Hello everyone,
this kind of thread has probably already been created a dozen times, but if you like, hear me out and maybe you can help me or we can come to some conclusions together.
So I bought this new Nintendo 2DS XL from eBay, in really good condition. The issue is: The blue LED turns on and that's it. No screens, no backlight, no WiFi LED, no sound. It just sits there. Charging works fine, the charging LED starts blinking red when the voltage is low, turns orange when the AC adapter is connected and turns off when charging is complete.
To turn it off, I have to hold the power button for about 7 seconds, and after another 10 seconds the blue light fades away.
I started disassembling the console and turned it on after every disconnected cable to check if the behavior changes, but I'm down to the bare mainboard with just the battery connected and it just turns on and stays like this. A normally working console should turn on and then turn off after a couple seconds at that point, this much I know.
So with all the peripherals out of the way, I thought maybe there's a short at some point, but the obvious candidates seem ok (gamecart, SD slot, buttons). I also mesaured some voltages on the testpoints, which most of them range between 4V (which means the battery is fine), 3.3V and 1.8V.
The console came with the original 4gb microSD, which is working fine on a PC. Judging from the folder structure, no hacking attempt was done, because there's only the Nintendo folder on it and nothing else. One thing I noticed is that there is no voltage at the microSD slot's VDD when the system is powered.
So I thought maybe it's a software issue. Maybe it's trying to boot, but hangs inside of some kind of loop. The next thing I did is connect a microSD -> SD adapter to the NAND testpoints to see if that changes anything, but no luck here either. Connecting it to an SD card reader (that Anker one, I already used it in a hardmod once) doesn't show the bootrom error screen. Connecting the card reader to a PC doesn't do anything either. Measuring with a multimeter, there are 3.3V at the CMD and DAT0 lines. No voltage at CLK, but I'm not surprised, because that's hard to measure with only a multimeter.
For now this leads me to the conclusion that there is some kind of hardware issue. Nothing obvious like water or fall damage, since neither on the case nor on the board are any traces of such things. Console seems to have never been opened before.
I know that it's probably not worth investigating much and if nobody here is interested in reading all of this and thinking about it, that's fine. But maybe you can give me some insights. So here are some questions that came up during all this:
My suspicion is that something prevents the system from performing its self-test, way before the bootloader takes over. But without schematics or datasheets it's very hard to find something on a multilayer PCB with tons of officially undocumented custom ICs. From where I'm standing now, it could be anything: a fried IC, missing voltages, an undiscovered short or a cold solder joint.
If you've come that far: thank you for reading. If you have something to say regarding the topic, thank you even more.
If you just skipped to the end, then, well, I can't blame you. Stay safe and stay healthy
this kind of thread has probably already been created a dozen times, but if you like, hear me out and maybe you can help me or we can come to some conclusions together.
So I bought this new Nintendo 2DS XL from eBay, in really good condition. The issue is: The blue LED turns on and that's it. No screens, no backlight, no WiFi LED, no sound. It just sits there. Charging works fine, the charging LED starts blinking red when the voltage is low, turns orange when the AC adapter is connected and turns off when charging is complete.
To turn it off, I have to hold the power button for about 7 seconds, and after another 10 seconds the blue light fades away.
I started disassembling the console and turned it on after every disconnected cable to check if the behavior changes, but I'm down to the bare mainboard with just the battery connected and it just turns on and stays like this. A normally working console should turn on and then turn off after a couple seconds at that point, this much I know.
So with all the peripherals out of the way, I thought maybe there's a short at some point, but the obvious candidates seem ok (gamecart, SD slot, buttons). I also mesaured some voltages on the testpoints, which most of them range between 4V (which means the battery is fine), 3.3V and 1.8V.
The console came with the original 4gb microSD, which is working fine on a PC. Judging from the folder structure, no hacking attempt was done, because there's only the Nintendo folder on it and nothing else. One thing I noticed is that there is no voltage at the microSD slot's VDD when the system is powered.
So I thought maybe it's a software issue. Maybe it's trying to boot, but hangs inside of some kind of loop. The next thing I did is connect a microSD -> SD adapter to the NAND testpoints to see if that changes anything, but no luck here either. Connecting it to an SD card reader (that Anker one, I already used it in a hardmod once) doesn't show the bootrom error screen. Connecting the card reader to a PC doesn't do anything either. Measuring with a multimeter, there are 3.3V at the CMD and DAT0 lines. No voltage at CLK, but I'm not surprised, because that's hard to measure with only a multimeter.
For now this leads me to the conclusion that there is some kind of hardware issue. Nothing obvious like water or fall damage, since neither on the case nor on the board are any traces of such things. Console seems to have never been opened before.
I know that it's probably not worth investigating much and if nobody here is interested in reading all of this and thinking about it, that's fine. But maybe you can give me some insights. So here are some questions that came up during all this:
- If I understand correctly, when applying a hardmod to a working system, it shows the bootrom error because we are "hijacking" the eMMC to be read by a PC instead of being accessed by the system's bootloader. Is that right? If so, does the fact that I can't access the eMMC lead to the assumption that there might be an issue with it?
- Measuring random voltages on random testpoints doesn't give me any information. Do you know of some kind of documentation about the N2DS XL's mainboard and what signal should be where? I checked 3dsbrew, but there is almost no information on the 2DS XL and whatever is there is very vague.
- Do you have any suggestions of things I could try? Anything that should force the system to some reaction which could lead to at least pinpointing the source of the error?
My suspicion is that something prevents the system from performing its self-test, way before the bootloader takes over. But without schematics or datasheets it's very hard to find something on a multilayer PCB with tons of officially undocumented custom ICs. From where I'm standing now, it could be anything: a fried IC, missing voltages, an undiscovered short or a cold solder joint.
If you've come that far: thank you for reading. If you have something to say regarding the topic, thank you even more.
If you just skipped to the end, then, well, I can't blame you. Stay safe and stay healthy
