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

So a little update for you! Some of you might have heard me mention a discord server that I helped to admin, some of you may also follow Louis Rossman and have been watching his latest videos... Well, the server I helped admin for the last 5 years or so was originally created by the person mentioned in Louis Rossman latest videos, because of the community drama and that persons response to the accusations I have now stepped away from that server (I don't have time for other peoples drama and also it disgusts me if even an ounce of it is true).

So what have I done and what is the plan? Over the last few days I have amassed a small subset of UK based techs that I know, have helped me over the years and have some pretty extensive knowledge when it comes to console repair. We are currently only 7 strong and are building out a new discord community for like minded folks - I will be sharing musings on the discord that you will likely never see in just here and rather than piggy backing off of somebody else's community we are now making our own. It's super early days but if you want to pop on in and see what's going on feel free to come and say hello :)


As I say super early days but I have no doubt that we will make it a success! If you want schematics, stl files for mods and other usefull tools or knowledge then pop on in. We have been populating the server and building out some bits, its fairly bare so come help us fill it up :)
 
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So a little update for you! Some of you might have heard me mention a discord server that I helped to admin, some of you may also follow Louis Rossman and have been watching his latest videos... Well the server I helped admin for the last 5 years or so was originally created by the person mentioned in Louis Rossman latest videos, because of the community drama and that persons response to the accusations I have now stepped away from that server (I don't have time for other peoples drama and also it disgusts me if even an ounce of it is true).

So what have I done and what is the plan? Over the last few days I have amassed a small subset of UK based techs that I know, have helped me over the years and have some pretty extensive knowledge when it comes to console repair. We are currently only 7 strong and are building out a new discord community for like minded folks - I will be sharing musings on the discord that you will likely never see in just here and rather than piggy backing off of somebody else's community we are now making our own. It's super early days but if you want to pop on in and see what's going on feel free to come and say hello :)


As I say super early days but I have no doubt that we will make it a success! If you want schematics, stl files for mods and other usefull tools or knowledge then pop on in we have been populating the server and building out some bits, its fairly bare so come help us fill it up :)
Amazing i will certainly be joining when i get back home to my good screen!
 
Sounds like a step over my head lol

Nothing to it! We have people who know all about all kinds of consoles... got some devs, got some guys that have written gameboy apps and games and are deep into that scene (one of the members wrote gameboy testing app and stuff). Really its just a place for us all to waffle about consoles and help people out :)

There are also schematics, stl files, useful software etc scattered all over the channels - there are even 4090 schematics ive just seen one of our guys put up :) Looks to be the MSI Suprim ones.... nice.

It's 8 weeks from server creation that we should be able to be publicly searchable so until then it will remain fairly small id imagine. We are already on the case though and have more server boosts already then the old server I stepped down from :D
 
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So a little update for you! Some of you might have heard me mention a discord server that I helped to admin, some of you may also follow Louis Rossman and have been watching his latest videos... Well, the server I helped admin for the last 5 years or so was originally created by the person mentioned in Louis Rossman latest videos, because of the community drama and that persons response to the accusations I have now stepped away from that server (I don't have time for other peoples drama and also it disgusts me if even an ounce of it is true).

So what have I done and what is the plan? Over the last few days I have amassed a small subset of UK based techs that I know, have helped me over the years and have some pretty extensive knowledge when it comes to console repair. We are currently only 7 strong and are building out a new discord community for like minded folks - I will be sharing musings on the discord that you will likely never see in just here and rather than piggy backing off of somebody else's community we are now making our own. It's super early days but if you want to pop on in and see what's going on feel free to come and say hello :)


As I say super early days but I have no doubt that we will make it a success! If you want schematics, stl files for mods and other usefull tools or knowledge then pop on in. We have been populating the server and building out some bits, its fairly bare so come help us fill it up :)

Joined!

As mentioned I still owe you for that DS4 controller.

