LG 31MU97 Not Powering On

Lately I’ve had a ‘fun’ experience with my LG 31MU97-B 4K monitor not turning on. The night before, I unplugged it from the wall due to an oncoming storm and the next day it just wouldn’t turn on. This is a known problem with this monitor where the IC205 chip on the monitor becomes stuck in a state which doesn’t respond to button presses.

Fortunately I found an extremely useful blog which helped me solve the issue!

Find the original link including user comments (which are also very helpful) here:
Integer13 WordPress

My experience was a little different and I used a combination of methods from the original author and the user comments. Below is how you can either temporarily fix or repair your LG monitor.

What you need:

The IC chip I bought was from ‘coppelltvrepair’ on eBay:
Coppell Tv Repair
(The shipping to Australia is outright theft at $29 for a part that weights basically nothing, but it worked… and I saved money I would have spent on a new screen)

Coppell Main Board Chip
Coppell Main Board Chip on Ebay

Or if that listing has expired, search for “LG 31MU97-B MAIN BOARD 62882801 / 31MU97/LM41C / EAX66105904 EEPROM IC205”

If you’re soldering the chip you will need:
● The new IC205 Chip
● A Fine-Tipped Soldering Iron
● Desoldering Braid
● A very narrow flat-headed screwdriver
● Very Fine Solder (0.3-0.7mm)
● Soldering Flux
● Isopropyl Alcohol
● A Cleaning Cloth


To Jump Start or Fix the Monitor:

DISASSEMBLING THE MONITOR
1. Turn off and unplug all the cables in the monitor and take it off the stand.

2. Remove the backing by levering the tabs on the back of the monitor all the way around. There is a big sticky pad in the middle on the back which can be slowly pried off with something like a ruler.

3. Unscrew the metal motherboard casing and take out the switch and speakers as well as the sticky tape that’s holding down the wires.

4. Flip over the metal casing while leaving all the wires and ribbon cables connected. Some wires may need to be taken out of the plastic wire holders to give you enough length to flip the casing over.

At this point you should rest the monitor on a box or something so that when it turns on you can change the settings as required in step 11.

IC205 Contacts Guide.jpg
IC205 Chip Contacts

5. You will see the IC205 chip at the edge where the ribbon cables are connected. Have a look at the image above, or head to the link at the top of this post and familiarize yourself with the diagram. At this point you should also cover up the power board on the left with the plastic backing of the monitor or something else non-conductive so you don’t slip and touch any part of that board.

6. Unplug and switch off the monitor’s power button (If it’s not already) then plug in the power cable and turn the switch on again. You should put the power cable through the plastic backing casing so you can reassemble it later without having to unplug it or turn it off. (Doing this is the best option to keep it working if you aren’t planning on buying a replacement chip, because as soon as it loses power it won’t turn on again)

TESTING THE MONITOR AND BOOTING IT UP
7. Using a multimeter on the DC voltage reading mode on setting 200 (or so), hold the positive (red) lead on the ‘JP’ to the left of the chip with the ‘antennas’ coming out of the top. Then hold the negative (black) lead to the ‘CS#’ prong. The CS# prong is the one nearest to the dot in the corner of the chip.

I recommend AGAINST doing what the article above says by touching the positive (red) lead to the array of positive terminals right next to the negative ones. You can easily slip and hit the wrong one creating a spark if not done correctly. (If you do create a spark like I did, you ‘should’ be fine and there (hopefully) won’t be any damage to the monitor. Again, as per step 5 make sure the power board to your left is covered by something before attempting this step, you will electrocute yourself if you touch it and cause irreversible damage if you short circuit any part of it.

Alternatively, (and the most highly recommended) you can use a 1k resistor to connect the ‘CS#’ and ‘VCC’ legs of the chip to bring it to life. The VCC leg is the one opposite to the CS# leg. This method also saves you buying a multimeter if you don’t have one.

8. While holding the multimeter (or resistor) in place, flick the power button on the monitor next to the power cable. (You may need two people for this step and the next one)

9. While still holding the multimeter (or resistor) in place, press the toggle power button on the monitor every second or so until you hear the beeps of it turning on. You will also see the back of the monitor’s backlight glow when it turns on.

If you don’t hear any beeps after a minute or so, unplug the cable and head back to step 6 and repeat until you hear it turn on.

10. As soon as you hear the startup beeps, remove the multimeter’s prongs.

11. Use the control joystick to go into many of the settings and change them, including input method, volume, brightness and enabling/disabling PBP (picture by picture). This will help the chip to ‘remember’ the state it is in, if you do turn it off. (This only lasts a short duration once you turn the screen off) This step isn’t foolproof so don’t rely on it to work. If you aren’t soldering the new chip in place I recommend just reassembling the monitor without turning it off by the switch or by pulling out the power plug.

