Yet another design failure uncovered

A Pico scope is a widely used piece of diagnostic equipment in the automotive world. They are required dealer equipment for several manufacturers. Pico has been around for decades, I recall training on them in the early 2000’s.

A dollar in parts, how much in labor and expertise? I remember my old joke about the mechanic.

If you’re willing to accept only 20K you can use the microphone input on a laptop. I have. I recorded the signal then analyzed it with Audacity. There are oscilloscope programs that can display the signal live but that was too complicated for me alone.

A youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX7YuHehyUw

and there are more sophisticated devices using Arduinos

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No labor cost, this is part of my hobby/leisure time.
The cost of my accumulated expertise has been amortized over many years/projects so already paid for :wink:

There are guys out there making a business out of repairing these and the control heads. Maybe some hope for me once I decide to quit my day job and retire. :crazy_face:

I have decided that repairing the unit is not enough. I am in the process of improving it by providing the necessary clamping force and using a more advanced technique and material for thermal management. A phase transition material we commonly use for high power IGBTs. It is process critical to achieve the desired results but superior in every way to the current “design”. All things considered, it would probably be less expensive to build them this way and there would not be decades of failed modules out there :wink: I’ll send myself the bill for NRE…

But you wouldn’t do it for a living. If your boss assigned you to do this (repair a single unit), he’d be fired. I do a lot of work that I wouldn’t do professionally because even if paid minimum wage it’d be cheaper otherwise.

The AI solution is to discard the whole unit, not pay an expert, and it’s right.

I just thought it was interesting, but maybe 30 years ago when we had a local car talk radio program, the host was having a problem with his car. Precision tune was a sponsor and the owner went through the hosts computer. He found one bad component and fixed it. Don’t remember if it was a transistor or what but a very cheap part. What equipment was used I don’t know but the guy was not a phd engineer, just knew electronics.

Just seems a waste to not fix this stuff. Most of us are capable of replacing electronic parts if we know what to replace. But messing with scopes and so on is beyond most diyers. It’s been over 50 years since I even saw one, let alone know what to do with it.