As an aside I don't watch Luois Rossman and knew none of the players from his bombshell video, which still made my recommendations. However what a way to call out that person. Bravo. Was interesting on the bounty to try and come up with open-source tools instead and did see that TheCod3r was also working towards the same. Brilliant work from all involved.
 
Joined!

As mentioned I still owe you for that DS4 controller.

As an aside I don't watch Luois Rossman and knew none of the players from his bombshell video, which still made my recommendations. However what a way to call out that person. Bravo. Was interesting on the bounty to try and come up with open-source tools instead and did see that TheCod3r was also working towards the same. Brilliant work from all involved.

Its all good mate whats a ds4 controller between friends - I have enough of them and last batch of pads were less than £3 a pad :cry: im pretty sure £3 or whatever I paid for it wont break me.
 
Joined!

As mentioned I still owe you for that DS4 controller.

As an aside I don't watch Luois Rossman and knew none of the players from his bombshell video, which still made my recommendations. However what a way to call out that person. Bravo. Was interesting on the bounty to try and come up with open-source tools instead and did see that TheCod3r was also working towards the same. Brilliant work from all involved.

Yea I guess I just didn't want to be associated in any way really so it was time to make a quick change but a ton of my content is still on the old discord so im trying to bring as much of whats mine into the new one as possible.
 
I joined the discord - also watched the Louis Rossman reveal video..wow!

There are some wonderful resources there already - having a read through the C64 pdfs. I have about 4(ish) C64s and two 1541 drives that I purchased to fix maybe 10-15 years ago. Got them mostly going. This is making me want to dig them out again.
 
I joined the discord - also watched the Louis Rossman reveal video..wow!

There are some wonderful resources there already - having a read through the C64 pdfs. I have about 4(ish) C64s and two 1541 drives that I purchased to fix maybe 10-15 years ago. Got them mostly going. This is making me want to dig them out again.

There should be a fair amount more to come hopefully - We have a lot more Playstation stuff, resources and guides for series consoles and other things. :) - Like I say we cant go public for another 8 weeks with it so we shall just use that time to throw as much up as we can - The basic setup, etc is done. If I can ill include an error bot for all known error codes on PS3/PS4/PS5 at some point so people can come in, throw an error code into a channel and it will report back known causes. Been working on it but might take a while :)
 
Awesome! Thanks very much for the update :)

It's late and my God I've been fighting this machine for hours but first signs of life since it's been with me and it's on a new bios chip!



And it powers on consistently every time!! We are onto a winner my man!

It took multiple nor attempts and multiple bios files to the point I have no idea what bios I have it on now but its a working one :cry: This last time and final nor attempt (it really was getting to last ditch efforts), I noticed the ground pad was pretty dry so I loaded it up with a ton of flux and solder and really went to town cleaning and tinning the area, the chip flowed into place lovely as they normally do, powered it on and it immediately burst into life. The positioning of the nor on these now i think about it on both systems (like the rog with its sd slot issue) sits basically under a heat pipe on the outlet where its hottest. Im now starting to think that a combination of nor positioning, solder used etc is the issue. Im thinking the heat cycles right where the console is hottest isnt doing it any favours. its a clear design issue is my thinking. Mines been good now for about a month and is ticking along nicely and so hopefully is yours. Here are some pretty pictures i took when diagnosing your machine :)

In this picture I was getting the thermal cam on the board during boot and noticed only 2 of its vcore power phases were really warming up. I thought this was a problem but its not and i think its by design, I bet in extreme mode that bottom phase will fire into life and i bet in its lowest power mode only the top phase would be producing heat:



Cool picture of the board running, on the cam its really cool to see the heat and air radiating out of the back :cool:



Honestly when the first 4 or 5 bios attempts were unsuccessful I was starting to wonder what was going on and probed basically the entire board, I even got the oscilloscope out, but we got there end the end.

Oh and your windows install appears to have survived the carnage:



What didn't survive the carnage was the little kapton like tape mask around the CPU which totally isn't necessary so I'm sorry about that but that tape really doesn't like 440c heat around it and the nor is directly above the CPU and you gotta get heat into the board. I put some decent ish thermal paste on it but your welcome to rip it apart and give it an inspection and put the good stuff on.

