The Tear Down: Repairing a Broken Audio Recorder

We're going to take it apart and repair it now. The tear down on this device is pretty straightforward. There's just a sandwich of printed circuit boards, basically. You just need to take off the little rails in the front here. The little rails in the front are designed to prevent the buttons from being broken. Should it fall face first, then you got all the little connectors on the side and the button on the side. And of course, the thing that we need to fix is the USB socket. It's buried inside this thing, so we have to take out all manner of screws. Once we did that, uh we're able to see that the USB connector has actually been ripped from the board. So it's not just that this is a matter of something needing to be re-soldered; the physical lands for this are missing.

Now this micro-USB connector has five pins, one of them has no connection. You got power and ground, and then data plus and data minus. This can be used as a card reader. I don't care about card reading all, I care where power is so what we're going to need to do is repair it. But since the traces are physically gone, uh I mean the ground pad's okay because the ground pad's huge. So we can make that work with the solder blob. But the Power Pad has just been completely ripped off the board. What we're going to do is take a single strand of copper wire. Now this is normally very resistive, so this would not work if this device used a lot of power. But since it doesn't use a lot of power on USB, we can get away with this.

Although you might have to experiment a little bit to find out exactly what gauge of wire that you're working with. We're going to solder a single strand of copper wire on this to the first pad that we can see. I've got a USB microscope that I got for like $12 in Taipei, or $20 or something like that because it was a really good deal and the picture was really, really good for what it was. So I've got my USB microscope hooked up, and we can sort of see the board. Look at all this crud; this is just junk and just Badness on this board. GH, this is terrible but this will let me see and make sure that I don't have a short and that nothing bad is going on.

So we're going to solder the connector, we're going to solder the single strand of copper wire directly to the board, and make sure that the connection is good. Using a resistivity meter or an OHM meter or whatever you want to call it basically; it'll just beep if there's a short and so we're going to check and see if there's a short between ground and the uh data positive wire. We'll need to look up on the Internet what the pin out of this thing is to confirm which pin is power, but I pretty much know because you can look at it, and you can say oh this is the ground pin and power is going to be on the opposite side so not really a big deal.

And we know which pin is the no connection pin although in this case, it does look like the no connection pen actually has a connection of some kind. I can see a little bit of a land there but that's okay. We're going to use the hot air to rework and remove the existing connection and then I've got this old memory card reader; it's USB 2, it's slower than Christmas. So we're going to steal this USB connector also using the hot air adapter clean up the connections, and then basically just resolder this USB connection on here.

