Monday, October 10, 2005
ipod madness
I have a mild obsession with iPods for some reason. I am pretty sure about 98% of the US population does too, but I love them. I also like taking things apart. Since I was a wee lad I have always enjoyed taking stuff apart and (hopefully) putting it back in working order. iPods are no exception.
In the dorms, a girl gave me a dead 20 gig 4G iPod she had dropped (although she denies it to this day). I took it apart and looked at the inner workings. If you were around in the dorms, you also remember me going to Radio Shack a few times and creating my own ATA adapter for the Hard Drive and frying a power supply in the process. Well, that project may have been a dud, but a friend of mine handed me another broken iPod tonight in hopes that it might work again. Somehow, I didn't really ask, he dropped it in a bit of water and it stopped working. Seeing how the warranty is void if contact with water is suspected, he gave it to me to give a shot at fixing it.
When I opened it up, I was shocked:
There were literally small puddles of water! After some initial work with tissue and q-tips® I opened it up a bit more to find some corrosion on the main board:
I cleaned it off best I could with more q-tip® and some toothpicks in order to not damage the board or the etchings. Anyway, I cleaned off all the corrosion, tested the battery, dried the thing out, and plugged it in. And guess what, it turned on. The first time! Not that I did much, but it was nice to take it apart and fix it.
In taking it apart, I did notice several key differences in this one and the one I took apart a few months ago. The recent one was one of the Apple+HP models which have since been discontinued, but came windows formatted out of the box. Also, it was a 40 rather than a 20 gig, so it was a tiny bit bigger than the other one. The click wheel was covered differently, and the screen was mounted differently than I remember (then again, I might just be clueless) but I swear it wasn't the same...
Whatever, here are some more pics if you are interested:
My boss says I should start charging to replace the batteries in them now that they have been around a while and are starting to lose their charge. I could buy them in bulk and charge $50 to replace them or something... something to think about.