I Bought 10 Broken Nintendo Switches... How Many Can I Fix?

I brought 10 Nintendo switches from eBay for 420 pounds and today I'm going to try and fix them these Nintendo switches were all sold by one seller as Forte and I managed to get these for the bargain price at 420 pounds which is around about 480 US Dollars they've all got various things wrong with them but I'm hopefully gonna fix these and hopefully make some money let's get these on the workbench and see what we can do but if you are new to the channel and you like this type of content I would really appreciate it if you hit subscribe and turn on the Bell notifications that way you don't miss any future videos and you can also check me out over on Twitch well I'll stream regularly just go to twitch.tv forward slash the colder 2015 Link in the video description check me out to give me a follow and catch a live stream but without further Ado let's get into this repair thank you to PCB way for sponsoring today's video as the industry leader in custom PCB manufacturing PCB way is the only solution you'll ever need for all your engine naming projects with affordable custom pcbs flexible pcbs CNC and 3D printing you can get your project off the ground today with the PCB way store you can purchase development boards tools and everything you'll need to get started prices are competitive and the possibilities are endless from multimeters to microchips PCB way have it all and if you're struggling for inspiration you can find pre-made projects by like-minded Engineers to learn more about the PCB way store shared projects or any of PCB way Services head to the video description where you'll find links to the great products and services that PCB way offer now let's get back to the repair so like I said in the intro we've got 10 Nintendo switches here this is a video that I'm really looking forward to I hope I can get them all in one video but I think the first thing that I'm going to do with these is just hook them all up to my USB ammeter and we'll see what kind of current is being drawn from them and try and get a general idea of what's going on so let's start off with the switch light this says no Power Pause 0.445 amps at 15 volts let's just check and make sure that's true and okay on my ammeter we've got 15 volts or there about 0.19 amps and now 0.48 amps however nothing seems to be happening on the screen so that one seems around about correct the equivalent that's being drawn and the voltage can vary depending on the power supply this isn't an official Nintendo switch power supply so we're going to give a little bit of a different reading to what the person who sold them would have got on another power supply so that one seemed correct let's check the next one this one says no image can hear system sounds okay uh and that one's not drawing any current for some reason let's try the other way ah there we go uh no that one seems incorrect it could be that the battery has been unplugged from this so let's drop something down a big thank you to PCB way for sponsoring this video it does help me to pay for these things so 15 volts 0.08 amps no power I'll fast forward through these and I'll get an initial reading and see if I can figure out what's going on with them and then we'll pick it up at the end so we've got 0.48 amps at 15 volts what does the back say he says 0.38 amps at 15 volts so yeah a bit right no image can hear system sounds and again we get the same blue screen of death for rental controls on V1 unpatched or possibly unboxed okay sometimes works all right ah yeah so we've got blue screen of death there this one's just got a marking on the screen that says bsld for blue screen of death yep okay this one's really not in good condition at all it's definitely gonna need at least a new touchscreen and nothing at all happening no power and five volts only I'm not getting anything on the screen at all no life okay all right Now power 0.44 amps at 15 volts yep that's about right and again this one says no power 0.44 amps at 15 volts looks like the battery is really dead on this one it's drawing 0.11 amps sometimes when the battery is really dead it will draw a really low current and it will trickle charge until it gets to a point where it's safe to charge the battery fast and let's work first of all on this blue screen of death so I think we need to get this apart so we can figure out what's going on with it the blue screen of death is normally caused by a connection issue on the CPU so we'll open it up we'll see what's going on with it and hopefully get this fixed hello so the board is pretty much ready to come out so what I'm going to do is I'm going to see if I can figure out what the actual cause of this blue screen is so as I said the blue screen is caused by a communication issue on the CPU and lamp and basically what that means is that the CPU can't communicate with the ram so it just throws out of blue screen so sometimes it's the ram but sometimes it's a CPU most often it's a CPU and it's caused by warping on the board and that's caused because these are really really cheaply made they're really flimsy they're not good at all and what happens is this bends like a banana and it causes a connection