Turn the screen off (every time) by holding the power button for a few seconds or by going through the screen’s menu until it’s off (press in then 2 seconds later pushing it towards the side the light glows from). Although you can continue with the following steps without turning it off at all.

SOLDERING THE NEW IC205 CHIP
12. This is the point where you would replace the IC205 chip if you have one. You need a very steady hand and an eye for detail and possibly an assistant. MAKE SURE THE MONITOR IS OFF AND UNPLUGGED BEFORE SOLDERING ANY PART OF IT! If you aren’t replacing the chip, skip this step.
a) First desolder the current chip using a desoldering band by heating up each leg of the chip and running the band over it to soak it up. Once desoldered, my chip needed a bit of a levering with a very narrow flat head screwdriver to get it to quite literally pop off the board. You will need a fine soldering iron tip for this purpose. Make sure you remember which side the black circular indent on the chip is facing as this is how you will align the new chip.
b) Once the chip is off remove any remainder solder on the board with the desoldering band.
c) Clean the board using isopropyl alcohol and a cloth.

Chip Removed
The board with the IC205 chip removed

d) Cover the area with soldering flux to help the solder to stick.
e) Using very fine solder (0.5-0.77mm) melt a tiny amount to any two opposite corners of the board where the chip will go. You only need the tiniest amount of solder for this purpose. If you add too much, use the desoldering band to remove some.

f) Hold the new chip in place making sure the dot is in the correct corner, then melt the corner solder one leg at a time while pushing the chip down so it ends up flush with the board. Make sure the legs of the chip only touch the corresponding contact and that there’s not any two legs joined by solder. Try not to heat up the chip too much.
g) Once the corners are soldered in place you can add tiny amounts of solder to the rest of the legs to make contact with the board.
h) Once the chip is in place you can clean the board with isopropyl alcohol. and leave it to cool for a few minutes.

ASSEMBLING THE MONITOR AGAIN
13. Being very careful, take off the covering from the power side and flip the motherboard housing over, being sure to align the grooves it sits in perfectly as you don’t want to short the monitor on any metal. Check that there’s no wires under the housing as they like to find their way underneath it.

14. Put the speakers and button back in their places. Before you screw in the motherboard housing to the monitor again, slide the plastic backing up to the end of the power cable which is still inserted. If you screwed the metal housing down first you won’t be able to get the plastic casing back on and you’ll have to take the screws out again. (Check if the monitor still turns on and off) You won’t be able to screw in the two back screws, however you can screw in the two top ones by lifting the housing slightly and finger tightening them.

If you aren’t going to replace the IC chip at any point you can use a flame gun to melt away the portion of the plastic under where the power cable is inserted so you can screw in all the screws. Be warned that the resale value will drop significantly, and wear a mask so you don’t inhale the toxic plastic fumes! When you’ve melted a portion and it’s pliable, use a stick or something to remove the plastic before it re-hardens. Also make sure that it’s relatively flat when you’re done or you may not be able to get the monitor backing on again. (Even though it’s included – I don’t recommend doing this part of the step unless you desperately want a working monitor again)

15. Don’t clip the plastic casing back on (unless you are sure you won’t be opening it again). Screw in the top two (or a top and a bottom screw) on the back of the monitor again to secure the plastic backing onto the screen.

16. Put the monitor back on the stand, plug in the data cable and check if it still works. If it does then woohoo! This method will keep the monitor working until you get the replacement chipset. Therefore I recommend connecting a UPS between the wall and the monitor to safeguard it against future power failures.

Excel Shape Distortion / Flattening Fix

If you spend a lot of time in Excel and have ever tried printing images you’ve imported, you would probably notice that they come out squashed, distorted or stretched. This is a problem that has plagued me ever since my huge Excel projects of TPE and TRSG which contain hundreds of images between them.

After much searching through posts online I finally found a solution to the bug which Microsoft hasn’t ever bothered fixing. You have to go into ‘Page Layout’ > ‘Fonts’ and select the ‘Metro’ font.
This doesn’t actually change the font of the cells, but it does change the fonts used for the headers and footers of the Excel sheet.

I decided to dive deeper into other fonts that don’t alter the images because I hated the style of the ‘Metro’ font on my headers and footers. After a lot of testing I found 5 fonts in total which are the most accurate when printed. That’s not to say they are perfect, but they are off by such as small amount that you won’t be able to tell the difference.

To find the fonts which are least affected by this glitch I inserted a circle into my excel file swapping between the fonts and measuring the length and the width of it each time. This gives you the middle column below. This column shows the stretch of the shape and which direction it’s stretched in. If the width (first number) is bigger than the height, this font creates a horizontally stretched circle and if the height is bigger, this means the circle was stretched vertically.

