Well Mick, what can I say, you’re an absolute genius, you really really are. I don’t think I can ever thank you enough. Thanks also for strengthening the connector with the hot glue, hopefully this will help for the future. You’re right, it is in and out of our vans all day everyday and the vibrations while in transit couldn’t have helped. Seems strange how it would decide to pick on that one connector lol. I think it needs a BuyItFixIt sticker on the top of it so I can tell the story to everyone that sees it and asked 😊 Again thanks a bunch. Skills like yours are far and few between. Take care. Regards Matt
Can you give us a backstory on what you believed first issue noticed? Like Was the screen gone and then you sent off or it had other issues for it to believed broken. Because it seems weird to me that the screen wasn't diagnosed properly but the main board was touched?
@@tdkyt46 that was the original failure, the blank screen. The back light could have packed up some time ago and I wouldn’t have noticed to be honest. Got it out one day and it beeped but didn’t turn on. Stripped the lid off and could see damage to the board and put the lid back on and that’s how it stayed for a few months and then I researched local electronic repair company’s and manage to find a TV repair shop and spoke with them and they said they could look but it wouldn’t be a quick turn around which I was fine with as I understand high workloads. Left it with him, after approximately 3 months I rang to be told he couldn’t repair it. Once I spoke with Mick I then removed the lid again to take pictures and that’s when I could see the signs of soldering to the main board etc. It was then reassembled and the next person to strip was Mick.
Good to know, I have one of these myself. By the look of it, those standoffs for the display don't hold it very securely so there will be some stress on the connector, I would imagine more so from being wheeled across a workshop on a diag cart that it would be installed in a mobile tech's van. Maybe the answer would be to use the same length standoffs but with threaded ends and nylon nuts - but your modified connector looks stronger than the original.
This channel, along with 'Mend It Mark', are head and shoulders above the rest in what is becoming an increasingly crowded genre. I truly marvel at the level of skill, knowledge and resourcefulness of these two gentlemen. And not a hint of ego. Thank you and long may it continue.
Just as I came to the end of watching every episode of bigclive, the algorithm gods present me with hours more content to watch til the early hours. Love the channel - it’s the right amount of detail, professionally shot without any of the faff and waffle. Now firmly subscribed! 31, UK
Mick, I could sit by your side for hours watching and learning. Saving pieces of equipment with sometimes no more than a few pennies of solder or a simple plastic connector. Simply amazing.
No problem with the bridged diodes at the beginning of the video? Surprised it was a display connector and that you found the fault so quickly, you're good brother. I'm always impressed by your talent, much appreciated. Great video, well done. See you next time.
Thanks Terry, I assumed the diodes were supposed to be bridged, probably by a track underneath, and the previous repairer just touched them with the iron. Thanks again 🙂
It's funny how the other tech tried to remove parts that had nothing to do with the problem, and you looked at them and said, "Let's look at the display." Genius!! It seems to me that critical thinkers are a thing of the past anymore. Not too many people can think their way through a problem like you. Another great repair from the Master!
Thanks Ron👍, well it was the display that wasn't working so I thought I'd start there and work backwards as the device seemed to have power, and the keypad seemed to function because it made a beep when pressing the button 🙂
Superb job! I'm pleased that you went to the display quite quickly as I had a feeling the machine was powering up and beeping because no battery was attached. I was hoping you may measure output first to see if was just a display issue but never suspected it would be the socket. I think your replacement socket and repair is more robust than the original 👍
Many thanks! Yes it seemed like it should have been displaying something because it beeped so I thought it might have no power to the display or something. I didn't expect it was going to be the socket either!
Was expecting this to be tiny components as the issue, to then find out what a nice simple repair it was (albeit with a bit of leg bending). That fixer of everything plaque is very justified :) Nice video as always!
That was a good lesson in not assuming anything . I was thinking that the usb port could power the display /controller separately from the charger . Thanks 😊
The display would have been the FIRST thing I would have looked at to make sure that the cable connections were OK. Also when you put the plastic glue as a physical brace to the socket, as I would have also done that on both sides. But apart from then few points, you went through it in a logical manner 👍🏽 Also one of the FIRST things that I had seen was that fan at the side of the unit.
