After a great success with making the HDMI port to surely stay in place I keep getting requests from people to do such an improvement to their devices.
Here you can see my latest masterpiece - upgraded SSD connector. There's just a tiny catch: no disk is detected by BIOS now.
Are all of my disks bad?!
Hi, I got a console from a friend, it starts rather normally, except there's no video output. It's an XBOX One X (packed in the beautiful white cover with skull). For the sake of sureness i replaced the HDMI socket (was looking and beeping good but who knows) while waiting for the TDP158 which I've just replaced as well, treating it as a "starting point" and usually the solution. Still no good. What do I do next? Of course cables and monitors/TV checked. My readings on HDMI port while plugged and running:
1, 3, 4. 6. 7. 9, 10, 12 (TMDS+Clock) all 3.3V DC like (seen on 100MHz scope)
shields are shields
13 - 3.3V
14-3.0V
15 - 5V
16 - 5V
17 - 0V
18 - 5V
19 - 5V
For me it looks like some idle state of the interface, my assumption is some balls suffered from the heat and it's reball time but I don't have equipment to do that reliably, so at this point it'd be cheaper to trash it and buy a new console)
Any clues appreciated.
Hi, i just received a laptop (Dell G16 8730) to make some thermal maintenance. It's kinda monster with 330W adapter. The first thing that i noticed was this dust everywhere on the board. Its glossy and turns out to not be too easy to remove from fingers when i touched the pads(?) i deduced it was coming from. I went to YT to watch some teardown video in hope this would get discussed there, but the laptop the guy was opening had none of these.
So, can a good soul tell me what is it, what purpose does it serve if any and can I safely get rid of it?
Thanks!
I've repaired dozens of DualSenses and this happened to me for the first time, so I wanted to share the story.
I've been using this tip (AliExpress sourced) to desolder the sticks for a long time with pretty good results, despite some minor issues. When the solder is molten enough, I insert the tips of the tweezers (usually ESD-15) between the stick and the PCB to pull the stick off the board.
Yesterday I used a different pair of tweezers because I couldn't find my usual one, and that turned out to be a big mistake. The tweezers were slightly damaged and not smooth enough.
Over time I learned that I don't really need to check the other side of the PCB when replacing sticks, so I didn't do it this time either. After reassembling the controller, it was completely dead.
After coming home, I spent the whole night reading posts about improperly connected FFCs causing the controller not to work (bullshit — only the battery actually needs to be connected).
The only thing that changed between the working and non-working controller was the stick replacement. The sticks themselves were good, so the issue had to be related to the repair process itself. And indeed, after desoldering the sticks again, I found this.
Using the damaged, sharp-edged tweezers, I tore a trace running between the analog stick pins, which caused the controller to die.
After locating the issue, I repaired the trace and the controller came back to life and now works perfectly well.
I don't know whether to blame Sony for routing such a critical trace between the pins of a known replaceable component, but this definitely taught me a lesson.
Lesson learned: even after dozens of successful repairs, one damaged tool and a moment of routine confidence is enough to ruin a board. Always inspect both sides of the PCB and never underestimate how fragile traces between the stick pins can be.
