Good day folks. A friend of mine asked me to take a look at an Xbox One console with him. He's pretty good with electronics too and we worked together for several years in fact, so we went on this journey together to see if we can resurrect this junk box for Christmas (spoiler: we couldn't)
Initially we thought the power brick is bad, because of the way it behaves: LED on the brick turns white, then orange after a few seconds and it keeps doing this. The touch-key on the front of the box works: it makes the "ding" sound and the white logo comes on, but that's it: no picture on screen. The logo then turns off and the LED on the brick goes back to orange. It can even eject the disc when you press the eject button, so there is power getting through.
I took the brick apart and the main electrolytic cap had yellow stuff oozing out of the positive leg, so that had to be replaced. We did so, but it didn't change anything: the console still power cycled. The brick appeared to be fine at this point: both output voltages of 5v and 12v were present and stable and also the main cap read 382v.
It was time to open up the console itself and it was at this point that it became clear the problem is in here and not the power brick (although that main cap still had to be replaced nonetheless): have a look at this LAN chip ! Completely gone ! The failure must've been quite the show, because there was some arcing to the chassis of the RJ45 plug as well, clearly indicated by those holes in it ! WOW ! This opened up some new possibilities.
Not having this chip on hand and nothing to lose at this point anyway, we agreed to remove the shot chip and see if the console at least comes on without it. I took on this challenge myself and it was a nightmare to do: I'd say it took me around an hour to finally pull off the remains of that chip and clean the area ! The bastard wouldn't budge, no matter how much heat I pumped into it ! My buddy helped me out with the soldering iron while I worked the tweezers and the hot air gun, but it was useless: the ground plane simply wouldn't melt ! In the end I had no choice but to use a sharp knife to chip away at the black casing bit by bit until I exposed the metal beneath it. Then I used the largest hoof tip I had to apply a large blob of solder directly onto the metal and worked it back and forth until the remains of the chip eventually peeled off. I was skilled (or rather lucky ?) enough that no traces actually got damaged. L581 got a bit charred on one of the corners, but should still be good.
Sadly, our box behaves exactly the same, however there is a light at the end of the tunnel: as I was searching for possible solutions, I came across a thread of our very own where a chap describes a fairly similar issue, despite not mentioning exactly how his LAN chips looked like and whether they were physically destroyed as ours was, so it could be the console is simply refusing to boot without a LAN IC on there.....
The other two possibilities are that the blown IC also damaged the DC-DC converter it's attached to, OR killed something further down the data line, in which case the board is toast. We were both pretty tired after wrestling with the chip for so long, so we closed it back up for the time being with no other measurements. The IC apparently is a Realtek RTL8151GNM.
We'll go ahead and order some replacement chips to try it out anyway and see what happens...
Any schematics for an Xbox One out there ? Couldn't find any, at least not of the console....we're talking about Microsoft after all I keep finding schematics of the controllers, ironically enough
Initially we thought the power brick is bad, because of the way it behaves: LED on the brick turns white, then orange after a few seconds and it keeps doing this. The touch-key on the front of the box works: it makes the "ding" sound and the white logo comes on, but that's it: no picture on screen. The logo then turns off and the LED on the brick goes back to orange. It can even eject the disc when you press the eject button, so there is power getting through.
I took the brick apart and the main electrolytic cap had yellow stuff oozing out of the positive leg, so that had to be replaced. We did so, but it didn't change anything: the console still power cycled. The brick appeared to be fine at this point: both output voltages of 5v and 12v were present and stable and also the main cap read 382v.
It was time to open up the console itself and it was at this point that it became clear the problem is in here and not the power brick (although that main cap still had to be replaced nonetheless): have a look at this LAN chip ! Completely gone ! The failure must've been quite the show, because there was some arcing to the chassis of the RJ45 plug as well, clearly indicated by those holes in it ! WOW ! This opened up some new possibilities.
Not having this chip on hand and nothing to lose at this point anyway, we agreed to remove the shot chip and see if the console at least comes on without it. I took on this challenge myself and it was a nightmare to do: I'd say it took me around an hour to finally pull off the remains of that chip and clean the area ! The bastard wouldn't budge, no matter how much heat I pumped into it ! My buddy helped me out with the soldering iron while I worked the tweezers and the hot air gun, but it was useless: the ground plane simply wouldn't melt ! In the end I had no choice but to use a sharp knife to chip away at the black casing bit by bit until I exposed the metal beneath it. Then I used the largest hoof tip I had to apply a large blob of solder directly onto the metal and worked it back and forth until the remains of the chip eventually peeled off. I was skilled (or rather lucky ?) enough that no traces actually got damaged. L581 got a bit charred on one of the corners, but should still be good.
Sadly, our box behaves exactly the same, however there is a light at the end of the tunnel: as I was searching for possible solutions, I came across a thread of our very own where a chap describes a fairly similar issue, despite not mentioning exactly how his LAN chips looked like and whether they were physically destroyed as ours was, so it could be the console is simply refusing to boot without a LAN IC on there.....
The other two possibilities are that the blown IC also damaged the DC-DC converter it's attached to, OR killed something further down the data line, in which case the board is toast. We were both pretty tired after wrestling with the chip for so long, so we closed it back up for the time being with no other measurements. The IC apparently is a Realtek RTL8151GNM.
We'll go ahead and order some replacement chips to try it out anyway and see what happens...
Any schematics for an Xbox One out there ? Couldn't find any, at least not of the console....we're talking about Microsoft after all I keep finding schematics of the controllers, ironically enough
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