jason is a local guy – we keep seeing him around – either he is walking with his family by my house, or our families are all walking and cross paths somewhere in the neighborhood. he mentions that his son has a kindle fire that just won’t power up. we take a look and sure enough it’s not taking any power. i can’t quite figure it out.

i know that sometimes these batteries get really low and need a kick start, and maybe that’s the problem, so i hook it up to my DCPS and start shoving some amps into it. i don’t have an adapter for this kindle, so i temporarily attach some pins the the charging terminals and clamp my clips onto those to get a good solid connection.

after charging the battery, i wake up the device – yay!!!

i’m pretty stoked about that, but still having issues with the charging. it seems that sometimes it will, but other times it won’t – and again, the charging port seems solid.

but it seemed to be pointing right at the charger port – had to be. so i took a much closer look and could see that even though the outside of the port looked very sturdy, the inside was floating around. tricky, tricky, tricky!!

this port has some sort of external cage which is very solid, but the internals had broken away from the traces leading to it from the motherboard. i was able to slightly bend the cage outward a bit to access those 5 pins that had broken loose from the motherboard and resolder them securely. after the solder, i applied a sealant to fill in the gaps and act as a reinforcement against a future break. applied it both top and bottom. i use a clear, fast curing, high tensile strength sealant. makes for a lasting repair.

after the repair, we check for charge and yes! charging fine – all fixed!