issue either with the ram which is located here or it causes a connection issue with the CPU which is located here so one way we can test and see if we can figure out which one it actually is is by putting some pressure on the CPU and RAM so what I'm going to do is just take off this shield and then once I've got all of this horrible thermal paste off here then what I'm going to do is I'm going to put some pressure I'm going to start with the rum I'm going to just press down on it as I start to Power It Up and that might give me an indication as to what's wrong so I'll put pressure on this top run first I'll try and turn it on yep so put pressure on that top of them and straight away that attempty to boot up and there you go that's turning on all right so it looks like we need to reball this Ram chip here in order to get this working and I'm not actually going to use this housing because it is bent and also it's not in great condition I can potentially reuse that digitizer if I need to and the LCD appears good so we've got some usable Parts in there but I do have some brand new housings which I built in preparation for this video there's a beautiful looking red hose in there with a brand new digitizer brand new screen uh almost new joy-cons but they've been really all rather joy-con rails but they're in really good condition I fully work in battery working fan working speakers you get the drift this is a very very nice looking shell and it's going to increase the value of the console and make it a bit easier to sell as well so under the microscope then here we have the ram so this is the top Ram IC which I've just put a little bit of pressure on I'm going to remove this so I'm going to desolder this from the board using hot air and a little bit of flux flux is going to help solder to flow and prevent any kind of damage to the board through oxidation or torn pads so I'm going to set my hot air up at 440 degrees Celsius at 40 airflow that's using my aten st862d not sponsored but a very good hot air station right there's the van removed and before I go any further I just need to prep this board add some more flux there and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my soldering iron to replace the solder that's on here right now with some leaded solder that's going to lower the melting temperature down so as it's safe to clean the solder off with Wick so if we've got some nice flat solder pads ready for the ram chip to go back on when I re-ball it and it looks like that top corner is a non-connected pad I'm not seeing any Voya so avoid is basically a pathway to another part of a circuit same with that one there not seeing any voice so I don't think that's going to be any kind of issue so non-connected pads always seem to lift up very easily well I just lost another one that one might actually be connected I've felt that rip as well that was completely my fault no I'm not seeing a Voya so it's time to fix up these Ram chip so again I'm going to add some lady solder to this and then I'm going to Wick it away all right let's just pop this into my IPA and clean it up okay there we go that is ready for me boiling so I don't have the correct stencil for this particular chip it's got 200 solder balls it's going to take me about around about 10 minutes but I'm going to do it by hand basically what I need to do is I need to pop some solder balls onto here and I need to place them all onto each pad by hand and I'm going to show you how I'm going to do it then I'm going to skip the rest because it's going to take too long for the video otherwise I'm going to add some flux not too much looks just enough flux a nice even layer then I'm going to drop some 0.45 millimeter solder balls on the chip and then I'm going to place them one by one onto each pad so I'm going to skip through the rest of this I don't want you to take too long but basically this is all I'm going to do see you on the other side 200 solder balls later 200 balls later and we've got a nice rebuild chip it's going to be that way so the indicators here we need to match at it with this dot just here so we're going to get that roughly in line but one way you can get your line up is if you get it roughly in place these are really small chips but if you press down on the chip and then give it a wiggle if it's in place then it won't move so I'm going to set my hot air at 420 degrees Celsius at 20 airflow I've got no nuzzle on the hot air I'm just going to flow it nice and slowly okay I'll move the heat away for a second let's just add some flux just let that trickle underneath there and then increase to 440 degrees Celsius at 40 airflow let's give the chip a tap there we go perfect all right I'm going to give that a second to cool down and then I'm going to add some isopropyl alcohol and just give it a clean don't want to put the isopropyl alcohol on too quickly which we don't want to damage the board and give it a scrub just dry off the board it doesn't matter the isopropyl alcohol isn't going to hurt the board it's non-conductive but that's all good it's nice and clean so let's get the board back in and see if it boots okay moment to choose what do you think is it gonna work I hope so there we go that's