I’m constantly doing something, whether electronics or not, but tools breaking themselves definitely do not contribute to progress. Time for another ragefixing.
Case 1: Pi Pico
While I was working with this particular MCU USB power was constantly cutting out. I believe I don’t have to say it, but it was extremely annoying. What was broken? USB-C port.
This is a very basic repair – desolder old port, steal another one from somewhere and resolder it. No particular skills needed, and pretty much the only tool I had to use was a HA station.
No magic here, it obviously works.
Case 2: Xbox 360 from previous post
Since I found a Kronos GPU in my stash I decided to fix this console. Why is it a ragefix then?
BECAUSE I HAD ALREADY REUSED THE CASE.
And this is a problem, at least for me, I have literally towers of fixed/working Xbox 360 boards, but no cases to put them in. Ehh…
No pictures from the reflow process, but I decided to reflow the PSB. As You can see, I made a tiny mistake and cleaned the flux a bit too early consequently cleaning a few capacitors and resistors off the motherboard. I have replaced the necessary components (that means no filtering caps, at least for now 🙂 ) and the console fired up without any problems.
Case 3: Multimeter Aneng AN8008
I was measuring how much current one of my projects take and fried my multimeter in process. Fortunately it was only a broken fuse, but it’s one of those small, 3.6x10mm 10A fuses, the one that I don’t have on hand.
There is hardly any space there, no way to hack a standard fuse, let alone a polymer, self-resettable one. For now I’m stuck with my old one, and You bet it has some mods, for example a mod that I call “I don’t want to buy a 9V battery, why can’t I just charge it?“
Catchy name, isn’t it?
It’s basically a Li-Ion 500mAh cell strapped to a step-up converter/charger. Not pretty, but it fits in the holder and when the cell runs flat I can just charge it.
Thanks for reading!