Hello, Habre! It’s been a while since my last post on electronics repair, so I thought I’d post a new article to show the condition in which devices from Spanish flea markets are sometimes sold. And, of course, how I repair them.

A few months ago, I bought a device, a portable 8-bit console, sold by the local chain of Game stores. It was sitting in my house all this time without work, when I brought it home, checked it – it does not turn on, does not charge, and put it in a long drawer. Now it was her turn.

What kind of miracle device?

I bought her for 5 euros, out of curiosity – I saw her, unhappy, under a pile of all sorts of things that an Arab was selling. It was dirty, wet, but I found it interesting. It was immediately clear that the device is not very expensive, but it is still a game console, so I wanted to know what kind of games there are.

And recently a watch came out, I decided to take it apart and see what was inside. The device would not turn on or charge, so I assumed that the device had either burned out or had been sitting in a flea market out in the open for too long. And there, the sun can heat up to a temperature at which scrambled eggs can be cooked without fire, and the rain can pour water (it is true, when it is pouring down, the sellers collect their goods and leave).

In addition, the climate in the place where I live is humid, so the device in the open air, even in the morning, could just pick up a little moisture. Looking ahead, everything turned out that way.

It turned out to be easy to disassemble the console – there are only a few standard screws, so an ordinary screwdriver was enough. And yes, no one disassembled the set-top box for me – the warranty stickers turned out to be intact. In the photo, they are damaged, but I already did this with a screwdriver. By the way, the photos are not very high-quality, for which I apologize – I filmed the assembly-disassembly process with an action camera, in which for some reason the low-resolution mode was activated, which I learned about while writing the article.

However, I filmed the cleaning/soldering process under a microscope, and everything is fine there – the video is posted after the photos. But even low-quality photos allow us to understand the condition of the console. Let’s start with disassembly.

And here is the console with the cover removed – here you don’t need a particularly high resolution to see what state it is in. Oxides and rust everywhere, including the contacts of the LED, volume control and power slider.

We remove the screen (by the way, it’s not bad, it can be useful in DIY projects – it costs more than 5 euros). In the photo, you can see white plaque – oxides. They are simply everywhere, both on SMD components and on button contacts.

Here it is visible a little better.

And here too.

The black shield in the middle is the most important part of the board, it was not damaged. The board itself contains very few components, and I was lucky that none of them were critically damaged by moisture. I cleaned the oxides with alcohol, soldered something, and the condition of the board became much better.

By the way, after assembling and checking the console, I disassembled it again, placed the board in an ultrasonic bath with isopropyl alcohol – and it became, if not like new, then close to it.

Here is another photo before cleaning.

But here it is already after cleaning, but before the ultrasonic bath, after which everything there in general shines and shines. By the way, if you haven’t bought such a bath yet, I recommend it. It can and should be used to clean jewelry, watches and everything else that is dear to you and you want it to shine.

Main works

Before examining the board under the microscope, I cleaned it with alcohol, first with cotton buds and then with a toothbrush, which is specially designed for such tasks. It turned out not bad.

The tools I used to work on the board were a Sugon T36 soldering station, tweezers, cotton buds, and a screwdriver. And, in general, everything. In the video below, by the way, I show the difference between fluxless and flux soldering. This, of course, is not rosin, but a specialized flux that comes in a syringe. Brand Amtech NC-559-ASM if anyone is interested.

Flux helps turn an oxidized, poorly soldered contact into a shiny and beautiful one. As for the soldering station, it’s a Sugon T36 – I don’t regret the money I spent on it at all (just over 100 euros, bought used). The soldering iron heats up to the desired temperature in 3-4 seconds, the tips allow you to perform the most delicate work. At the same time, the soldering iron is quite powerful – the video clearly shows how solder (lead-free, factory) melts in a second.

I soldered something that looked suspicious. One of the contacts of the USB port, by the way, was not soldered at all – did they forget or something. The data contacts of the port do not lead anywhere, they simply “hang” on the board – this is no longer a bug, but a feature, since the console was not supposed to be connected anywhere.

After I cleaned it and put it back together (not forgetting to wipe the D-Pad contacts with alcohol, which were clogged with dust and dirt back on Sega controllers, if anyone remembers), the console turned on, but refused to charge.

The battery looked good, no deflation, nothing like that, so I decided to “push” it with a lab power supply. The fact is that when the battery is discharged below a certain level, its controller thinks that everything, the battery is dead, and does not allow it to be charged stationary. So the life hack – if after a long stay in the desk drawer, your device (PDC, smart or something else) does not turn on and does not charge, remove the battery and charge it manually. That is, set the standard parameters of voltage and current (for example, 5V and 700 mA in my case), and connect the contacts of the power supply to the plus and minus of the battery. If it is charging, then everything is ok, wait a few minutes and you can insert the device.

I did so, after which the device began to charge without problems.

And what kind of console is this?

This is a portable device that has 180 built-in games plus a cartridge, which the manufacturer added for some reason – the same games could be added to the main memory of the device.

The console was sold in 2019 by the local network of game stores Game. A review of it, as it turned out, is already available on the network. It is the only one of its kind – I have not found other videos on this set-top box.

Surprisingly, for such a simple device, the possibility of outputting sound and image to the screen was provided, so these great games can be enjoyed on a TV screen or monitor. Actually, here is the review itself, it is in Spanish, but it does not interfere with understanding what is happening if you do not know the language.

Actually, nothing special – yes, play for a couple of days and forget. It was on sale, new, for 15 euros, so after paying 5 euros for it at a flea market, I overpaid, I had to offer 2 euros, no more.

But in any case, I posted the post not to introduce you to the set-top box, but to show you the state of the devices and what needs to be done to bring them to a working state.

If you have any questions, ask them in the comments, I will definitely answer. By the way, I plan to make such posts regularly, but their “heroes” will be more interesting devices with much more complex breakdowns. Well, for example, as in the case of this gaming laptop.

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