Bug In The Hardware -- Ghost In The Machine

so this specific sl-5500 didnt work quite right, ever.

very recently i flashed to the latest sharp rom, unsuccessfully. i dont even know what happened but now it's a brick. no power, yadda yadda. i'm not interested in fixing it now because of this one interesting thing:

once bricked i decided it was time (being way out of warranty) to open the Z up and examine it's guts. what i was really looking for was a blown capacitor or bubbly chip on the board which would have explained it's forever erratic behavior. when i opened it i found this wedged in between the floating board and motherboard practically attached to a capacitor:

elysse.net/bug/DSCF1557.jpg
elysse.net/bug/DSCF1560.jpg in cm.

what the heck was that? not exactly what i expected, for sure.

after sending the afore pictures to a bio friend of mine, it was identified as a carcass of a long dead Asian Silverfish:

alive ones look like this

so, entirely stunned (because if any of y'all have ever taken a 5500 apart you'd know that something that size would not be able to get in to the case, and nevermind that here in kentucky we dont have silverfish like that), i cleaned out all the hair on the chips as i could, cleaned it up as best as i could, put it together not expecting it to work. it didnt and now it's a nice looking brick.

i contacted sharp, not expecting any kind of anything of course, and i dont think they believe me

i figure i'd let y'all know, because this was highly amusing. we all know about the Mark series machines and the moth...i had a real bug in my hardware

e.
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elysse.net