Repairing an iPhone XR with "No Image" - What I found inside this phone was horrifying!

everywhere? look we even have a ball down here between these coils I think how do they manage to do that but I didn't melt the alloy on these pads like I just removed the shield but

this

alloy still didn't melt it's almost like half an ingenuity would have tried to use the same high fusing temperature alloy up here that Apple uses down here on

this

shield, which is just horrible. There is too much carnage here. This is a

phone

that's supposed to be back up and running with data intact because after all, I mean it just had a simple problem.

There is no

image

. He sounds a lot like someone's hopeless guy. I really had some problems with this board I think. It's absolutely a revamp. I'm really tempted to take a look under Chestnut. I mean, this thing is absolutely disgusting, although if I get the

image

to work on this, there's no way I can return it as a repaired board with a clear conscience. This is, uh. This is completely disgusting, just imagine the same grip we have around all these components, we have like a whole row of components down here with balls squeezing, we have balls squeezing here, this is just horrible and down here it's like Someone left me some, Someone left me some snot on the board, but imagine with all these balls squeezing

what

the bottom of the CPU looks like.

It's an absolute miracle that this

phone

was able to boot up and work, but I. I bet from the description that this is a phone that the customer has been using and they actually took it to a shop to get it fixed and said please fix it without deleting my data. This needs a lot of work at least if I do it. I'm going to fix it with all the balls everywhere, it still needs an ultrasonic cleaning because there is mucus and some kind of sinister corrosive fluid all over the board that is corroding the components.

It's actually a pretty big repair to try to fix, that's one stop. point for me in this case because if I continue from here I could be digging a grave as it is right now I only have evaluation time on this and I need to contact the client and say hello if I can get image working on this I'm not even close do it, you know, there is no way I can guarantee that this is a fully functional phone because it is absolutely disgusting, but I need to see if they are just after the data and if so, I can try to repair it to a point where I can send it back to you , at least working well enough that they can access their data now on phones like that, phones like this.

I'm still trying to create a local backup before it ships, otherwise I mean

what

are the odds of this coming back to them and not working and they're probably pretty significant because it just looks bad, very, very wrong so I think that will be it for now, if I continue with this I will come back to this video and add more, otherwise I can post this video exactly as it is. I'm back with this one. I received approval from the customer to continue with the repair for the sole purpose of being able to access the data.

Take a look at these connectors again. I have it under the microscope and zoom in to look at the display connectors again. These look very bad when looking at the pins along these connectors. See how we have something like that? a kind of substance that makes a bridge between the pins and then inside the connector, we actually have the same substance as down at the bottom, a kind of sticky substance, it's all inside the connector, the camera is not really doing justice to this, so I have all these things, I mean, this looks like liquid damage, right, I mean, this looks like some sort of resolidified solid that was once suspended in liquid and all of that is between all of these pins, this could actually be causing us a No image problem now, I suspect that all of that is also under the connector, since we have it here along the pins and I can see the inside of this connector, it's all at the bottom here, like this Whatever it is, it's absolutely disgusting first.

What I'm going to do, I don't normally do this first, but I'm actually going to clean this with ultrasound now, since I don't like to remove these bottom guards, but obviously someone else has already done that. I'm going to go ahead and remove the CPU protector and we're going to do an ultrasonic cleaning just from this part down and see what we get, so let's remove the CPU protector from here now, just like other refurbished boards, this one has a little strip of glue here where I've put a strip of glue on the top of the shield, so we're going to go ahead and apply a little heat and remove it from there.

I'm really curious to see what this looks like under the CPU shield anyway. Alright, now we have removed the glue, let's start heating it to remove this shield. Now the CPU shield on these comes off quite easily. It's not like these nether shields that are a complete nightmare, so I'm. I'm just going to grab it and apply a little upward pressure, I'll see it's starting to move, oh yeah honey, easy on daddy, yeah, that's exactly what I was hoping for. Balls squeezing everywhere. I mean, look at this board. Holy cow, this customer. He was using this phone and one day suddenly the picture stopped appearing.

I mean, really look at this thing it's crazy. Do you know what I'm seeing? I see that the CPU has been replaced, not replaced, but recalculated and replaced. again and man they just swelled up the solder and they went crazy about where the CPU was definitely carved out of there let's get it out of the bracket so I can turn it over and work with it what's wrong with me being bored sent here? there is no image that reminds us of our previous CPU, oh yes, it is definitely a CPU reball, we can see everything under the edges of the CPU.

