Vince's Ebay Repair Thread - (Console Repairs & Mods)

Vince · 26 Mar 2022 at 20:19

I shall just put this one pic here... If I would have opened one of these christmas 1989 I would have been over the moon!

New mosfet and she is working first time every time. Its now basically an immaculate fully working, fully original mk1 Lynx, the screen is actually pretty damn nice for something so ancient. Very happy with my £56 purchase. So much so I have another 2 inbound from the same seller. Who just so happens to be a guy that repairs consoles but sadly couldn't repair these.

Tomorrow I think I'll spend a bit of time with the 1070 see if we can't get her up and running.

Ice Rich · 29 Mar 2022 at 19:42

Brilliant work

Vince said:
That wire is 0.1mm so pretty small and what I use for a lot of trace repair. Honestly the first time you do it its tricky, there is no space to work, you cant see the wire under the iron and you use the force you do start getting used to how it behaves though and what you can and cant do with it. Once you feel that out it is pretty simple

Is there much room (not physical) for trial and error on this? If you're not happy or the trace doesn't work is it a case of scrapping back when cool and trying again or is there a limited amount of 'attempts'?

I can see why that scope must be one of the best purchases ever - without it i'm guessing some jobs would just be impossible?

Are you still actually holding the iron on these small scale jobs or do you have some kind of mount which allows turning of dials for tiny movement?

Vince · 29 Mar 2022 at 21:55

Ice Rich said:
Brilliant work

Is there much room (not physical) for trial and error on this? If you're not happy or the trace doesn't work is it a case of scrapping back when cool and trying again or is there a limited amount of 'attempts'?

I can see why that scope must be one of the best purchases ever - without it i'm guessing some jobs would just be impossible?

Are you still actually holding the iron on these small scale jobs or do you have some kind of mount which allows turning of dials for tiny movement?

So once you have found the broken trace and scraped back the mask to reveal the copper trace its just a case of gently tinning up the revealed traces (all by hand with an iron) the scope really does allow you to be very very accurate, in terms of the trial and error factor you have as many tries as you like really to get it right. If you mess it up you can just run your iron over it and it will fall away. What I do is hold wires in place with some bent tip tweezers and get the one side just right I then run the wire, hold it in place somewhere in the middle and then gently keep running my iron in the direction of the trace gently over the wire. I guess it is sort of hard to explain but once you get used to it and working at such a small scale it all starts to slot together and you get better all the time. It's hard to get used to not actually looking at what your hands are doing but looking at a screen instead.

To be honest the scope is absolutely essential kit for any sort of small scale soldering without one your eyes just simply cannot see properly at that scale. Take a switch charge port for example, no chance without some sort of assistance be that a digital or old school microscope.

For everything you see I have just held the iron in hand, you would be surprised how accurate your hands can be.

Vince · 29 Mar 2022 at 23:27

double post

Ice Rich · 30 Mar 2022 at 08:13

Vince said:
. I guess it is sort of hard to explain but once you get used to it and working at such a small scale it all starts to slot together and you get better all the time. It's hard to get used to not actually looking at what your hands are doing but looking at a screen instead.

I can visualize that and makes perfect sense

cheers for the info,

Please keep up the good work and posting, love reading this thread.

Vince · 30 Mar 2022 at 20:48

@ljt - I have worked out what I'm going to do with your 360... I've been mulling it over for a while and saw something today that looks awesome... I'm going to mod it to have "triple nand"

yes I'm going to stack a couple on nand chips on top of its current nand and give it some custom firmware and stuff. Watch this space!! - It's called the triple stack nandwich :cry:

ljt · 31 Mar 2022 at 18:24

Vince said:
@ljt - I have worked out what I'm going to do with your 360... I've been mulling it over for a while and saw something today that looks awesome... I'm going to mod it to have "triple nand" yes I'm going to stack a couple on nand chips on top of its current nand and give it some custom firmware and stuff. Watch this space!! - It's called the triple stack nandwich

I won't lie. I had to google what that was and what it was for

Sounds good, what sort of things were you thinking? Or can't you say on here?