Once we've done that, we're going to look at that under the microscope and make sure that there are no Bridges or anything looking under the microscope now I can see that you know everything basically looks pretty good except for this junk on the board probably should have used more flux; you can never use too much flux. Um but I didn't so whatever let's hook it up and see if it works yeah we've got USB power on the screen this is great so basically we've been able to solve that problem with this thing, you know a couple hours on a Saturday afternoon and basically getting our audio recording gear for pretty much free almost free not quite. I mean we got it on eBay; um and you know it was broken but less than half off or less than half so I feel like we did pretty good and it's got my two XLR inputs so we can use it in a studio setup if we want. But it's also got the 3.5 mm inputs as well so we can use it with things like the wireless camera so all in all pretty great pretty quick easy electronics repair hopefully you guys enjoyed that if you guys want to see more stuff like this the future let us know cuz I don't know, we're going to find out what else we need to fix.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enare you guys ready to repair some surface mount Electronics badly stay tuned uh no Lis Rossman I don't do this for a job but uh if you want to learn how to do it you could probably look at his videos and understand it and it's really great and it's really awesome stuff but I do like to fix electronics that I can get for practically free that only have little minor problems so we needed a portable audio solution cuz we're setting up everything from scratch behold the task cam 60D Mark I it's not the greatest portable audio recorder in the world but it's not the worst either so what this does is this records up to four tracks of audio in a portable fashion you know to a Micro SD card I'm basically able to take four different channels of audio and record them on a Micro SD card and sort of mix it however I want and send it back into the camera and so ideally uh the name of the game here is that we do all the audio mixing in hardware and then we don't have to fix it later in software because we can send a stereo mix out to this thing and if we don't have this then you end up in really weird situations where the left microphone goes to the left Channel and the Right microphone goes to the right Channel and then everybody's like why is everything in the left in the left ear everything on the right in the right ear you can fix it in post but I'd like to minimize the amount of time that we have to spend in post doing those kinds of things if you capture it right to begin with you don't have to worry about that it's the same with audio you know with with good audio the trick is getting the microphone close to your mouth so you have reasonable audio for this audio I'm using the lav mic in a slightly echoey room because I'm trying to show you the hardware uh we've got an analog mixing board for more permanent installations but when we need to go to the lab or we need to take the camera around this is what we're using we don't really want to waste money on a bunch of crap that we don't need plus I know how to electronics so we can fix this and make it fine well what was wrong with it well not really anything it's actually completely operational except for the USB port the USB port theoretically I thought would let you charge the batteries and also run the device cuz in the menus there's a menu option that says what kind of batteries are in me nickel metal hydride or alkaline usually when you see that kind an option in the menus on a device like this you're turning a charging circuit but instead of having a menu option that says charging circuit on or off because if you turn a charging circuit on and you got alkaline batteries that's a fire waiting to happen or that's a leaky battery waiting to happen but no there's no there doesn't seem to be a charging circuit in this thing it doesn't seem to charge nickel metal hydride batteries at least I can't find mention of it anywhere so if I'm wrong about that and it does actually charge let me know put a link in the description come to the forums I don't know but we couldn't power it off USB either because it's really not a big deal to put the USB battery pack for this thing on four aa's you can get about and using three or four channels you get about an hour and a halfish of recording out of this and I would like to have just a little bit more because sometimes we'll leave it in test mode or sometimes we'll leave it set up and you know sometimes it's a tripod shot sometimes it's a running gun on a tripod I'd like to just have the battery pack you know sort of on the tripod ready to to go uh so that's neither here nor there but we didn't want to spend a bunch of money on something new so we're going to take it apart and repair it now the tear down on this it's pretty straightforward there's just you know a sandwich of printed circuit boards basically you just need to take off the little rails in the front here the little rails in the front are designed to uh basically prevent the buttons from being broken should it fall face first then you got all the little connectors on the side and the button on the side and of course the thing that we need to fix the USB socket is buried inside this thing so we have to take out all manner of screws then once we did that uh we're able to see that the USB connector uh has actually been ripped from the board so it's not just that this is a matter of something needed to be resolder the physical lands for this are missing now this micro USB connector has five pins one of them has no connection you got power and ground and then data plus and data minus so this can be used as a card reader I don't care about card reading all I care whereabouts power so what we're going to need to do is repair it but since the traces are physically gone uh I mean the ground pad's okay because the ground pad's huge so we can make that work with the solder blob but the Power Pad has just been completely ripped off the board what we're going to do is take a single strand of copper wire now this is normally very resistive this would not work if this device used a lot of power but since it doesn't use a lot of power on USB we can get away with this although you might have to experiment a little bit to find out exactly what gauge of wire that you're working with we're going to solder a single strand of copper wire on this to the first pad that we can see now I've got a USB microscope that I got for like $12 in taipe or $20 or something like that because it was a really good deal and the picture was really really good for what it was so I've got my USB microscope hooked up and we can sort of see the board I mean look at all this crud this is just junk and just Badness on this board GH this is terrible but this will let me see and make sure that I don't have a short and that nothing bad is going on so we're going to solder the connector we're going to solder the single strand of copper wire directly to the board and make sure that the connection is good um using a resistivity meter or an OHM meter or whatever you want to call it basically it'll just beep if there's a short and so we're going to check and see if there's a short between ground and the uh data positive wire we'll need to look up on the Internet what the pin out of this thing is to confirm which pen is power but I pretty much know because you can look at it you can say oh this is the ground pin and power is going to be on the opposite side so not really a big deal and we know which pen is the no connection pin although in this case it does look like the no connection pen actually has a connection of some kind I can see a little bit of a land there but that's okay we're going to use the hot air to rework and remove the existing connection and then I've got this old memory card reader it's USB 2 it's slower than Christmas we're going to steal this USB connector also using the hot air adapter clean up the connections and then basically just resolder this USB connection on here then once we've done that we're going to look at that under the microscope and make sure that there are no Bridges or anything looking under the microscope now I can see that you know everything basically looks pretty good except for this junk on the board probably should have used more flux you can never use too much flux um but I didn't so whatever let's hook it up and see if it works yeah we've got USB power on the screen this is great so basically we've been able to solve that problem with this thing you know a couple hours on a Saturday afternoon and basically getting our audio