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  • Author Author: cstanton
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How not to repair a Playstation 4 - The Risks of Second Hand Electronics

cstanton

I have enough game consoles in the house, they're not all current generation. I have a Wii, Wii-U, XBox 360, Nintendo (3)DS, GBA, Gameboy, SteamLink to my gaming PC, and access to a Playstation 3. A friend of mine offered me a copy of Destiny since I've been playing Destiny 2 on the PC and I haven't finished the first.

 

The problem? It's a console exclusive, so I thought to myself "What if I managed to get a Playstation 4? I can play Destiny 1 free online with it and... maybe if it's a bit damaged, I can fix it!"

 

So most 'damaged' Playstation 4s go for about £60-90, claiming that it's an easy fix for the HDMI port, apparently these get very loose and rip up the pads on the PCB and just need a re-soldering job. Sounds easy enough, or perhaps the processor needs to sit under a heat gun for a bit of reflow.

 

So I gave myself a budget, can I get hold of and fix a Playstation 4 for £50 max? I thought I was in with a winner when I found one on gumtree for £25 saying it 'doesn't display but it obviously powers up'.

 

Yeah, yeah... sooooo I really should have checked it physically before handing over the money, when I got the Playstation 4 home, the torx screws had been mangled. so I opened it up. Oh boy.

 

Oh, boy.

 

I really wish I had taken a photo' of it when I first got to the motherboard, instead, you can bare witness to the clean up after I removed the huge blob of solder that was across the HDMI pins, and the massacre of the board left behind:

 

imageimage

 

Pretty charred for a HDMI port.. so about the rest of it..

 

imageimage

 

I thought maybe they've used some kind of butane / blow torch on this, but it looks like they've drilled through the PCB to get the HDMI port out and then wondered why it's not working.

 

Still, under advisement, and a bit of clean up, I thought maybe it hadn't been entirely trashed, the vias seem OK and the traces are still there.

 

image

 

I've managed to re-solder the HDMI port on, and now at least any screen I plug in recognises that it's got a HDMI cable plugged in, still though, doesn't work. I'm wondering if this HDMI port is actually connected up properly because it's orientation seems different to the original, may have to double check that later.

 

So the other part that can fail is apparently the IC under the shielding... time for some proper reflow work and a bit of kapton tape.

 

image

 

This was a pain to remove, I had to go up to 500degC on the station to get this melted. I managed to replace it successfully, still, no go on the visuals. I'm wondering if the filters were also damaged, as those had started to pull the trace from the board a bit.

 

I've at least learned a lot from soldering at this pitch, which I hadn't done before, and the Playstation 4 does indeed boot up fully, it's just getting the visuals out of the system. At this point I'm just below my budget for fixing it, and I managed to find this graphic online:

 

image

 

Micro soldering isn't something I've tried before either, but at this point, I've literally got nothing to lose from this mess, haha!

 

What's been your most difficult repair?

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  • There's so many deceptive things on sale, it's disappointing : ( I've received a couple of items from ebay in the past, that the owner must have known were faulty, and yet sold as "untested" : (

    I cannot think of the hardest repair, but this one seemed interesting:

    It's a car Engine Control Unit (ECU), from a Mercedes (don't know which model), that a friend asked me to repair. But the thick plastic box was glued shut with no obvious way to open it.

    So I took a milling machine to it, and carefully routed out the entire top off it (since I didn't know which area of it I needed to access). You can still see the some of the black plastic swarf on top of it in the photo below.

     

    But the inside was filled with jelly-like sealant : ( So I had to hack away at it with a scalpel, in the corner which I suspected.

     

    image

     

    The wires were the issue (partially). The wires seem to be either aluminium or silver, they were not copper. Anyway, they suffer fatigue with the vibrations from the connector that one end of the wires are attached to, and break off. It's a common fault with them.

    So, my fix was to replace some of the wires with normal tinned copper wires as shown below marked with arrows. And then create a new top to the ECU from scrap plastic.

    Unfortunately in this case it didn't work : ( There could have been some other issue, but I'd spent enough time working with it. A replacement used ECU was found from somewhere.

    image

  • in reply to shabaz

    Huh, I always wondered what inside an ecu looked like, thanks for sharing.

  • in reply to cstanton

    The older ones were fun to work with, a friend used to make money from Ford Sierra Cosworth owners : ) by pulling out the old-school dual-in-line packages (EPROMS : ) and replacing them with blank ones from Maplin, programmed for higher performance. Using Motorola/Freescale 6805 CPU I recall (not 100% sure).

     

    This is the one in my car.. fortunately no potting over this one.. but hard to service if the left-most MOSFET fails : ) it would need the 100+ pin connector removing, or breaking off a plastic bit of the connector!

    image

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  • in reply to cstanton

    The older ones were fun to work with, a friend used to make money from Ford Sierra Cosworth owners : ) by pulling out the old-school dual-in-line packages (EPROMS : ) and replacing them with blank ones from Maplin, programmed for higher performance. Using Motorola/Freescale 6805 CPU I recall (not 100% sure).

     

    This is the one in my car.. fortunately no potting over this one.. but hard to service if the left-most MOSFET fails : ) it would need the 100+ pin connector removing, or breaking off a plastic bit of the connector!

    image

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