Timothy's Nintendo DS Lite had stopped working .. no reaction to the power button with both screens remaining dark (and no sounds). Rather than treating it as a disposable electronics item, I gambled that I could successfully take it apart and fix it: I believe in one simple truth:
In my experience, 95% of all electronical / electrical failures are due to a mechanical problem. Mechanical problems can be found and possibly repaired.
Fortunately their are quite a few sites showing how to take the Nintendo DS Lite apart, the only annoyance being that you need a special 'tri-wing' screwdriver to do it.
In the end, I managed to remove two of the three tri-wing screws using a regular flat screwdriver, unfortunately one resisted and had to be removed 'less elegantly' (damaging the casing). So this is what Timothy's DS looks like inside:
I'd found a site telling of a standard fault of blown fuses, but checking those found no error. Then I decided (with multi-meter ready) to check the circuitry. After a short while, I noticed that the power switch was broken: a small tab which connects to the power slider within the casing had broken off (i.e. another example of a mechanical failure):
(The strange thing is, that when testing the DS (still intact), the lack of return spring on the power slide was not noticed .. although it was late when I was working on it ..??).
Anyhoo. I read somewhere of someone fixing the switch by jamming / smelting a bit of paperclip into the switch, and of someone wiring up an external switch, but I decided to just replace the switch (at a cost of only EUR 3,39 (excl. shipping)). Just to make sure that the problem was the switch, I switched the DS on, using a wire bridging the points. In my experience, switching on, relies only on connecting point 1 with the ground:
I had read (on a Flickr photo report) of the problem of removing the old switch without damaging the circuit board, but even with my fairly large soldering iron I managed to remove the switch, albeit in pieces (I had a quick experiment with a mechanical removal with the Dremel but this was way too destructive).
Having said that I did manage to remove all solder from the right point 2 and point 3, but that didn't stop the new switch from operating properly: installed below:
Putting it all back together was a bit of a fiddle, but I managed .. and now Timothy is the happy owner of a working DS (thanks Dada):
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