Baby Monitor LCD Repair

Pretty quick post about my morning repairing the baby monitor that we were given for our new born last week. It’s an Angelcare AC401 (sensor pads not pictured):

It’s only issue was the LCD display. It started out just missing a segment or two when our friends were still using it, and slowly progressed until the display was almost useless:

We were gifted the monitor, as our friends kids are past that age - which saved us a chunk of $$ on a new one. So I set about opening it up to see what sort of connection the LCD display was using to see if I could reseat/reconnect it to get the LCD working 100% again:

Once it was apart the cable to the LCD was clearly visible, and was just one of those glued ribbon cables. The best link I could find about repairing one of these is from Instructables. I followed that, using a peg to hold the display where I needed it while working on it:

I got out my heat gun and put it on the lowest setting and gave the ribbon a few hits, waiting a few minutes in between. I figured a few hits at lower heat were a better starting point that one go with a higher heat. I used a pencil with an eraser on the end as pictured in the Instructables guide to apply pressure to the cable as it was heated and the glue melted. I put it back together enough to power it up:

So there you go, about 20 minutes of my time and no new parts later we have a baby monitor that works 100%. Time to go change another nappy!