Excellent work as always sir It's a pleasure to watch you work!!! 1:39, ah, there's your problem, "Made in France". I mean we're all familiar with the disco light display on the back of a Renault, or Citroen, where all the lights flash and/or flicker once the indicator is activated?? You just can't trust them, I mean it says "Fan Less Technology" on the outside of the cabinet, but guess what's the first thing you see when you take off the top cover... A fan!!! Mon Dieu as the French say, Mon Dieu...🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@BuyitFixit to be honest I can't believe a company manufacturing garage equipment, especially "high end" equipment didn't think to add some sort of mechanical support to that display socket during manufacturing. A blob or two of silicone glue, or at the very least a few lines of hot melt glue, to give it a fighting chance at least. Like these things are dragged around from vehicle to vehicle, bashed off benches, etc. That's just piss poor design...
@@generaldisarray Actually these chargers are really good and reliable, VAG uses them as standard in all dealer shops. There is also a secret power supply mode if you read the manual. Note that there are absolutely no carry handles on the device? This particular model is NOT made to be dragged around in a VAN or bashed off benches, it's made to be sitting in a diagnostic cart with a laptop or wall mounted with a bracket. GYS sell other models with carry handles that are of course completely full of mechanical supports and vibration mitigation.
@@mrfrenzy. Even in a cart it's going to be subject to vibration, etc as the diagnostic cart is wheeled around. It's just common sense that you'd mechanically support a component like that socket
Well done Mick, Another terrific video and repair. I would not have thought that connector would do that - bizarre. I have a Bowens flash head (Strobe) with a fault on the modelling lamp circuit which similarly was sent away for repair only to be told that the replacement boards arn't available anymore which they knew but still accepted it and charged £35.00 handling. It is great to see someone who works around issues and actually can repair stuff. Sadly no one else seems interested in repairing my Bowens GM500Pro :( and its a bit out of my league lol mains stuff - shivers
Nice work Mick. I'm wondering if there was another fault on it that the previous fixer might have worked on, but while working on that they've buggered the display... Good fix that matey, well done.!
Thanks Marc 👍Perhaps the cap blew and the other repairer touched up the diodes and MOSFET which may have looked a bit dry. Then when the unit still didn't work gave up. I think the cap wouldn't make a lot of difference as it just looked like a decoupling cap, and there was another one in parallel with it. If he had looked at the display perhaps he may have found the problem I found too.
attention to detail wins the day and not panicing that its a mcu controlled power factor corrected smps with no schematics! i would tend to get into negative headspace about that, and that looks like what happened with the previous tech too -you can see they absessed about the smpsu section not quite finished though ,still that burn up and missing smd to think about , it could be mosfet gate drive shaping and thatll take days to weeks to cause a shorted mosfet + all the other damage that causes
Thanks 👍I think it just looked like decoupling. I had it running for 4 hours after the video and it still ran fine. I think the main issue was just the display.
I swear these connectors are made with candlewax the way they melt if you go near them with an iron. What I do, is stick a pin-header into the socket to keep the pins aligned and soak up any excess heat. WHEN the plastic melts, the header stops the pins wandering.
Good tip 👍I don't usually have an issue with them. The one I used was from when I built an RGB LED music sequenced Christmas light show a few years back (video on here from about 5 years ago) it was quite a big project and took me around 4 months.
Great find with the connector. But I really dislike unleaded solder. The joints always look dry and the wetting is terrible. Surely some flux would have helped on this job?
Thanks 👍The light on the microscope also casts shadows at times which makes some joints look worse than they actually are when viewed at a different angle. Yes I'm not a fan of unleaded either!
When the case was opened and I saw the conformal coating over everything, I thought.. OH NO!! That stuff is such a pain when it comes to fault finding and servicing.
What a legend, Mick the fix lol, An absolutely brilliant fix maybe the other shop screwed up the socket? I would of thought it was robust enough to take a few knocks, those pins looked like it had been forced which had snapped them?
Cheers Gary 👍I think if it was being "thrown into a van" or vibrations from being transported around in a van every day might have caused some kind of metal stress fatigue over time.
Good job and i like your repairs........the screen and the control board under screen are a complete system on its own and u could have tested by just plunging in a USB cable ....it would be the same powering up a adrino board with its screen screen
Thanks 👍I did briefly plug the USB into the PC but I didn't record that part. It didn't seem to do anything. It didn't power up the board / display anything on the screen or enumerate as a device on the PC, so perhaps it needs to be in some kind of "bootloader" mode like the AVerMedia video capture device that I repaired.
Oh, GYS. Bought a GYSPack jumpstart/flashlight/tire inflator combo long ago, the inflator died first - compressor got stalled and the motor shaft broke off. Then the "18Ah" lead-acid battery died so I replaced it with 30Ah LiFe assembly. The only surviving original parts are the flashlight and battery clamps.