what I'm talking about parental controls is on but if I found Nintendo I'll be able to get parental controls turned off and then I'll be able to factory reset this one and resell it okay it looks like it might need a replacement joy-con rail there let's just try cleaning it okay it does look like it needs a replacement rail it's not connecting to that duallycon it is reading a game and he's not connecting that Joe you can't that's a bit oh yeah there you go you read that one okay it does connect one it looks like we need a new rail but I am going to change the housing on this and even though I don't think it is going to be I've been wrong before I'm gonna pop this on to the computer and just see if we're able to exploit it so the way I'm going to do that rather than using a jig is just by disconnecting the nand and then attempt to pay rate on he's not going to show anything on the screen and as you can see it says RCM device detected if I press inject payload what do you know it takes the payload which means this is exploitable so buy on patch that means that we can install some custom firmware but like I said I'm going to pop this into a Mario limited edition housing or rather eats kind of a Mario limited edition is unofficial but it is the same colors as Mario limited edition and I also have the matching Joy cons for it as well so that'll be a little bit easier to sell and there we go inside the new case so this case is the kind of Mario limited edition but it looks a lot better and this one is kind of bent so yeah really not happy with that one so that's why I've chose to put it into the other case so let's just test a few things there we go now the left hook on the pairing and the right one as well awesome fantastic so this is an exploitable switch which means that I can set it for a little bit more than what I would be able to sell it for if it wasn't exploitable probably get around about 20 or 30 pound more so I am super super happy with that that's how it's going to be sold I do need to put a back case on it so I've got a back cover there needs a bit of a clean it's got some thermal paste on it a few other things I need to do to it put some thermal paste on it put the heatsink honey etc etc but I'll do that off camera but that's what it's going to look like with obviously the kickstand and the Gang card cover as well the dust cover but yeah I'm really really happy with that and that is number one done so on to number two then no power 0.44 amps at 15 volts let's get this one apart and we'll work on this one I'm just putting that other one on charge because I need to charge the battery it is fast charging so just off to the corner there we are going 0.98 amps and that's all the screen's off so it is fast charging that's fantastic I know I haven't put all the screws in the other one as well but that's absolutely fine all right one thing I've just noticed is I am seeing a little bit of liquid damage just here on the housing so that could be why are we not getting any kind of power on this so let's get the board out and we'll fully inspect it under the microscope and okay here we go now I'm seeing what we're getting no pair on this one so immediately on the back of the board I can see that we've got some corrosion around here this is the max 77620 it's one of the main power management ships and we've got corrosion there we've got some corrosion on these transistor here um around the backlight I see as well yeah so there's quite a bit of damage to this one okay let's start off then by cleaning this up using some isopropyl alcohol and a toothbrush I'm not sure what that is looks like something out of a horror movie so I'll give that a second just to Sulkin already that looks a million times better right all right let's just dry that off there we go okay and as we can see we've got some very burnt components including this inductor here that's going to need replacing I'm probably going to Reflow this this Mac 77620 we've also got some damage components here I'm going to give these pads here these ones that are burnt a little bit of a scray and then I'm probably going to give this cheaper Reflow as well so I guess I should just start putting some components off then I'll start by adding some flux I've got my hot air at 440 40 airflow degrees Celsius that is and by reflowing this chip it's just gonna basically get rid of any corals around let's have a quick look at these pads so I've just scraped those away using my tweezers just to get rid of the little bit of Charming we may have a burnt pad here and yep that track is broken so we're gonna need a jumper wire from here to here before we put that component back okay so basically a jumper wire means I'm going to pour a little wire which is going to link the pad from where it's broken to where it's meant to go to and that will restore the connection and allow me to basically well hopefully fix the power ratio let's just add some flux I'm going to add some leaded solder and then I'll grab some enameled solder wire and I just realized I didn't actually tin that pad that I wanted to Tin and then I'll need to Tin this wire as well and now we'll just need to restore this Trace so basically I'm just gonna position this