PS4 "Blue light of death" what causes it and how to find defects.

In this quick video i show a cool and cheap method to inspect and identify solder defects in the outer edges of the  PS4 Apu, common cause of the "blue light of death"

Here are some pics from the bga inspection and reball process..

You can get an optical prism from here - optical prism
and i used this to mount my cell phone onto my microscope Gosky universal mount

JBL Flip 2 broken usb charging port

This particular JBL daughter board was a different revision from others I've seen and has a different usb port than the ones i have in stock, unfortunately i couldn't find  a exact replacement, so had to do a hackish install with the one i had on hand, the data pins line up fine but the ground posts were way off, doesn't look pretty but hey it works! :)

Xbox one intermittently shutting down and ejecting game disk

Got this xbox one the other day after a customer accidentally spilled a protein shake over the system,  it looked pretty bad, but thankfully most of the liquid spilled over the fan and onto the face plate and touch sensor / rf board.. and nothing leaked into the main board.

here are some before and after pics, i had to clean and reflow the solder joints on the small ic.

Xbox 360 dvd drive lens mechanism

I was working on this Xbox 360 lens repair this morning and thought it would be cool to record how the laser mechanism inside looks while its reading your games  pretty neat huh? :)

PS4 black screen no video signal

PS4 powers on white light and controller syncs up but no video output to the TV.

premature diagnosis- initially i thought it was an issue with the HDMI port because it felt kinda loose, and its a pretty common problem so i replaced it with a new one, and double checked to make sure the joints are good under the microscope as you can see in the following picture all looks well.

But.. still no video :-/


So then i started probing around the hdmi circuit with a multi-meter and found several smd capacitors that read almost 0 ohms in other words complete short..

the capacitors themselves aren't bad infact these smd caps rarely go bad... but this was a good indication that there was an issue with the hdmi communications chip.

the PS4 uses a Panasonic MN86471A QFP type IC its on the bottom side of the board hidden under a heat shield that requires a lot of heat to desolder properly..

Here is the chip under the scope before and after replacing the chip..

 With the new hdmi chip installed the caps on top side of the circuit now measured the correct resistance... But i still got no video, however i was positive the chip was bad and the replacement was good and genuine chip.. so i went back and sure enough found 2 blown signal filters ...   generally its best to replace them as they are put there for a reason, but in this case all  i couldn't find them easily so i decided to just jumper the pads using some 30 gauge wire..

Woot! that did the trick finally we got video output on the tv :-)   I hope this helps someone that has a PS4 with the same issue.

Xbox One "black screen of death"

So many systems with video port issues recently....  got this Xbox One today with a loose hdmi connector this is why i always recommend my customers to invest in a quality hdmi cables for their systems.

PS3 cecha01 backwards compatible system fw downgrade

I've done many ps3 slim (NOR) systems in the past, this was my first attempt at a PS3 fat NAND model...    holly crap soldering to the nand chip legs is super tedious!! not an easy feat requires a steady hand and solid soldering skills.. so be careful if you attempt to DIY on this model..