Fantastic video mate. Amazing knowledge you have. I have this charger and it’s stopped working. Can I ask how much a man of your calibre would charge for this repair out of interest? I’m based near Liverpool . Cheers
Nice repair, but I wonder if one of the mosfets in the PSU is not heatsinked properly? Seems like someone else worked on one of them, and the heatsink may not be touching the mosfet properly anymore. Might be worth checking out?
Thanks 👍 I doubt they got enough heat on that to remove it (as that was one of the things mentioned). I think they just touched up the legs with an iron.
Its like when you drop a car off at a shop and they have it for a month just to charge you 900$ for a buncha parts that didnt fix the issue so you take it to another shop and they find and fix a broken wire for a few bucks. But then you have other problems from the “new” stuff the other shop said you needed and now you cant get any refund or return parts because you took it to another shop arguing that the other shop broke the parts they just put in.. lol.
Sounds like you've been watching South Main Auto! The previous shop fired the parts cannon at that truck, to the tune of $900. Still not repaired. Eric O found a corroded wire in a module connector at the rear of the truck. Sheesh, there are a bunch of hack mechanics and technicians out there. Thanks for a great video Mick, you aced another one.
My first words to local shops that bring me their problem jobs are "where are the original parts?" You know, the ones that weren't faulty in the first place. They are learning now, don't throw away old parts until you know it's a good repair. Sometimes, they have made the right call but they've sourced a part that doesn't quite perform to spec (or doesn't perform at all!) I have some really good customers though... if they're not sure, they won't fire the cannon, they send it to me for diag.
Good show, an expensive device saved from landfill. Surprised that the connector pads hadn't ripped off the PCB. Not a fan of these devices. PS, I didn't know you were Australian.
Definitely saved from LandFill. After the previous repairer (if you can call him that looking at the state of the board) gave up I thought it was game over. Mick’s skills to the recuse.
For such an expensive unit, one would think that the design would be better. Great job as always. Did you figure out what that was between pins 1 and 2 of the wide ribbon cable? It looked like there was something stuck between the two solder joints.
After having to do a "firmware update" on my car, that required me to keep the engine running for almost 3 hours, to ensure the battery doesnt go flat during it, I was wondering to myself "I wonder if there was something like a battery charger that could plug into the mains and keep the battery charged, without the engine running, while the ECU updates. Then a few hours later, this video drops, indirectly answering my question. Yes, yes there is.
It stands out how little you are actually measuring. Can you find the problem most of the time just inspecting the board? I'm a hobby electronics tinkerer and like trying to fix things like this myself. As a mather of fact i got one of these at my work that's broken.
A lot if it is observing what the device is doing. The fact that it beeped when powering it on suggested that it was getting power and the microcontroller was working and should have probably been displaying something. If it had not of beeped then I would have started at the power input side and worked through.
Good repair👀👍👍👍🍻 and a intresting tool A tipp,,, 23:25 The hot glue doesn't last long. The glue hardens after a while and breaks. A better choice is silicone.
@@BrainHurricanes the hot glue here in germany is after the cool down hard not soft. Over the time , mechanical stress causes it to separate from the workpiece. Ive seen often. In the 80's,90's in the consumer devices there are a lot on the connectors. Meanwhile you will see silicone. Escpecially at the capacitors..
@@Lightrunner. Could be, it doesn't sound like regular hobby hot glue that I know of. The glue used in the video you can melt over and over again. What I do believe is that if the thing glued isn't degreased it will release over time.
Hi Mick, I purchased a cheap plasma cutter off ebay and it did not work, it gave some error codes. They did not want it back and sent me a new one and that also didn't work. I now have two of them, both new and neither work. Would you fancy having a go at seeing if you can see what's wrong. You can have one for free if you are successful. Or you can have them for parts if not as they are no good to me. Thanks.
Its amazing how many people who work with electronics that are able to find faults but unable to rectify them, it makes me wander if they even know what they are doing in the first place?
That was an odd fault. The display looked to be pretty well supported. Maybe a low quality connector from the factory and it didn't take much knocking about to break the pins?
Yes, I was surprised by the connector being broken. I thought it was just a few dry joints or no power getting to the LCD and was quite surprised as you seen when I started re-soldering the pins!
That is indeed a very good point. I've just checked the connector and it is indeed a 50A Anderson, although it looks in good condition and has no signs of overheating. So either the connector is under-rated, the charger is over-rated, or they very rarely pull 100A.