so as it's not in the way of anything but also at a point where I can drop a capacitor there doesn't look great I know but I don't want it shorting out on this pad here so I'll just tune that there and trim it there as well there we go looking good I'm going to use some conformal coating just to protect the area and that's nice and secure now all right time to grab a few donor components and get this thing fixed hopefully all right I think that's about the best I can get it I'm not so sure on this one to be honest all right it's the moment of truth is it gonna work no it's not gonna work I think I think this one's gonna be unfreakable ah damn it let's just try another battery in this so I know these batteries got some charging here no it's not gonna work oh so it's looking like number two he's gonna be unfixable that is a shame what what unless the screen's faulty let's try eating another housing I know this housing is a good test housing sorry this one so let's just double check on another housing just to make sure he's not the screen so I'll just plug the screen and backlight him for this and the battery I won't worry about anything else for now uh no unfortunately not it's reading 0.25 amps at 15 volts so that's telling me that it's charging a battery I'm going to see if it does increase in charge a battery but I don't think this is going to work I am feeling a little bit of heat out of the battery management circuit so I think it is charging a battery it's just not working at all which is rather unfortunate this one may need a revisiting a separate video that sucks so I think for now number two is gonna be unfixable so switch number three says no life at five volts 0.09 amps only pulls power something away yeah only pulls power away okay this one's interesting uh and yeah okay so he says no charger detected from me and that's on both sides of the port okay let's take apart number three let's just see first of all let's unplug that and let's pop into the microscope because there's a fuse that I want to test and just see if that's any good and also some areas around here as well so the fuse I was talking about is just here and that is the main fuse for power coming into the board so let's just check for that I'm going to be looking for continuity okay so that beeps which means that it's good let's check this area here starting with this coil that's good sometimes this can go bad and it can cause no power next let's just check some of these capacitors for a shorter ground there's something on there I'm not sure what that is that baby because this side of the cap is ground that seems good let's have a look around M92 t36 and it doesn't appear short oh there's a short right there and that could be causing no power so let's get the board out and we'll see what we can do about getting this one working starting to build up some screws there and with the board out let's pop everything else to one side I think it's this cap here which is linked to p13 USB I think this one is just for M92 t36 so let's get that chip removed and we'll see if that short goes away very unlikely going to be the capacitor one way I like to remove ICS is just to use what I call the drop method which is where I'll just hold the entire board by the chi heat it up and then when it's ready it's just going to drop on its own being about three two one there we go so with that chip removed let's just test again I can use this part here for ground now and yep that sort has disappeared excellent so that means that chip was bad I'm replacing that chip should fix this issue so that chip there is the main USBC charging IC and it's a very common value on these consoles so I'll just partially solder a new chip down and then if I add some flux and there we go that is beautiful just add some ice up with alcohol let's give it a little bit of a scrub awesome so let's just see now if this wants to work so I'll took that M92 t36 off this board here so I have got some new ones but that was right next to me another lazy technician all right let's just pop the charger in while it's out of the case and let's just see if it wants to charge so I've got my meter there let's just grab let's not put it on there because there's IPA there but let's just grab this property in there and let's see if it recognizes the charger yes it does but it's only recognized in it ah there we go so is that no I think that's just my cable there we go on the other side yep it appears to be picking it up now the question is whether he's picking the battery up or not I can't tell because it'll draw sometimes 0.08 amps when he's not detecting a battery and then sometimes it'll draw 0.08 times if it's completely dead as well so I'm going to try it with another battery one that I know has got at least enough charge to draw 0.2 amps and there we go 0.36 so that is indeed picking something up let's just pop it back in the housing and I'll see if we get anything on the screen uh like Moment of Truth are we going to get anything on the screen yeah let's go that's what I'm talking about we've got a charging symbol that's working this switch is fixed I'm going to let this charge the battery's really really dead we're on 120 milliamps right now I have