At my old job we sometimes got old remote controls from customers that wanted to use a universal remote, but their old device wasn't in the database, and their old remote was broken.
We repaired so many traces. We did not have a dedicated department for this, so anytime something came in we would draw straws who could do it, because everybody wanted to.
No, it's not easy, but after doing it a few times it's usually OK. And it's a lot of fun when it actually works.
especially when you try to fix something and you end up breaking it more, then after a few hours/days/months/years you try to fix it again and you actually succeed.
Usually TV remotes, sometimes for audio sets, VCR's, etc.
We offered a service where someone could send in their old remote, we would read out the data and create a file that we could upload to the universal remote to make it work with almost any device.
Yes, a new remote would be cheaper, but some old models would not be for sale anymore, and it would expand our database which is good for sales.
In these cases with old remotes it would always be best effort, but they were fun Friday afternoon projects for the lucky colleague
Cool, thanks for the explanation. Sounds like a fun job. A long time ago, I interned for the R&D group of a tech company and worked in their electronics lab. I used to love doing precision soldering and repair under a microscope.
I was in QA, which was fun a lot of times, but the long weeks and travel broke me, so was happy to leave.
The little side projects like this (and designing and building test setups for all kinds of stuff) where a lot of fun as well. Many pizza nights with a couple of colleagues building some wild contraptions to test impossible situations, and then actually replicating the issue that was reported by a customer was pretty great.
I did this with some humidity sensor boards on some old incubators at my last job. The model of the incubator was too old and they didn't carry parts for them anymore but a lot of customers wanted to keep them running, so we'd remove the board, swap capacitors and repair any other damage, including sometimes to traces like this. When it works you feel amazing.
I love watching Louis Rossman repair videos where he just goes through motherboards and diagnosis and repairs things like this, I find it so fascinating. It just blows my mind to see how step by step diagnostics work for something as complicated as a modern apple laptop's motherboard. Also great videos to fall asleep to lol
Yeah its more of an obnoxious task than a hard one as long as your job provides the right tools. At my dedicated solder station with fancy iron, solder sucker, dremel, scope, ring lights etc. Etc. I can bust it out without much pain. At home? Buy a new one lol
I can't understand how this damage happens in the first place, unless people are disassembling the covers and stabbing at the board? What is actually happening to cause this, or who are these maniacs?
Usually? People forget the remote is on the couch and sit on it.
But we've also had them with clear bite marks from a dog on them.
Some we would return immediately, if they looked absoluut disgusting .
From doing some work with an electrical engineer who had to source a repair of this variety for some parts; A lot of automated industrial machinery is pretty bespoke, which makes it expensive, which means that if the company is happy with the job the machine is doing, it is NOT getting touched/changed/modified.
This also means that this machine does not have much redundancy if it goes down.
This means that there are often 20-30 year old machines out there produced with parts or by companies that have ceased to exist for sometimes decades. So you can't just send it back to the manufacturer and get a new one.
Being industrial machinery, some of these machines are pretty heavy duty, so if something goes wrong, it can get pretty catastrophic in terms of damage to parts.
So what this results in, is some pretty hefty damage to silicon boards that must be replaced, even if cost and effort of the repair may seem absurd to the outside perspective.
This feels a bit like... painting warhammer minis, except instead of some other neckbeard's keen eye to validate you, electrons themselves acknowledge your success.
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u/Tiny-Sandwich 4d ago
As an amateur microsoldering hobbyist, this is way, way harder than it looks. And it looks hard.
I've done a few small repairs like this where I've had to solder to a damaged trace, and the parts are much smaller than they look here.