I guess we answered the question can we beat aya neo 6 month turn around on this issue :cry:
 
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Honestly, that is properly impressive work! That was clearly very involved and certainly WAY beyond my ability to fix. There are not many people that have the skills to have resolved this, and probably even fewer that would be so quick to offer their help. You're a top chap and I'm really grateful :)

I'll ping you a private message later to discuss reimbursing you for your time and costs.
 
Honestly, that is properly impressive work! That was clearly very involved and certainly WAY beyond my ability to fix. There are not many people that have the skills to have resolved this, and probably even fewer that would be so quick to offer their help. You're a top chap and I'm really grateful :)

I'll ping you a private message later to discuss reimbursing you for your time and costs.

Dude it was my absolute pleasure. Id recommend a few days of me turning it off and on again, making sure it holds up. Obviously if you have any issues going forward with that same issue (mine died 3 weeks after getting it back from RMA) then id of course put it right for you! I wouldnt imagine it will but if it does you at least know you got some support. Seriously Aya need to find some UK techs and techs in other places that they sell their items. Give them some schems and access to debug tooling (yes these boards all have debug jtag points) and use them as RMA centres. I suspect they could significantly improve their after sales reputation if the repair/rma and support process wasn't so damn expensive and took so long.

It appears to be even more beffier than mine! I was wondering if you would notice if I sort of swapped some bits around here and there :cry:

One thing to note, your machine requires an amount of battery in it to properly post, it doesn't appear to have passthrough charging capability enabled in the bios. If the machine runs out you must give it a 5 to 10 min charge before turning it on otherwise vbat line is too low for the machine to post. You might be able to change this in the bios you certainly can on later bios releases for the air.

One thing this experience made me buy was a wson8 tool for onboard programming:



This way if the first attempt or whatever doesn't work, I don't need to pull the chip off the board solder 8 wires to it etc etc etc... cool little thing!

One thing I do see is lots of people complaining on the internet about this issue with various people coming up with various ways to "fix" none of which really cover what the issue actually is. There are reddit posts and other misleading info out there but no definitive answers as to what the issue with these systems is. I think we can now answer that with a degree of certainty. I do feel really sorry for people out there who are sending it to aya and getting it back with the same problem. It appears to me that aya are just straight up replacing boards, the problem with that is that its not really fixing the issue its just giving somebody a "new" or pulled board or whatever they can find. If the solder on these was not unleaded and was of a higher quality id hazard a guess that they would last longer, also if they wernt pupming hot air over the nor chip but i can't do anything about that one.
 
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Cheers buddy!! Keeping it for a few days makes perfect sense, no problems there at all.

I completely agree with what you're saying regarding UK techs, that would really help provide some peace of mind - especially given the problems some of these consoles are having. You are also right about the various "fixes" that people have suggested which were no such thing.

I'll ping over a PM in a sec...
 
Cheers buddy!! Keeping it for a few days makes perfect sense, no problems there at all.

I completely agree with what you're saying regarding UK techs, that would really help provide some peace of mind - especially given the problems some of these consoles are having. You are also right about the various "fixes" that people have suggested which were no such thing.

I'll ping over a PM in a sec...

I sent you a quick reply dude. So long as there are no post issues over the weekend (so far so good with a couple of dozen power cycles) it will be in Monday mornings post on its way back to you. Thank you for using the OCUK official AyaNeo service centre. We hope your RMA experience was a good one. Whatever you do don't rate us on trustpilot as we don't exist. :cry:

 
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I sent you a quick reply dude. So long as there are no post issues over the weekend (so far so good with a couple of dozen power cycles) it will be in Monday mornings post on its way back to you. Thank you for using the OCUK official AyaNeo service centre. We hope your RMA experience was a good one. Whatever you do don't rate us on trustpilot as we don't exist. :cry:

:cry:

You should rename yourself the Ayaneo repair service!! I've dropped a little care package into your account, I hope it's ok buddy :)
 
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