current draw the reason for the sudden increase is because it's now pairing the screen as well but we're not 120 milliamps that's nowhere near enough to turn on so I'm gonna let this charge and move on to number four number four again e is going to be another that says no charger detected let's take it apart and under the microscope we go all right so same deal as before on this one I'm gonna go ahead and test this fuse first of all the fuse is good and then I'm going to check this coil the coil is good and then let's just check for shorts around here let's get rid of that thermal pad now shorts okay let's check for shorts around here and we have a short there on that cap so this is short on both sides of the cap which means that there's a short on this chip okay so once again let's change M92 t36 let's give it a try let's just see if it recognizes the charger yeah it does that's what I'm talking about the other side oh yeah I just want to check this screen well that's assuming that the actual board is working but I want to check the screen and see if the screen is cracked because if the screen is not cracked then I can use the screen or I can just put a new digitizer on this one so I'm literally just going to check it with the backlighting LCD let's have a look oh has that just blown the chip again oh oh could that be the screen that's blowing that tree oh wow he's just blowing it there now okay I'm not seeing any damage on that port wow it should blow on my chip well that's not cool is it I guess I'll change it again which sucks but I guess I'll change it again and then try it with a different screen that's annoying there we go it doesn't take long to change the chip not when you used to it anyway all right so here's another red case that I made earlier let's try it with this case I hope it was a screen I hope I don't have to change another chip uh here we go time for the Moment of Truth easy gonna blow yet another one we get 15 volts do we get something on the screen no I'm not seeing anything on the backlight It is charging or it appears to be charging I'm going to try it in the computer something on the CPU doesn't sound good I'm hearing kind of like uh clicking but that don't sound great something isn't good on that something's not happy I think I need to leave it to charge the battery if it's going to charge the battery that is it's definitely not happy unless my screen that's inside this housing doesn't work I can't see that being the case but at the moment nothing's displaying on the screen it's not recognizing in RCM mode and when I do plug it into the computer I can hear like a ticking noise coming from the CPU so let's just pop it into another housing again plug it into a charger no no it's not picking up anything and in fact it's not drawing any currency that and it's killing chips yeah that clicking noise every time I've experienced a clicking noise it's never ended well so honestly I don't know on this one I think this one's going to be a no fix to be honest two out of four on to number five we're almost at the halfway point all right so number five is no power 0.44 amps at 15 volts and it's a V2 okay so let's see if we can get this one working hopefully we get at least three or five working and before we do that I've just realized that this is now turning on except we don't have a touch screen connected that's rather silly I've prompted that to boot parental controls is on so I'm gonna have to phone Nintendo to do this so what I'll do is I'll contact Nintendo I'll tell him that I forgot the pin pretend it's my switch well this is my switch wow there's loads of games on here there we go boom okay so he's connecting joy-cons it seems to be working just get my test game out and pop it in there boom that works excellent fantastic so that all appears to be working so we've definitely got two of four working which is great news all right we've got some screws missing in this one as well but that's fine we are gathering up quite the collection of screws and already I can see water damage on this so the board is definitely gonna have to come out it looks like you might need a new battery as well this one might have quite a bit of water damage okay that one I think has actually been out before that foam come off a little bit too easy again that's okay I mean it doesn't appear as though any work's been done to this if he had then the liquid damage probably wouldn't be reasonable and unfortunately this housing might not be any good because I can see liquid damage on the LCD connector and also on the backlight ribbon and connector as well so this might need a new screen that's going to be okay for now we just want to get this board working so let's pop this under the scope and take a look so starting down here we've got some liquid damage around the joy-con connector and the battery connector so that's going to need to clean up may need to do something about this but we've also got quite a bit of damage around bq24193 that's the battery management area and considerable damage around here yeah that's gonna need some rebuilding uh um that's not good oh wow oh dear okay this is probably the worst liquid damage I've seen in quite some time I'm gonna be honest