Some friends of mine had the worst possible nightmare. A switch that kept overheating during school holidays, and thus kids going nuts. But the strange thing, is that the controllers wouldn’t charge / be detected when connected as well. Interesting!

They asked if I could take a look, and if could do something about it.

The Switch itself looked really clean. I wouldn’t see why it would be overheating. Practically no dust. But I did notice the fan didn’t run.

I was able to buy a switch lite for a ridiculous low price. People had apparently done a prior attempt at repairing. I knew I was in for a wild ride :-)

Upon receiving, the battery was dead as a dodo, not a good sign… So I charged it up manually a bit. Immediately, I notice the connector for the interconnect was burnt… Someone swapped this USB port :-)

I noticed some damage to the connector for the LCD as well. This will be an interesting fix…

This is a neat little PC I came across. I bought it as non-booting, not turning on. Got a good deal on it, so I bought it. Has some nice specs - a Ryzen 9 6900HX.

I noticed there were no shorts on the input, so no shorted MOSFET’s there. Yet no boot.

I did found a voltage rail that was shorted to ground. But what’s shorted? The regulator? Or the caps?

By injecting some voltage onto the rail, and using the thermal camera, I noticed the regulator lit up.