There is a calibration mode where the charger measures resistanse in cable and connector. It automatically adjusts output voltage at the charger depending on current to give exactly the requested voltage in the car. I guess they have made their own tests for how long the connector can take 100A before overheating and implemented in the firmware since the Anderson datasheet only lists temperature up to 70A. The internal forced air circulation probably helps.
I'm somewhat surprised the original tech didn't pick that up. Given the display is at fault, wouldn't you would take out the display and examine it first?
I wondered why you'd zero in on the zero ohm "resistor" as a failure component to test. Surely they've got pretty simple innards, just there to bridge tracks.
Note if it was pin 7 - 10 that were 'broken' that may have been by design because they are not used in 4 bit operation of the display (which is quite common to reduce the data lines required). Interface is a standard Hitachi HD44780 AFAICT
Yes, Hitachi HD44780 interface. Pins 12 (D5),13 (D6),15 (BL Anode) were broken and pin 16 (BL Cathode) was a dry joint. If you look at the PCB they all have traces going to them which then go to pull-up resistors 19:30 , so I guess they were using the 8 bit data mode.
No worries mate 👍Yes I was surprised at the failure mode too. I think it was more luck that I found it so quickly, although I probably would have found it eventually after testing the metering the lines from the display to the MCU.
year's ago we had a TV brand called PYE it was one off the earliest colour TV , my father even paid for extended warranty over a period of the the TV would play up. the service man came out many times and fixed it & sometime later the same problem would occur, so one while my parents were out I removed the back cover it had 4 or 6 circuit board & a cathode ray tube. so I unplugged all of the boards and inspected the PCBs I found on each board about 10 components not soldered properly in place, so I got my 15watt solder iron & solder & resolder the components then replace the PCBs plugged them in accordingly replace the back cover power the TV up & hey presto it worked better than before. it lasted 20 more years, I think what happened was in those days workers would fit components then another worker would solder they would get paid X amount of $ to complete then got paid so much per 10 to 20 TV sets completed. to get the bonuses they would rush the job & not doing a good job the QA man would check them to quickly.
Yes, I wanted to rule out that the display wasn't faulty, then noticed the dry joint. I surely wasn't expecting the connector to be broken underneath. That was purely found by chance!
@@BuyitFixit Auto electrician is short for automobile electrician which is yank English. In Great Britain 🇬🇧 we are referred to as Vehicle Electrician's. Signed A real certified Vehicle Electrician. Ps have a Great Easter matey
I get the impression the people aren't fans of this technology... "Fanless" Dad jokes aside great fix especially as others failed, I have the 5024hf version which is physically the same but for trucks etc I quite often max it out whilst programming but it puts up with the abuse great piece of kit
Thanks 👍I just did a quick search and it looks a very similar including the display. If the display ever goes off at least you now know what the likely culprit is 🙂
For the amount this costs, you would expect the display connector to be through hole and the display mechanically held in place _properly_ with M3 nuts and bolts, not those useless cheap crappy plastic stand offs. Even my cheap component tester that has the same 20x4 character display has the display connector pins soldered through the board.
Hi I have worked around d vehicles all my life I'm an old git now and avoid working on anything post 1990 as there seems to be a culture of using hi tech electronics just for the sake of it. Now this psu is it really necessary I can't se why a fully charged battery connected to the vehicle in question would not be good enough, could you explain please Great video
Thanks 👍Well someone commented in the video that a software update took 3 hours, so if you had the ignition on for 3 hours... Or you could just let the engine idle for 3 hours although not ideal if it's in a garage 😂😂😂😂
No proper trained technicians employed now. I remember we had thousands of spare parts for everything. Even masses of mechanical parts for tape cassettes.. Disposable age arrived and killed it.
Also, any chance we can see what your component storage area looks like? You always seem to have extras of everything :) I try to save extras but always feel like a hoarder:)
I love your videos, but you're so much of a wizard, I have to question if this is real?!?! How do you assume all of the main PCB is fine then only work on the LCD and magically hold the unit and find a faulty connection?! It's really impressive and really suspicious. Like I said, huge fan!!
My wife always says "electronics are afraid of you", because every time she gives me something that "doesn't work", it works when I use it. I think it's just the same with our australian friend here...and a lot of knowledge and experience.
The fact that the device beeped when the button was pressed does (sort of) indicate that the majority of the unit (CPU, power supplies etc) is probably working. I was both surprised and disappointed that there was not an almighty bang, sparks etc from the burnt area.
Lol, stupid comment from someone who has never soldered in his life. The solder already HAS flux, you idiot. Stop watching garbage videos where they drown everything in flux, it's not necessary.
