{"id":134,"date":"2021-06-08T23:08:01","date_gmt":"2021-06-08T21:08:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bowfinger.de\/blog\/?p=134"},"modified":"2021-06-08T23:08:01","modified_gmt":"2021-06-08T21:08:01","slug":"repairing-electronics-rant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bowfinger.de\/blog\/2021\/06\/repairing-electronics-rant\/","title":{"rendered":"Repairing Electronics Rant"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So, I have this Samsung NP900X3A laptop that I used for about 4 years. It started to have random glitches when I was about to start some very important work, so I decided to get a new laptop. I never sold or scrapped it, and recently I took it out of its neoprene bag, cleared the disk, installed a clean Ubuntu 20.04 and it worked like a charm…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

…ish. Well, obviously it’s old, the battery had seen better days, but for work when it’s on power supply, it is a very decent device. Until recently:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I plugged it in, opened the lid, pressed power aaaand: it won’t boot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Okay, my first though: The SSD died. Nothing catastrophic, a 120 GB mSATA costs about 45 \u20ac. So I booted into a Linux live system, quickly installed smartmontools (smartctl), opened my favourite smartctl reminder wiki page<\/a> (seriously, man<\/kbd> pages are still the best, but they’re so long!), and found that all tests passed. Well, the drive was old, yes, but still intact. fsck<\/kbd> did not complain either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it still wouldn’t boot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, I opened the BIOS menu. First suspect: time and date were off by years. Aha! The BIOS battery, or actually, the battery for the real time clock (RTC), had died. And that set everything to defaults. Including: UEFI [DISABLED]. Well, you could’ve printed something, you nob…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyways: Enabled it, it boots again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Here’s the culprit: Empty, unmarked<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

So, what about the battery? It’s obviously a coin cell on two wires with a plug. Nice idea, very accessible. Really. But at least some<\/em> documentation would have been nice. No label, no print, nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Measuring reveals: diameter 16 mm, thickness maybe a little below 2 mm. Hard to tell exactly while still in the rubber protection. So, could it just be a CR1616 or CR1620 cell with some spot welded soldering pins enclosed in some heat-shrink tubing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No way to get the original part anymore. Samsung stopped selling laptops for quite a while in Germany (or even the whole EU, though it may have recently restarted again). Ebay has some offers. Anything from 5 to 150 \u20ac (seriously, it’s a coin cell, who charges more than 10 \u20ac for that?).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I decided to get one full package (cell, heat-shrink, wires and connector) for 5 \u20ac and a bare cell with spot welded solder pads for 2 \u20ac.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Got the wrong cell for 5 \u20ac (for a Samsung P20). Would’ve fit if it wasn’t for the connector.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
CR1616 for 1,59 \u20ac to the rescue!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

So, where’s the rant? Here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

COMPLEX ELECTRONIC DEVICES “BREAK” BECAUSE OF < 5 \u20ac COMPONENTS AND YOU NEED A F****ING PhD IN BATTERIES AND EBAY TO FIND REPLACEMENT PARTS BECAUSE NOONE THOUGHT OF PRINTING “CHECK UEFI SETTINGS” OR OF PRINTED LABELS ON A BATTERY OR A SIMPLE REMARK IN THE USER MANUAL (“YEAH, AND BTW, THE BATTERY IS A CR1616 FOR 84 CENTS WITH A MOLEX CONNECTOR, YOU’RE WELCOME.”)???<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By now, this laptop would’ve been thrown out twice by every single average capable consumer in the world. And honestly, I cannot blame them. Right to repair will have a loooooong way to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

So yeah: Turns out the coin cell actually was a CR1616.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Cut off the wires, placed heat-shrink, soldered to replacement cell (not to the cell directly but to the solder tails), pack all in heat-shrink and voil\u00e0: a 1,65 \u20ac (+some solder and heat-shrink) replacement for a 10 year old laptop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, I have this Samsung NP900X3A laptop that I used for about 4 years. It started to have random glitches when I was about to start some very important work, so I decided to get a new laptop. I never sold or scrapped it, and recently I took it out of its neoprene bag, cleared…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bowfinger.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bowfinger.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bowfinger.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bowfinger.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bowfinger.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bowfinger.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":145,"href":"https:\/\/bowfinger.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions\/145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bowfinger.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bowfinger.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bowfinger.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}