Repair Facility For Raspberry Pi In India?

Regardless of a repair facility or not, anything that has been affected by lightning (or static) can fail internally later.

The cost associated with repair will likely be higher than the replacement, and that assumes it can be repaired.

Best idea is to turn it to art, donate it for display or keep it for parts to rescue another (connectors, etc)

The best idea is try to protect them using power surge devices and the like.

Mark

Hi,

What a remarkable opportunity for a start up.  See a need... fill a need.  If, as you say, you have some toasted Raspberries, you can't go wrong using them as a learning platform (kind of what they were intended to be in the first place). The learning in this case, is diagnostics and repair, instead of control systems. Start with a schematic, and some spec sheets for the chips, pick up a cheap DVOM, and some kind of scope (BitScope), and go to town. You might also want to get a list of patient folks that have repair shops (via email), and see if they will be able to provide titles of reference material.  Hopefully you would have some electrical background too.

What I am noting, this could be ground floor stuff. Raspberry Pi is big stuff, and getting bigger, being the repair go-to for a large area, could prove quite lucrative.

Jack

Honestly... Pi's are so cheap I seriously doubt it would be cost effective enough for a 3rd party to make the money they would need to from repairing these unless they had TONS of repairs they could do and quickly.  I used to run a pager repair shop and in the later days of us being open we could barely turn a profit.  They simply had gotten so cheap it wasn't worth the cost fix them most times compared to just buying a new one.

That said... just go buy new ones.  Like my comment started out - they are dirt cheap to begin with.

Hi Rajat,

If you look at a Pi in detail you'll see there are not many parts between the interfaces and the very few ICs on the board. So if a part blows, you are very likely to want to replace the USB hub IC, or the processor. The latter isn't available in small quantities and is a hard part to swap out.

Someone could start a business swapping out the USB hub IC or other parts, but the schematic isn't available. Some parts you can know or can guesstimate, others you can't, but could swap from other boards perhaps.

Anyway, it seems like a lot of effort, but some countries still have businesses making a living from repairing very low-cost consumer items like radios and kettles.

If it is still worthwhile doing (I don't know the costs of labour or the costs of Pi's in India) then perhaps someone is doing it, but you can quickly figure out for yourself if you estimate that it could take an hour to swap out parts and requires some reasonable competence. In many countries the cost of labour is too high. But it could be worthwhile in other countries.