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by duhast
707 days ago
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Phones, laptops, GPUs and many other modern highly integrated electronic products are repairable. Look it up, there are tons of videos on YouTube of people doing component level repairs. Leaked schematics make a huge difference here. |
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I've watched these videos — and the people you're referencing doing this are rarely using any kind of schematics at all to repair modern digital-logic boards. And not for lack of accessibility!
Modern logic-board designs consist of a few proprietary ICs, plus generic labelled support components (e.g. VRM caps, surface-mount resistors and diodes, etc.)
You can repair these boards, but these repairs fall into three categories:
1. bad solder joints or broken traces — which mostly just requires looking at the board carefully to notice these.
2. bad generic support components — which in theory you can determine the need for by testing with various multimeter modes across the individual component's legs; but more often you just notice that what the component is in line with isn't working, and "swap out to see if that fixes it." And which where such a swap-out can be done by just looking the part to figure out what it identifies itself as; then de-soldering it and soldering on a replacement.
3. bad proprietary ICs — which you determine by tapping the signal lines leading from/to the IC on an oscilloscope; and which you "fix" by buying other for-parts copies of the board, de-soldering those ICs off of the sacrificial parts boards, and soldering them onto the "almost good" board.
In none of these cases would referencing a schematic help! They're all effectively "context free" repairs — see, probe, think, do.
(A schematic can in theory help you to find test points to differentially diagnose 1 vs 2 vs 3 in the case where a board is failing mysteriously... but once you have some experience in board repair, you can get 80% of the same information by just staring at the board for a minute.)
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Of course, if you're repairing a power supply, or an audio receiver, or some still-half-analogue electronic appliance from the 1970s — then yeah, schematics help. But these types of systems do still come with those schematics! (You just need to buy the thing directly. You aren't getting a schematic for an "embedded" PSU with a computer; but you do get the schematic if you buy that same PSU at retail at a Shenzhen parts-mall. And you get forwarded that same schematic [and more] if you make an industrial order of 10000 of them, too.)