I feel sorry for the customer who bought a nice new 10r and didn't realize he had this kind of carnage. On the inside, I mean, if you like balls, this is definitely a phone for you, so I'm starting to change my tune here. I'm thinking that maybe it's not as likely to be a problem with the connectors as it is going to be a problem with the balls squeezing everywhere and also this is a previous attempt at reworking the CPU. I'm going to remove some of this stuff from here now. I have to say they did a very good job reworking the CPU and it didn't swell any solder around the main pmic, but they sure hit bloated the solder around the Wi-Fi.

I see holy smoke, why am I really tempted to melt that CPU down and give it a float because that may be all it is. It's wrong, well, just in case, this is just, sometimes it's hard to judge a book by its cover, even when the cover looks really bad, but just in case, this is just a problem with the salts between the pegs of the connectors, I guess I could. check with a multimeter but this looks very bad. What I'm going to do. I'm going to go ahead and ultrasonic clean the top end of this board so I can see much more clearly what's going on and also if it's just there's a problem with the connector with nasty stuff then the image might work so I'm going Let's go ahead and clean this out with ultrasound and I'll be right back, let's see if we can make this nasty plaque a little less. nasty with my nasty ultrasonic cleaner, should we get out of Branson ec?

It should arrive today though, so I'm going to try to go straight to those bottom guards because I really don't want it to get wet under those bottom guards. let's give this about a minute 30 seconds on one side 30 seconds on the other side is about 30 seconds I'm going to rotate it I don't think it really matters to rotate it but I think the transducer or whatever is making this awful noise , is making one side better than the other. I don't know if you can see it or not, but I literally have a flow cloud on this board.

Look at the cloud coming out of the dashboard, it would be much easier to see if my ultrasonic cleaner was actually clean, but look at that cloud, the flow is literally clouding up from this thing. Now after ultrasonic cleaning, we will use a napkin and just absorb it. as much ultrasonic cleaning solution as we can and then once we're sure we've absorbed enough liquid, we'll throw away that napkin and take an alcohol bath. Now I don't want to do it completely. I'm going to sink this in the tub because I didn't remove these bottom guards and I don't want to get wet down there, so I'm going to put it on its side here and flood as much as I can.

Can we just try to displace the water with alcohol? We are trying to get rid of the cleaning solution and replace it with alcohol which evaporates much more easily. Now it's hard for me to get the alcohol up here into the connectors. I'm really worried, but when I turn the board over, we're actually putting it into the connectors. Once I'm sure we've washed this plate enough, I'll take a new napkin and soak up as much of the alcohol as possible. As I can, the next thing I'm going to do is put this board in a preheater, so to dry it out, I'm going to place it right here in this preheater and turn the heater on. a temperature that is not high enough to melt solder or hot enough to boil water, even because we don't want anything to swell.

I hesitate to say exactly what temperature I'm using because this thing is not calibrated and its temperature could be different than my temperature. Let's set this heater. I'm going to start at 195 degrees c after about an hour. I raise that temperature to 200°C after about two hours. I'll raise it to 205°C now that it's that high. As I go, I'll leave it at 205°C for two to three hours. I just want to be absolutely sure that this board is dry because I'm very likely going to have to use hot air and Let's say you have a little bit of water between the RAM and the CPU or a little bit of water trapped anywhere on this thing and then You take a heat gun and heat it to 350 degrees C so that the water swells and explodes. it literally makes it crackle and pop and completely destroy this thing so it's really really important to make sure it's completely dry so with this thing set to 195c I can actually put my hand on it and it's like it's really hot, no It's what I would consider to be hot, maybe without the gloves I could burn myself a little, so it's a pretty low temperature.

I don't feel like it's actually 195 C. Okay, boy, has it been a really long day? I'm back with this. The thing is, it's been in the dryer all day and I'm sure it's completely dry, so let's take a look and see how different it looks so you can see that my ultrasonic cleaner has done this quite a bit. Well, there is no longer any visible flow around any of these components. Solder balls. The unsolidified solder paste we had all the time here disappeared. No massacre is seen anymore. Let's take a look at the CPU. Oh yeah, it cleaned up pretty good.

You know there is a There is a chance that a simple ultrasonic cleaning could make the image work again for two reasons: Some of the flux that was around here could have had other things mixed with it and caused it to be conductive, but also the connectors They looked good, but they had a bridge along the sides here where there was some kind of substance, a sinister substance that was forming a bridge between the connections both along the pins and inside the connectors. Now I have a bit of a problem. I have to confess that many of you already know this, but a lot of times when I'm recording a video, I get caught up in the recording and it affects my judgment in such a way that sometimes these repairs don't turn out exactly as they should.

There should be one thing you should have checked before ultrasonic cleaning. I mean, you can see we have swollen balls here. We have a little bit of what looks like a ball. I'm not sure if it's a ball or not, but. we just have swollen balls everywhere, now these boards every time you heat them with this excess rubber on the components, these components often separate, so before ultrasonic cleaning, I really think one is moving. I really should have taken this stuff out of here and looked at it really carefully before doing anything else. I'm going to go ahead and put them in a case, make sure it still boots without image and then we'll go back and re-evaluate. things test the screen by connecting so we have the power button test screen and now we are going to connect the power supply and now we are going to press the button to boot one, two, three, we are drawing 80 milliamps, oh we have Just a brief image.

Did you see the image flash briefly and then go out? That's exactly what the customer said he was doing with this phone. He would only get the image for a moment and then wouldn't get it again until he turned around. It went off for a while and then came back on. He felt like something was heating up, which was causing him to not get the image, so, look,here we have the image again, oh, no more images. Look at all this, I bet you couldn't see that. The picture comes on for a moment and then goes off, I'm pressing the button to turn it off, turn it on, boy, something is hanging in the balance, so this phone is running on the picture now, but I can't get it back. this way because I know it won't work again.

I have seen the image. Off, Off, Off, Off, like something is barely holding on and I think I might know what it might be. Okay, folks, I think that's the problem. This may have been what should have been obvious to me, you know, besides the tight ball everywhere on this entire board. I guess I should be more fair to myself. I went into diode mode. I checked all the pins, but this phone. You have an intermittent connection somewhere. I really should have checked these components here because I think I see one moving and any components that are covered in this stuff when the board is heated to the point where the solder melts these components can come off pretty easily so I don't see nothing immediately obvious that it is moving.

I was expecting the components to start falling off, that's what they usually do, huh, so maybe it's like that. It wasn't such a simple problem that it was overlooked here, let's keep sculpting it so there's nothing loose, but they're all soldered together. like crazy, yeah, no big deal, I feel like almost everything here is going to be for the other jack, probably It's for playing, not much to do here, everyone stays where they should be. I've actually smeared the solder on a couple of them, it still doesn't look half as bad as the rest of the board, yeah, nothing's coming. loose here, everyone stays down now, how about here where we had this kind of peek through the rubber layer that looks to me like it was done with someone's pry tool, not actually a ball squeeze?

There's nothing loose here, they're all soldered I'm not going to harp on this any further, well it's not the components along the display connector, eh, let's take a look at the bottom of the board, right at the old area brown in color. I'm wondering what the odds of us having a corroded connection under the chestnut icr probably aren't as high as the odds of having a problem with the reball on the CPU let's take a look at that reball now that we've cleaned up the stream oh yeah it's beautiful work, I feel like a couple Some of the balls maybe stretched a little as if they had solidified after moving them just a hair, but the ball actually looks very good, other than having so much heat that it squeezed out the heat around everything else on the board, I think I can move on. and just put another chestnut in it.

I see that there are actually probably hundreds of things that could cause this to have a flashing image. I would say there is a higher chance that it is actually a connection below the CPU, however the CPU fix on this really shows. Well, other than the balls coming out everywhere, I'm going to go ahead and try to put in a replacement chestnut that I see here and see if it might be a faulty driver for those of you who don't know the chestnut. Look, it's the little chip that produces power for the screen and we're going to replace it.

Let's take a donor plate. Now I know this ic looks like it might have some heating or something on the side, but I can assure you that it is a good IC because this is a 100 confirmed working donor board until I start stealing components from it. I'm very grateful that many of these chips are available on several different boards so we don't have to. I have an iPhone 10r plate to steal this from. I used to have tons of these in stock, but I rarely use a brown ic anymore, so it doesn't make much sense for me to keep them in stock, we'll just move that little bit. cap out of the way it's not necessary there anyway and now the board is pretty much up to temperature so we'll just slide this up out of there.

I like to lift the board by the chip and then let the board fall. from underneath, this allows the ICs to be removed with as little heating as possible and it's almost always a clean lift, without missing a beat, we'll move it straight to the reballing station and here now for smaller ICs like this, I just do it. I make them right on the bench, but when I go into larger ICs like nand and such, I make them on a paper towel, so we have a decent amount of flow, oh really, it's just beautiful, okay, this is alcohol 99.9 isopropyl that I bought. this on Amazon, clear it right now.

I like to try to get it to stay glued to the table because the Quick Flux chip I'm using will hold it down really well and this keeps it from sliding around while I'm cleaning. I see it, it's pretty and it's glued to the table, wonderful. Let's take a template here and put some new, shiny, pretty balls on it. Here we go, let's spread some pasta on ourselves. Here I go. To try to use only the dry pasta that I have. on my blade, yeah there we go, it's not that dry on this phone, I doubt it though, I'll try to get it working again and can boot up so you can see what's there. and also be able to run a backup, I think it will survive, I mean, it's a phone that they've been using surprisingly well, okay, let's get our template out of here, come on, the chip needs to stay on the table, here we go . and now we're going to give it a nice last float, we still have some straggling beads, we'll warm it up, that's smart, there we go, good, and there we have a beautiful chestnut with symmetrical, not hairy, well re-balled lead balls.

I see that's okay, back to the customer board, here's your not-so-bad chestnut. I see it used to look really bad now I always like to put a mark somewhere on the board, like I'm going to do right here on that little line I just put. on the board for me that's going to represent pin one for this chestnut that I see and now we're going to go ahead and get this puppy off the board. I'm going to start heating the entire board. God knows not. Now we don't have to worry about floating the CPU, although they probably use some lower fusion alloy, so we still want to be careful and curious to see what it looks like underneath, which actually doesn't look that bad, I think there might be such Maybe a pad there that might have come off, there's definitely lint underneath, weird, okay, we'll set it aside while the board is still warm, apply some flux, rub these pads and get them ready to receive our nice shiny balls.

They're going to need a little more flux than that, right? There is nothing like cleaning them very well and spotless and then spraying them with flux. Well, that looks good enough to me. Now let's take our replacement. I see I've put it here. on the bench right there, biggin and I can see where our pin one marker is, that's good, a little bit of flow, although I probably didn't need to add any. I'm just very picky, guys, I don't like what I do. I'm seeing here there's a little bit of solder there, we're going much better, okay, let's put this little ic here like this, there we go, it should work right there, okay, the Quick Flux chip now has it locked in place. let's heat it up and melt it into place, we should see it settle down there, so it was a little further than I thought, okay, a little push and it's on the board from here.

I'm going to let it cool a little bit and then we'll do one more test on it so with this one it's going to be a little hard to tell exactly when it's fixed because it's an intermittent issue so once I see it turn on and have a picture on the screen . I have to leave this phone on for a while and periodically come back to it and make sure it behaves consistently. We'll connect the flexible base and connect the battery while we're at it. I'm just going to use a standard loader and put this through a series of tests because I think it's going to have an image now.

This is what I get by assuming we are drawing 800 milliamps of charging current, one amp of charging current, it's cranked, but I still don't have a picture. I just heard the charging connection tone, so just now we broke the picture or it didn't make any difference. Test the screen out of the way. Power button and remove the board. I'll look. and see and make sure I lined up the chestnut correctly it looks good mmm boy what a strange problem ok the board is still a little warm this customer said they had to let it sit until the board was completely cool before they could get it . to get the image again and then even then it was only briefly this is going to be a mystery it will be a coil it most likely has something to do with this CPU repair unless someone rebuilds the CPU to fix the image, that would be crazy. well guys, it's about oh, it's late at night and it's time for me to take a break from this workbench.

I've been here for many, many many hours, so I'm going to put this aside and go. I came back to this in the morning, so I came back to this today determined to make it work. I pulled the brown IC off the board. I took a bunch of diode mode readings below the IC. I couldn't really find anything out of control, so I put another chestnut I see on the board. I verified that 5v7 was present, but this phone still didn't get an image, so I had decided that this was going to be a CPU level issue and that this phone would probably need to have the CPU removed. it was re-traced and re-attached which would actually be a lot easier since someone already did it once here is this phone we have a working picture we still have a working picture I have had a working picture for a long time let me show you What I did to get the image working on this phone I decided that before doing something as crazy as removing the CPU and redoing it, it would be worth going ahead and giving it a gentle refloat, so what I did was apply such a small amount of flux like You could be sure it flowed through and out the other side.

You don't want there to be a lot of flow because a lot of bubbles and stuff can move the balls out of place and you want this process to be pretty smooth, so this There was actually a little more flow than I was comfortable with, but I was looking at the other side of the CPU to be sure the flow would come out the other side so I knew everything had flow and then proceeded to warm up gently. This with hot air. I have the hot air set to 350 degrees C with an airflow of 40 and I just heated this up very gently and looked at the components along the side of the CPU, checking with my tweezers to see.

Every time those components are melted down for use, it's like an indicator for when you know the rest of the balls under the CPU are melted. Now I apologize, but as this heats up, it is placed directly on my mat, so the mat becomes hot. It's actually swelling up and the plate is lifting up a little bit and throwing it out of focus, but I really just want to show you what I did. I reheated the CPU to warm it up nice and once I'm sure it's floating I take the heat off and let it cool down gradually so it's successful no no no no no after doing this with this board , every time I connected the DC power supply, it instantly drew two amps of current and there was a short circuit. somewhere then my hot air caused a short circuit somewhere so from there I moved on to the thermal imaging and with the thermal imaging I could see that u6150 was producing a hot spot as soon as the power was turned on so obviously there was probably something shorted under u6150 and if we look at the view of the board we can see that my warm up took place from this side of the board and the u6150 was right here and also the u6150 was completely full of underfill and that was probably where I created a short so I spent some time looking and clicking on balls and pads here and tried to figure out exactly where things were going and it looked to me like there was a short VDD boost because you could actually get a direct short to ground on the VDD boost.

The really strange thing is that after I checked it once or twice, the short circuit disappeared, but then the phone only consumed 80 milliamps 300 off, so I said I killed this phone, I killed this phone, so I carried on I went ahead and removed u6150 from the board and that's where we are now so refloating the CPU completely fixed the picture issue on this phone, it's working and I haven't had a single time where I didn't get a picture since I did it though I told them there's a good chance this isn't fully functional, I'm not going to leave the u6150 off the board just yet, so against my better judgment I'm going to go ahead and put it back on the board and then let's call to this fixed so below this ic you can see how we have this flattened solder right here when I took this ic off the board where it was completely flat and it almost looked like we exposed the ground plane orsomething like that. but now I think that's actually solder and we're going to find out right now because we're going to reball this ic let's add a little bit of flux and I think that little bit is going to melt yeah that's what it was so this it had actually been made like a soldering plane with my hot air, isn't it kind of like someone blew hot air out of this board and I went ahead and gently refloated the CPU once and caused a brief moment? clean this up, put some shiny new balls on it, put it back in the phone and then watch it boot up with no picture.

Now I'll lose my mind. I don't think I have a template for this, so let's go. To wing it, it's probably similar to something else I have that looks good, yeah, we'll use it. It's probably the same as a backlight driver or something. Let's put some pasta in here and my pasta is getting a little bit dry. Actually, it's getting. very dry, we'll use it anyway, oh yeah baby, okay let's gradually start heating this up, a little more gradual than that, well it looks dry until you start heating it up, okay, here we go, I see something melted, gotta make it. very slow and go, shiny new balls, nice semi-glossy, we're not going to be picky with this one, we give this one one last float and there we have it, it looks like there might be a little bit of dirt on that one, but I'll leave it, okay, put this aside, yes, I know I should leave it while I'm ahead, but I'm going to go ahead and put this chip back on the board, so we'll heat it up a little bit and add some flux. too much flow, holy mackerel, and let's put this back on the board, oh boy, I can't tell where pin one is, we're going to have to clean it, too much flow on the ic, oh there it is, my point is shown.

Okay, here we go, drop the chip, we're starting to settle in there and that's fine, let's let the board cool and see if this thing still has a picture and then I'll be able to sleep at night, you just know I'll I said it's most likely not fully functional. I don't want to do anything that I know will make it not fully functional at all. That ICU 6150, that's the gecko I see. Honestly, I don't know exactly what it does, so if you want to let me know in the comments below, I'd appreciate it. Okay, with that back on the dash, I'm going to press the button to start 80 milliamps 130 Apple logo. so we didn't break anything passcode white illuminated screen illuminated white let's be ready to continue, I already have this phone completely reassembled, we still have a working image, we are up to 40 charges now I am absolutely curious To see if the baseband is working, I didn't look under the bottom shield, but we have the baseband working seriously and the Wi-Fi works.

We have Wi-Fi working. Ah, something amazing, now I have to say what I did in this. video with refloating the cpu, please don't do that unless all the bottom padding has already been carved out underneath and it is a repair from the old cpu. If you try to do that on a factory CPU it will definitely kill the phone. and then it will definitely need a CPU repair so that will be it for this guy this phone is ready to go back and he will be a happy customer and I also have a local backup in case for any reason they get the phone . back and it doesn't turn on so that's all for now everyone see you next time have a nice day