MacbookAir A1466: 820-3437 Broken RTC steals my time

[@davidlegault9745]

Hi Paul, rabbit holes sometimes propagate nearly as quickly as their namesakes, but always nice to find and fix one. Regards, Dave

[@GregM]

Nice fix there Paul. Makes up for some of those rabbit holes we all had to haul ourselves out of . Thank goodness for those safety lines securely fastened to our waists ;)

[@pldaniels]

Some days it feels like the abyss consumes us.

[@paublusamericanus292]

this was possibly the hardest rabbit to chase I could think of. You could have checked continuity from the rtc leads, both enable, and sense, but taking that cap off and its stem pulls up, instantly showed you why you had spent three days.

[@randyscott5873]

that board is swimming in a sea of flux. looks like you been all over chasing rabbits. whoop whoop, way to go Paul. good job

[@pldaniels]

Yes, there were many other little areas that needed fixing up, though none of them (obviously) were the main fault. Possibly they would have played up after the main fault if I'd found the via issue originally. Either way, it was a lot of running around.

[@RichardHeadGaming]

You are right, whoever introduced us to blog should be introduced to flog.

[@TheDefpom]

Very nice repair. Hiding in plain sight

[@pldaniels]

Yes, certainly was; I'll know for next time (and 3437 / 00165 boards are notorious for RTC/BIOS area faults)

[@An.D]

Great job Paul 👍

[@zx8401ztv]

That sounded like a pain in the bum, well done at not giving up, i do know the feeling. There are so many words in the language, most i don't use, big words seem to be a shortcut for a sentence, so use the full sentence and don't be lazy lol.

[@1Rictec]

Nice one there i was thinking it was the cristal ..not that far out i guess

[@pldaniels]

ja, it was certainly pertaining to the whole RTC module at least.

[@thelamb288]

So what is the total number of videos you did on this one Paul. I look at your videos and it seemed quite a few! Bet you are glad to get it out of the door :) Cheers.

[@pldaniels]

All separate machines, just happen to be having a run of A1466's at the moment.

[@renaulth2009]

Hi Paul, thanks for your great videos, both repairs and the C coding. Do you think one can do these kind of repairs with only one eye?

[@pldaniels]

I would say it'll require just more practice but can imagine it's entirely possible. The most difficult aspect would potentially being trying to learn the depth of field limits. Fortunately the microscope has a very shallow DOF in most cases so you'll be alerted to the relative distances in terms of focus.

[@renaulth2009]

Thanks for the insight (pun unintentional haha). I ordered a digital (hdmi) microscope because I figured that a stereoscopic one would be useless to me because of my vision problems. Will try it out and see, since I see some other YT'ers doing microsolderiing with digital scopes...

[@pldaniels]

You may find an optical still is a winner, because there's no latency involved and thus the eye-hand feedback loop is much faster. You can start out with about a $180 unit on a fixed stand that'd do an excellent job still. Going to have to be something to experiment with.

[@renaulth2009]

Good point, thanks!

[@donald1056]

Did you say veer ?? is that to much solder - thanks

[@pldaniels]

Too much solder on which bit? If it sounded like veer, that'd be because I was being verbally lazy and not saying it as "via" :D

[@EPiCxPS3]

Whats the ending music?>

[@pldaniels]

Called "Greedy", it's part of the Amazon free audio collection. Well worth spending a few hours digging through that and picking out a collection.