friend of mine was working on an ipad and the battery was still connected, resulting in frying the backlight circuit – pretty badly too.

not only fused the component to the motherboard, but travelled up to the diode pair and blew those as well. actually blew one in half. (see photo)

replaced the diodes, removed the fuse and pulled a pad… shucks…

had to reconnect the trace back to the diodes, so used some very thin magnet wire and rerouted a new trace.

not a lot of room to work near the fuse. it is very tiny – 0201 (20 mils by 10 mils) that translates out to half a millimeter by a quarter of a millimeter. super small. so small i sometimes lose a few – they just fly off of my tweezers and disappear into a black hold somewhere never to be found again. lol.

also, on certain jobs, i like to make a momento of what was worked on. if i can, i like to take the pieces i replaced and place them on a dime for perspective. i usually take a photo, but the customer actually gets their broken pieces back on that dime. i apply a resin over the top of the pieces with my logo and seal them in. so if you take a close look under roosevelt’s nose, you will see a tiny chunk of the burnt fuse and nearby it a brand new fuse. along with the larger diodes and the wire i used to make the trace – comparable in size to a human hair.

got it all back together, and we definitely got a backlight, but no image at all, just a blank white background.

was really worried that something really bad had been damaged. so i pulled a tester assembly and attached it and fired it up and got what we needed. the power surge had been strong enough to blow the new $100 display assembly as well.  hard lesson learned. no fun.

thanks for looking over my shoulder on this stressful repair. appreciate you coming along. should you need me to look at a device for you, please contact me here.