Afterwards I subtracted the difference between the two number which gives me the ‘Offset’ number which signifies how warped the circle is as seen in the table below. The table below lists the different fonts in Excel 2010 and their offset. The lower the number on the end, the more perfect the shape. You could get away with a 1 or even 2 without people noticing the warping, but try to stay low.

These are the links which proved invaluable to me to figure out where to start to solve this problem:
Excel will not print images at correct height/width!! (Post by “Chinchilla”)
Images distorted when previewing or printing from Excel

Font Name Font Type Width / Height Offset
Office 92×82 10
Office 2 80×77 3
Office Classic 92×80 12
Office Classic 2 80×77 3
Adjacency 92×82 10
Angles Franklin Gothic Book 71×71 0
Apex 80×77 3
Apothecary 80×69 11
Aspect 64×68 4
Austin 80×69 11
Black Tie 92×82 10
Civic 71×70 1
Clarity 80×77 3
Composite 92×82 10
Concourse 71×69 2
Couture 92×82 10
Elemental 80×86 6
Equity 93×83 10
Essential 80×77 3
Executive 80×86 6
Flow 80×75 5
Foundry 80×73 7
Grid Franklin Gothic Medium 71×71 0
Hardcover 80×77 3
Horizon 92×82 10
Median 80×77 3
Metro Consolas – Corbel 80×80 0
Module Corbel – Corbel 80×80 0
Newsprint 92×80 12
Opulent 80×74 6
Oriel 80×79 1
Origin 80×84 4
Paper 80×75 5
Perspective 80×77 3
Pushpin Constantia – Franklin Gothic Book 71×71 0
Slipstream 80×74 6
Solstice 80×84 4
Technic 80×77 3
Thatch 80×77 3
Trek Franklin Gothic Book 71×71 0
Urban 71×70 1
Verve 80×69 11
Waveform 80×75 5

Fallout 4 widescreen lighting fix

Fallout 4 has just been released and I’ve been stuck fighting a lighting issue rather than raiders due to stretching the game to widescreen, a massive 3440×1440 due to having an LG ultra-wide monitor, the 34UM95. I’m not sure if this happens with smaller 21:9 widescreens notably 2560×1080, but the lighting has been confirmed to break with a resolution of 5760×1080.

This error typically only happens indoors where there’s a lot of shadows and lights within a small area, but it’s incredibly annoying as it takes up a good third of the screen.

I’m not even sure why Bethesda didn’t support ultra-wide monitors in the resolution selection but there are quite a few of us out there with larger unconventional monitors. To even get the game to run in fullscreen on my monitor I went into ‘Documents’ > ‘My Games’ > ‘Fallout 4’ and then edited the Fallout4Prefs.ini fields to this:

iSize H=1440
iSize W=3440

The above directory is on windows 7 and may differ if you have an alternate operating system.

Now to fix the lighting. If you’re using an ultra-widescreen monitor with Fallout 4 you’ll have go into the ‘Prefs’ file like above and set:

bComputeShaderDeferredTiledLighting=0

Here’s some screenshots of the lighting surface that appears amidst some lights:

Fallout 4 Lighting
Fig1. – The lighting surface error in Fallout 4.
Fallout 4 Lighting
Fig2. – The lighting inside a Concord building.
Fallout 4 Lighting
Fig3. – How the lighting should look instead of the above image.

There will still be a couple of bugs in the game such as the sniper scope image below, but the lighting one is the most noticeable.

Fallout 4 Lighting
Fig4. – The sniper scope screen.

Pokemon Gen 3 Team Randomizer

So I’ve recently been indulging myself in some heated online pokemon battles with a friend, which often includes a side bet or two if we manage to acquire streaks. She’s quite a bit better then me so I figured I would even the odds with a new game mode we can play that’s down to chance a little more then skill, where you can random any generation 3 pokemon which has literally any ability or moves of another pokemon.

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Introduction to Buttkickers, what are they?

I’m excited! I bought a pair of Buttkicker LFE’s today and a single amp for $1117 AUD which will be amazing on my Obutto Revolution cockpit which I bought late last year in 2014. However I haven’t had a chance to use it much yet as I’ve moved house 3 times since I bought it and moving the great thing is difficult, therefore I never set it up fully at any of the houses. This is going to change though because in 5 days i’m moving for the final time (This move was included in the first number) to hopefully stay there for 5 years or so and to actually get use out of my Obutto.
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Completely redesigned website!

Recently i’ve been learning HTML and CSS in an online course so I thought it might beneficial to redesign my entire website to learn the code faster and start my website again from scratch. The only down-side to this that I can see so far is the fact that all the links to my previous blogs are now broken and this may cause google to not display my site in the search engine again, especially the many blogs that i’ve written over the years.

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