recording gear for pretty much free almost free not quite I mean we got it on eBay um and you know it was broken but less than half off or less than half so I I feel like we did pretty good and it's got my two XLR inputs so we can use it in a studio setup if we want but it's also got the 3.5 mm inputs as well so we can use it with things like the wireless camera so all in all pretty great pretty quick easy electronics repair hopefully you guys enjoyed that if you guys want to see more stuff like this the future let us know cuz I don't know we're still experimenting who knows see you guys see you guys in the Forumare you guys ready to repair some surface mount Electronics badly stay tuned uh no Lis Rossman I don't do this for a job but uh if you want to learn how to do it you could probably look at his videos and understand it and it's really great and it's really awesome stuff but I do like to fix electronics that I can get for practically free that only have little minor problems so we needed a portable audio solution cuz we're setting up everything from scratch behold the task cam 60D Mark I it's not the greatest portable audio recorder in the world but it's not the worst either so what this does is this records up to four tracks of audio in a portable fashion you know to a Micro SD card I'm basically able to take four different channels of audio and record them on a Micro SD card and sort of mix it however I want and send it back into the camera and so ideally uh the name of the game here is that we do all the audio mixing in hardware and then we don't have to fix it later in software because we can send a stereo mix out to this thing and if we don't have this then you end up in really weird situations where the left microphone goes to the left Channel and the Right microphone goes to the right Channel and then everybody's like why is everything in the left in the left ear everything on the right in the right ear you can fix it in post but I'd like to minimize the amount of time that we have to spend in post doing those kinds of things if you capture it right to begin with you don't have to worry about that it's the same with audio you know with with good audio the trick is getting the microphone close to your mouth so you have reasonable audio for this audio I'm using the lav mic in a slightly echoey room because I'm trying to show you the hardware uh we've got an analog mixing board for more permanent installations but when we need to go to the lab or we need to take the camera around this is what we're using we don't really want to waste money on a bunch of crap that we don't need plus I know how to electronics so we can fix this and make it fine well what was wrong with it well not really anything it's actually completely operational except for the USB port the USB port theoretically I thought would let you charge the batteries and also run the device cuz in the menus there's a menu option that says what kind of batteries are in me nickel metal hydride or alkaline usually when you see that kind an option in the menus on a device like this you're turning a charging circuit but instead of having a menu option that says charging circuit on or off because if you turn a charging circuit on and you got alkaline batteries that's a fire waiting to happen or that's a leaky battery waiting to happen but no there's no there doesn't seem to be a charging circuit in this thing it doesn't seem to charge nickel metal hydride batteries at least I can't find mention of it anywhere so if I'm wrong about that and it does actually charge let me know put a link in the description come to the forums I don't know but we couldn't power it off USB either because it's really not a big deal to put the USB battery pack for this thing on four aa's you can get about and using three or four channels you get about an hour and a halfish of recording out of this and I would like to have just a little bit more because sometimes we'll leave it in test mode or sometimes we'll leave it set up and you know sometimes it's a tripod shot sometimes it's a running gun on a tripod I'd like to just have the battery pack you know sort of on the tripod ready to to go uh so that's neither here nor there but we didn't want to spend a bunch of money on something new so we're going to take it apart and repair it now the tear down on this it's pretty straightforward there's just you know a sandwich of printed circuit boards basically you just need to take off the little rails in the front here the little rails in the front are designed to uh basically prevent the buttons from being broken should it fall face first then you got all the little connectors on the side and the button on the side and of course the thing that we need to fix the USB socket is buried inside this thing so we have to take out all manner of screws then once we did that uh we're able to see that the USB connector uh has actually been ripped from the board so it's not just that this is a matter of something needed to be resolder the physical lands for this are missing now this micro USB connector has five pins one of them has no connection you got power and ground and then data plus and data minus so this can be used as a card reader I don't care about card reading all I care whereabouts power so what we're going to need to do is repair it but since the traces are physically gone uh I mean the ground pad's okay because the ground pad's huge so we can make that work with the solder blob but the Power Pad has just been completely ripped off the board what we're going to do is take a single strand of copper wire now this is normally very resistive this would not work if this device used a lot of power but since it doesn't use a lot of power on USB we can get away with this although you might have to experiment a little bit to find out exactly what gauge of wire that you're working with we're going to solder a single strand of copper wire on this to the first pad that we can see now I've got a USB microscope that I got for like $12 in taipe or $20 or something like that because it was a really good deal and the picture was really really good for what it was so I've got my USB microscope hooked up and we can sort of see the board I mean look at all this crud this is just junk and just Badness on this board GH this is terrible but this will let me see and make sure that I don't have a short and that nothing bad is going on so we're going to solder the connector we're going to solder the single strand of copper wire directly to the board and make sure that the connection is good um using a resistivity meter or an OHM meter or whatever you want to call it basically it'll just beep if there's a short and so we're going to check and see if there's a short between ground and the uh data positive wire we'll need to look up on the Internet what the pin out of this thing is to confirm which pen is power but I pretty much know because you can look at it you can say oh this is the ground pin and power is going to be on the opposite side so not really a big deal and we know which pen is the no connection pin although in this case it does look like the no connection pen actually has a connection of some kind I can see a little bit of a land there but that's okay we're going to use the hot air to rework and remove the existing connection and then I've got this old memory card reader it's USB 2 it's slower than Christmas we're going to steal this USB connector also using the hot air adapter clean up the connections and then basically just resolder this USB connection on here then once we've done that we're going to look at that under the microscope and make sure that there are no Bridges or anything looking under the microscope now I can see that you know everything basically looks pretty good except for this junk on the board probably should have used more flux you can never use too much flux um but I didn't so whatever let's hook it up and see if it works yeah we've got USB power on the screen this is great so basically we've been able to solve that problem with this thing you know a couple hours on a Saturday afternoon and basically getting our audio recording gear for pretty much free almost free not quite I mean we got it on eBay um and you know it was broken but less than half off or less than half so I I feel like we did pretty good and it's got my two XLR inputs so we can use it in a studio setup if we want but it's also got the 3.5 mm inputs as well so we can use it with things like the wireless camera so all in all pretty great pretty quick easy electronics repair hopefully you guys enjoyed that if you guys want to see more stuff like this the future let us know cuz I don't know we're still experimenting who knows see you guys see you guys in the Forum\n"