Vince · 31 Mar 2022 at 21:03

ljt said:
I won't lie. I had to google what that was and what it was for

Sounds good, what sort of things were you thinking? Or can't you say on here?

ill be honest I saw somebody did it, thought that looks cool.... so now its a plan!

Vince · 1 Apr 2022 at 11:23

Remember the yellow JP GG from a few pages back?

A china order got here yesterday with a load of toys, I'll post up the full haul shortly but some of that went into fixing the JP GG. Thats also an original 35v GG screen and to get a working one like this is very lucky indeed. My bench is pretty clear now for the weekend so some work on the GPU and possibly some more GG and switch action is en route.

teenwolf · 1 Apr 2022 at 11:41

excellent work vince

Vince · 2 Apr 2022 at 02:09

I got bored so threw another GG together tonight...

A twin asic board no less that's actually working and only required some trace and via repair. MLCC recapped:

The yellow one was a bit more interesting as I decided to test up a new cap set with it, I've changed the spec of the 100uf caps and have changed over to a 1210 rather than a 1206 cap, apparently this should improve it's DC bias characteristics while not really having any effect anywhere else. I mean it certainly makes the yellow one work nicely even with an original screen:

Vince · 3 Apr 2022 at 01:49

Got bored again and had an hour or so to burn, remember the reworked switch board from earlier on in the thread? I decided to to build that board into one of my clear shells. This is the one that is getting the hwfly chip when it I finally get around to sorting it

Vince · 11 Apr 2022 at 22:42

@drakulton Finally got around to troubleshooting the card. Its got a mosfet that's got a short to ground on its gate... this one here..

All those vcore mosfets have 9.7kohms at the gate bar that one.

So we need these parts to attempt a repair.

one n channel mosfet and one 1R0 coil. If you let me know or if you can find me those parts cheaper? I only need to one coil as well not 10.

Vince · 11 Apr 2022 at 22:49

I do have a 1050 on my shelf so will look at what fets that has on it first. - Edit: 1050 is useless and I dont have comparable parts. Just let me know and we can either order those in or find them somewhere else.

Vince · 14 Apr 2022 at 17:14

Would the thread like to see what happens when somebody with no idea tries to replace a switch lite port?

Two hours of cutting away layers to remove a short and then I rebuilt it....

And you know what, the board works perfectly... Aint nobody replacing that port easily any time soon but it works perfectly!

pingwing · 15 Apr 2022 at 18:43

Easter, resurrection, miracles, this thread has it all!! :cool:

Vince · 16 Apr 2022 at 11:48

Problem with a board like that is there is no way you can resell it properly as whoever gets it if they break the port or something goes wrong it's not fair that the device they have is that difficult to repair for your standard repair shop who need to maintain a certain amount of profit and keep repairs quick. It's basically a write off if anything ever goes wrong as it's cheaper to buy a new board than repair that board. That repair took about 2 hours 30 mins so I might actually use this board in a custom blue switch I was thinking about building.

Ian_Eb · 16 Apr 2022 at 14:50

Any thoughts on replacing the USB port on a Kindle Voyage? Not sure if mine is playing up, but keep getting charge issues.

Vince · 16 Apr 2022 at 16:41

Ian_Eb said:
Any thoughts on replacing the USB port on a Kindle Voyage? Not sure if mine is playing up, but keep getting charge issues.

I mean it should be pretty easy to do but have you tried putting a new battery in first if its doing weird things or is the charge port actually broken and you have to fiddle to get it to charge?

Oh Ed not again. · 16 Apr 2022 at 16:42

Hey @Vince,

Appreciate this is straying from the console light somewhat but was wondering if I could pick your brain... I picked up a non-working router thinking it was just a NOR flash replacement, but it seems there's a bigger problem on the board somewhere. The NOR chip was indeed toast (unable to read it on or off the board), so I've replaced that but I'm still at a loss as to why it won't power up.

Thinking if the NOR chip was cooked then it might have taken a jolt, but before I call it I was wondering if you could suggest any other avenues for diagnosis. This is the board: https://imgur.com/a/hFUAnxg, I can read 12V at the lower left of the board in the first pic at the socket, diode and at various resistors so I know the board is getting power.

I assume something has shorted to ground, but don't have a clue how to start picking that apart.

Cheers in advance!