Sansa m250 - volume changing issue

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1

 Hi!

I have an m250 for a few years and I am very happy. About half a year ago I noticed something strange - sometimes when I pressed play/pause the player behavior was like if I pressed volume+ button. That happened maybe once in five times I pressed the play/pause. Strange thing, but I could live with that. Yesterday the volume went totally crazy and now most the time the player behaves like one of the volume buttons (+ or -, randomly) was pressed constantly. I know that m250 is an old buddy but I like it so I want to do sth about this problem. The one I have is an european version (no FM radio) based on Telechips cpu, my f/w is 2.2.5e.

Besides this issue there are also some bad sectors or sth in the memory - one mp3 file always causes the player to freeze when it tries to play it, but this is not related to any particular file - actually, every time the library is rebuilt after disconnecting the player from the computer some different song becomes “corrupted” and the one that was corrupted before works fine (another strange thing…).

This memory issue doesn’t bother me that much, but I brought it here anyway because maybe it’s somehow related to the volume buttons issue that essentially makes the player useless :frowning: I wanted to update the firmware, but looks like there’s no more support for this old player and even if there was firmware updater for m250 available, since the firmware that I have is the newest, if I tried to upload it again I would probably get a message “your firmware is up to date, go f… yourself”… I hate when things like that try to be smarter than me :confused:

Any advices, besides “throw it out and go buy something from XXI century”? :stuck_out_tongue: I tried formatting already, it didn’t help.

2

Problem solved :slight_smile:

After about an hour of research on the internet I managed to “update” my firmware from 2.2.5e to 2.1.0a, thus enabling the FM radio :smiley: The firmware update went well, but didn’t help with the volume problem. Furthermore, another issue appeared - tracks’ and playlists’ titles are displayed with spaces after each letter… But I don’t care :slight_smile:

I solved the volume issue by adding pullup resistors to the volume buttons. Probably dirt that got inside over the years became too conductive, and original pullups (if any) are very high resistance in order to save battery. I added two 100k resistors pulling each button up to pin 3 of TLV320AIC23B chip (analog Vdd, which is 3.3V). There’s plenty of space in the player’s casing to hide the resistors and now it works fine, and I have the radio :smiley: