Because the Raspberry Pi 3B+ launch, the Pi boards everyone knows and love gained yet one more weakpoint – the PMIC chip, liable for producing all the facility rails a Pi wants. Particularly, the brand new PMIC was far more susceptible to shorting 5V and three.3V energy rails collectively – one thing that’s trivial to do on a Raspberry Pi, and would depart you with a bricked board. Simply changing the PMIC chip, the MxL7704, wouldn’t assist because the Raspberry Pi model of this chip is personalized – however now, on Raspberry Pi boards, [Nefarious19] has reportedly managed to interchange it and revive their Pi.

First off, you get a alternative PMIC and reflow it – and that’s the place, to our information, folks have stopped to date. The subsequent step proposed by [Nefarious19] is writing correct values into the I2C registers of the PMIC. For that, you’d desire a currently-alive Pi – helpful as each I2C controller for writing the values in, and as a supply of known-good values. That mentioned, should you go along with the values which were posted on-line, simply having one thing like a Pi Pico for the I2C half should be sufficient.

[Nefarious19] reviews a revived Pi, and that is far more hopeful than the “PMIC failures are unfixable” conclusion we’ve reached earlier than. The directions usually are not fairly clear – another person within the thread reviews an unsuccessful try doing the identical, and it may be that there’s an important step lacking in making the values persist. Nonetheless, such an development is notable, and we belief our readers to take the lead.

Every week in the past, [Mangy_Dog] on Hackaday Discord introduced up fixing Raspberry Pi boards – on condition that the Raspberry Pi shortages are nonetheless a problem, digging up your damaged Pi and repairing it begins making sense budget-wise. It’s not the ages the place you would purchase damaged Pi boards by the hundred, and we think about our readers have been getting artistic. What are your experiences with fixing Raspberry Pi boards?