oh oh oh oh oh no oh wow oh no ooh it's rough let's start off just by cleaning up a few areas a few key areas okay so basically that's going to be power Management areas battery management uh CPU power all of that stuff let's take a closer look then using the multimeter so let's start off with this area here and hey that's not going any short I will never know um wow I'm not finding any shorts I mean obviously most of this is still going to need replacing however it's cleaned up fairly well some of these BGA chips might just need a little bit of a Reflow to be honest let's have a look on another screen not this one because I can see corrosion on the LCD and I can also see corrosion on the LCD backlight connector as well so I'll look into the screen later I'm not really bothered about the screen at the minute let's just use another screen and let's just see if we get any activity would you reckon is it going to work I don't think it will and it might help if uploading a battery that might be a bit of a help wow well I will be damned that's unbelievable that is absolutely unbelievable I am gobsmacked okay well that's at least trying to charge the battery and it's displaying as well so it's got a display it's trying it's attempting to charge the battery so I think in fact I don't think we've got to replace any ICS here I think we just need to replace some damage capacitors wow I'm shocked I don't think I've ever seen anything like it these ones definitely a fighter so I'm gonna replace some caps I'm gonna pull some parts from Downer boards replace some caps and resistors the stuff what looks burnt I think I'll just replace so cue inspirational music I guess [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign that was a lot of work what do you reckon is it gonna work I don't know could I it's possible I could have made it worse but couldn't leave you like that so yeah let's give this a test that with waiting which work all right let's test it in this red case there we go boom that's charging it's only charging at 100 milliamps right now but this battery is completely dead but the switch itself is charging and this one appears to be fixed so I've been filming for over four hours now around about four and a half hours unfortunately and that is all I'm going to be able to fit into one video it's going to be very difficult to even fit this into one video so I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to call this part one we've managed to fix what appears to be three Nintendo switches out of the first five which is absolutely fantastic 60 success rate that means these three switches alone should pay most of my money back if they're all working absolutely fine there's still a few tests I'm going to need to do off camera but that's going to take too long you know to do on the video so what I'm going to do I'm going to call this part one and in part two which I'll release a few days after this one I will look at the other ones so there's four Nintendo switch lights and then there's one Nintendo switch normal which is another blue screen of death there's a reason that I left this one and that's because I know it's going to be a time consuming job because it's a blue screen of death so five more to look at three of them appear to be fixed I'm going to leave this one to charge and I'll obviously you know let people know how that one got on in the next video hopefully by the next video I'll have the three dollar working put back together and they will be pretty much ready to sell but three out of five ain't bad and uh I'm really really happy so far we've still got four switch lights one other switch to do hopefully we get at least three of them or the five working fingers crossed so if you're not subscribed make sure you do get subscribed for part two and make sure you give the video a thumbs up as well tell all your friends tell all your family matters might be really really popular and uh yeah I really do appreciate it if you do want to support me you can head over to Twitch you can link an Amazon Prime account to Twitch and become a twitch Prime subscriber by linking your Amazon Prime account to Twitch gaming and then pressing subscribe for free with prime it doesn't cost you anything if you've already got Amazon Prime and it really does really help me out so really does really help me out I'm tired it's late and uh yeah but yeah three out of five ain't bad stay tuned for part two hopefully you enjoyed it let me know what you think down in the comments down below and I'll see you all in the next video thank you for watching bye for now

Channel: TheCod3r

Views: 64,264

Keywords: thecod3r, the cod3r, thecod3r youtube, the cod3r youtube, thecod3r ps4, the cod3r ps4, thecod3r vs tronicsfix, thecod3r xbox one, thecod3r discord, nintendo switch, switch repair, nintendo switch repair, broken switch, electronics repair, joblot faulty items, joblot broken consoles, joblot broken fix, joblot broken electronics, faulty electronics, fault finding pcb, water damage repair, nintendo switch liquid damage, switch lite repair, repair for profit, tronicsfix, broken

Id: YKmu0JM3_HA

Length: 45min 25sec (2725 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 09 2022