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@0x47df@duckpon.de
Post #4291171
2026-07-31 20:36 UTC
Today I went through a pile of dead raspberry pis and did some triage on them.
Today’s subjects:
- rpi4,8g: damaged beyond current repair capabilities. missing parts, a wlcsp shattered, need to research the missing parts to see if there’s any chance.
- rpi4,2g: replaced missing oscillators, functioning again after eeprom recovery
- rpi3a(1): tested ok but seems to have larger than expected voltage drop after usb
- rpi3a(2): same as above
- rpi3a(3): tvs diode after usb seems bubbled - it flickers my usb lamp a lot during boot and gets very hot. lifted the failed TVS, no more extreme heat, but no sign of life. may replace PMIC, whatever hurt the TVS probably hurt the PMIC too. I have a few spare. They’ll need programming.
- rpi3a(4): PMIC missing, but I won’t do hot air work today.
well, I have three more “maybe working” rpi than I expected. I’ll take it.
Replies (1)
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given the price of ram in today’s economy I am sort of wondering about picking up a dead no boot pi4 and transplanting parts across from the 8gb one until it boots. or emailing rpi foundation to see if they can suggest which parts went in the places where parts are now not. it’s mostly passives but a bunch do look load bearing from a quick eyeball of the circuit. I guess I could desolder some from the working pi and test them to get values, but they’re 0201, breathe near them and they are lost. I would need a good microscope too, but I think I have some chance of replacing some of the damaged pads. I guess I could always move the ram from the 8gb to 2gb one too. But I figure two working Pi is better than 1 working pi with the chance of 0 working pi…
Open ##4291170