So I popped around to John’s today to take over his Xmas present (yes, I’m aware that it’s late), and also to have another stab at finding the Squeezebox2’s failure point. After much investigation, probing and poking we thought we had it down to a single component. Specifically a ‘high speed low voltage operation switching regulator control IC’. But there was just one oddity. It turned out, when John checked, that the Anode, that which we’d previously discovered was sporting a mere 1 volt instead of the target 55 volts was more-or-less directly shorting to ground.
Odd.
Eventually it boiled down to a faulty capacitor.
See the teeny splodge marked C2? That evil object had turned from a capacitor into crappy resistor. Having extracted it, John then used his superior bodging soldering skills to attach to legs to it such that he could approximate it’s capacitance using a very fine piece of test equipment.
That done it was a simple matter of replacing it.
Only, neither John, nor I, stock a vast range of teeny tiny surface mount components. Through hole is more where I’m at. Thus:
The repair’s almost invisible n’est pas?
But regardless of the invisibility of the repair:
Lo, it worketh.
Hopefully we now have 3 streaming boxes. I say hopefully, because I tripped carrying the old one up the stairs, and then dropped it (hopefully from a low enough height that it’s survived).
