hwfly snowball disaster

[cstout]

This was about my 10th hwfly install and my first time running into a major issue. I'm honestly not sure at all what happened, but here's the order of what I witnessed today.

• Switch OLED, modded and working last week with hwfly v6 kit using the under-chip DAT0 adapter. Everything worked great. Even had emummc loaded up and played a test game from cartridge.
• Powered it on today and got a sideways red-text error saying it couldn't boot, press a button to go back to hekate
• Hekate tools showed "failed to init" for emmc and also "Your eMMC is initialized in slower mode"
• SD card passed everything I could throw at it and I also reformatted and re-loaded it with the bootloader - same error

So, I removed the hwfly parts and put it back to stock and then it boots to a purple screen. ONCE.

After that, black screen, no signs of life. Pulled the board to check for shorts and they're all over and on both sides. It looked like MAX77812 was causing shorts, so I removed it and I still have shorts on both sides. I'm really not sure on this one - I've never had an experience like this with hwfly installs. Did it cook my APU? I've got some pics below from both sides where some of the bigger groupings of shorts are. Any help or recommendations are greatly appreciated!

SIDE A:


SIDE B:

 

[thesjaakspoiler]

Problem with HWFly's is that there can always be a bad one.
Purple screen is usually only happening when the bootloader is messed up.
Not sure why you would only get it once though.
Since you're capable of removing the MAX77812, maybe also consider taking a look under the emmc.

I saw some guys injecting a low current voltage directly and checking with a thermal camera to see which component would get hot.
I don't read that people mess up their APU very often here so it seems other components go first.

 

[cstout]

Thank you, that's helpful and hopeful. I did reflow the emmc earlier today but I'm waiting for a replacement max77812 (I don't have a reflow template for that chip...) so I can't test further until I get that back in. I've found after reading a bit that there are quite a few reports of issues with hwfly and skhynix emmc chips. My other oled models I believe were samsung - so maybe I ran into some odd incompatibility? Quite a headache.

 

[cstout]

I replaced the MAX77812 and the shorts are still there. I get 15.3V and 0.13A on usb connected with or without the battery plugged into the board. I'm out of ideas and really not sure what to check next.

Post automatically merged: Aug 31, 2024

These are the new shorts around the other side of the board surrounding MAX77620H

These are the new shorts around MAX77812:

Post automatically merged: Aug 31, 2024

I removed and reinstalled the MAX77812 and...great success. I'm going to button it back up and move on without modding this one. My nerves are shot from this. I'm not sure if I got a bad picofly or what, but now that it's back in a working state I'd hate to go full circle after reinstalling the chip. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