A friend of mine (and also neighbor) came by the other day. He had borrowed a MiniDV and with it, of course, a battery charger. Now, when he connected the charger to the outlet, it just "poffed" and didn't of course work after that. That's when he called me ;-)
 |
| The Canon CA-910 battery charger |
What I first noticed was that there seemed to be something loose inside it, because when I shooked it I could clearly hear something rattling inside. If this something was of some kind of conducting material, then that could very well have caused the failure.
Well, nothing else to do but to open it up I have a look. And this is what I found.
 |
| The loose objects inside the charger (above the pcb). Note the missing ferrite core on one of the coils. |
It was the ferrit core of one of the coils/chokes that had split into three pieces and fallen out of the coil housing. Now, those ferrit parts are indeed conducting, and if you take a closer look at the resistor to the right of the fuse, you see that it's been burned. So this is probably what's happen.
 |
| The loose piece that short the charger. |
The good news was that nothing was really damaged, because the current went straight through the fuse and blew it. However, after taking a look at the other side of the pcb, I saw this.
 |
| Track burned off due to the short circuit. |
The fix was i.e. quite easy. With some quick glue the pieces was replaced where they belonged, and the PCB track gap was bridged with a piece of cable.
 |
| New fuse and the ferrite core glued into place. |
 |
| A piece of cable to bridge the track gap. |
After those fixes, the charger was working again! Job done =)
No comments:
Post a Comment