This bad boy from either 1986 or 1988 (sources differ) is one of a handful of Casios with a full dot matrix display, and has a metal case with a mineral crystal. Such a shame Casio doesn’t make them like this anymore… An EL backlight on one of these would be the bomb. Unfortunately this doesn’t even have an incandescent let alone a LED… Actually, I wonder why digital watches with incandescent illumination were ever a thing, since the first digital watches used tiny LEDs…
Anyway, I’ve had one of these sitting forgotten in a drawer for years, until recently… Unfortunately, Casio didn’t make the buttons out of anything durable, so they’ve all either disintegrated by now, or the watches with remaining buttons are unused to keep them that way. Here’s my example:
I bought a dead example of a later (and otherwise inferior) DBC-62 for its buttons, and managed to remove them and trim the surround to fit (a bit disappointed with that effort, but I can probably hide it), but the damn contacts are at a different pitch, such that the outer two would completely miss. It also seems I’ve damaged the traces during removal anyway, since they seemed to have lost continuity from a visual inspection… I had some old conductive paint, which is the only way I can think of to repair and reposition the traces, but it’s fiddly business…
The contact strip is wider and comes off the button pad at a higher position too, so I’ve had to enlarge the slot in the case. Looks like it can still fold back to the proper spot inside for the zebra strip to push on it though.
Unfortunately this silver-based paint doesn’t seem up to it; attempting to clean up the traces led to most of it flaking off, in spite of the boasts on the packet, and at this thickness, what’s left doesn’t seem to conduct worth a damn. To be fair, it’s several years past its shelf life, but I’m not sure why silver should stop being silver. It’s pretty gluggy, but I mixed it as well as I could inside the pen with a poker, which I used to apply the stuff, since I had terrible results with the pen tip back in the day…
Anyone have any ideas how I can make this work? I actually found a NOS DBX-100 on eBay, but the buttons are toast and the batteries (there are two) have probably leaked inside it like with the DBC-62 I bought.
I bought it anyway, since it was a reasonable price, and at worst I can put my working module inside it, scrape off the perished rubber and replace it with an exorbitantly priced decal somebody in the UK makes. But maybe the NOS module will work with fresh batteries, and I can get two of these units running…
and please keep us updated
