How not to repair a Playstation 4 - The Risks of Second Hand Electronics

RE: How not to repair a Playstation 4 - The Risks of Second Hand Electronics

johnclord — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 01:55:49 GMT

I didn't have to do any reflow work (and pray I never have to!), but I have a Foscam F18910W camera that I had mounted under the roof overhang in front of our garage, that had been "not right" after I accidentally hit it with a high pressure water spray while washing gnats and cobwebs off the exterior garage light nearby. The unit still seemed to power up OK and turn back and forth as usual while booting, and all the LED's in back still came on as usual, but the cabled and WiFi internet on it were NOT working. After watching the video of some guy working on a very similar model Foscam, (here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibXkmefqx6E ) I figured I couldn't break mine any worse than its already incommunicative state. So, watching as he discovered all 4 screws, I opened mine up to view the damage. I didn't think to make a photo of mine, but the only part that looked messed up in mine was the main PCB with the SMD's on it. The water had gotten in there and washed dust and debris across the leads on the SMDs and I figure made shorts across most of them. So first, I used the canned air duster to blow loose what I could. Then I used cotton swabs with alcohol to try and gently scrub them. Then I decided that was just too tedious, so I took a clean terry wash cloth wetted with alcohol (plain old rubbing alcohol) and swabbed the entire filthy side of the PCB where the SMDs were mounted. When it looked like I'd gotten all the debris off the connections, I used the canned air again to dry it all out, put it together, and was pleasantly surprised to watch it show up (wired) on my network as "Anonymous" because I'd also used the reset button while booting it to reset it to factory defaults. After using the wired connection to program it with our timezone and give it the Wi-Fi SSID and password, and also changing its own administrator username and password, I disconnected the Ethernet wire and rebooted it and watched it connect successfully to my Wi-Fi network. Saved myself the $79 I'd paid for it many years ago and only used a couple tablespoons of rubbing alcohol and some canned air duster. This guy's youtube video (link already given above) is him working on his own Foscam camera which appears to have the same circuit board as my own camera. I just snagged the relevant screenshot [View:/resized-image/__size/966x732/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-8114868c-ba2d-40e4-ba65-917cf17a2d1f/contentimage_5F00_191205.png:966:732]

from his video. The SMD contacts are incredibly close together. I think a human hair would be hard to fit between them. I felt incredibly lucky to have gotten them all clean enough to work with my crude and impatient repair, but it worked.

Now that I have all three of my Foscam cameras working again, I need to run wiring for the two that are still using Wi-Fi. There's just too much distance and signal obstruction and the wi-fi communication is too slow, so those two keep dropping offline. The wired one stays on OK, but it was the one I'd hit with the water spray. The other two are just annoyingly unreliable on Wi-Fi. Probably because I have them mounted outside the house and when we got new siding, the installers put up 1/4" thick foam board insulation panels that had silvered aluminum foil covering them. I think I live inside a Faraday cage now. I had to use an outdoor antenna on the rooftop to get decent, free, over the air TV signals.

There's always something left to fix, isn't there?

RE: How not to repair a Playstation 4 - The Risks of Second Hand Electronics

Jan Cumps — Mon, 01 Jul 2019 21:14:59 GMT

I also use 500° for rework on this kind of components on lead-free boards In combination with pre-heating and a ridiculous amount of flux.

RE: How not to repair a Playstation 4 - The Risks of Second Hand Electronics

shabaz — Mon, 01 Jul 2019 15:28:26 GMT

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.

[View:/resized-image/__size/993x744/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-8114868c-ba2d-40e4-ba65-917cf17a2d1f/8284.contentimage_5F00_191202.jpg:993:744]

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.

[View:/resized-image/__size/992x744/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-8114868c-ba2d-40e4-ba65-917cf17a2d1f/2844.contentimage_5F00_191203.jpg:992:744]

RE: How not to repair a Playstation 4 - The Risks of Second Hand Electronics

dougw — Mon, 01 Jul 2019 14:32:49 GMT

A brave attempt at repair. Looking at the original repair mess, I don't think I have ever seen such a nasty butcher job performed in hopes of repair. It looks like it came out of a war zone where nothing else survived either. I wouldn't even try to give something away in that condition, much less sell it.

My riskiest recent repair was a crashed hard drive:

[View:/resized-image/__size/620x407/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-8114868c-ba2d-40e4-ba65-917cf17a2d1f/8284.contentimage_5F00_191201.jpg:620:407]

You can see the heads (actually stuck) in the middle of the platter. The heads are so stuck to the platter it won't rotate.