Maciej Rutkowski

AirPods Pro have been probably the best Apple product I have bought in years. Indeed Jobs’ vision of VR for ears realized.

I guess it all comes down to a platform which assumes physical controls, and where the market doesn't discourage paid-up-front games. It's a shame Vita was squeezed out by mobile, of all things. Such a nice, compact package, much more manageable than a Switch.

Some time ago I bought a broken Playstation Vita (mangled charging port I replaced it with a USB-C adapter PCB, but that's beside the point). It amazed me how better the games are for that thing than the modern "mobile" ones - pure game, no lootboxes, no purchases, no brainrot single button slop. 😍

On other note - given how homogenized many liquid app-ready apps now are, as if made from the same iOS 26 template, what are some good examples where liquid glass is present, but doesn't take over that app's design or style?

Voltage at no load is stable as a rock. Need to load test it too somehow, maybe using a couple of car headlight bulbs. Don’t want to tear down the living room PS5 for that. 😇

For the record, TEA2017AAT works too from what I hear on the interwebs. And it’s easily available on DigiKey too.

A multimeter showing nice 12V output from the fixed PS5 power supply

TEA2016AAT chip soldered on the faulty PS5 power supply

Checked out the ADP-400DR PS5 supply again. All critical components were measuring fine, and with the symptom being that there is no PFC at startup, so it wouldn’t output 12V at all in the end, I thought that replacing the DAP053T with a freshly arrived TEA2016AAT would fix it and it did. 😍

Just transplanted one with a little help of hot air as they are surface mounted on a tiny PCB.

Note - the pin on the right closer to the center is Accessory ID on the controller side, it’s just not connected on the charger. It’s mostly there for mechanical support I guess.

Leaf spring contacts in the DualSense Charging Station. From the left: GND, 5V, Accessory ID, NC.

If you ever bend one of the left (looking from the front of device) leaf spring contacts on the DualSense Charging Station, and you are not able to bend it back or it breaks in the process, don’t fret as the two right ones have no function in the charger so you can borrow one.

LTA2016 PFC/LLC combo chip used in some ADP-400FR power supplies

A photo of MPS HR1211 PFC/LLC combo chip in the wild

If only there would be a way to edit one's posts. I screwed up all the chip markings. First of all, the one on my power supply is LTA2016. And the candidate replacements from MPS are HR1210/HR1211 or HR1270/HR1275. Sorry about that.

Attaching a photo of HR1211 courtesy of ChargerLab.

My units have each a different issue - one attempts to provide 12V output and shuts down, the other one doesn't even start the PFC circuit, so the output is completely dead. I'll take that challenge. 🤓

I tracked the traces going from most of the pins and those seem to match what the datasheets of those chips document, and additionally, an MP1211 is used in Xbox Series X power supplies. So that is good to know. Just like in the first case though, the passive components sound healthy.

However the other one is a later FR variant and uses a different LLC/PFC combo chip in a SOIC-20 package with some custom marking of LA2016, which I, with the help of a friendly LLM, figured out as actually being one of MPS's controllers like MP1210/1211 or MP1270/1275.

One of the PS5 power supplies is a ADP400DR variant, uses more common parts like the DAP053T, which is known to have a replacement in TEA2016AAT in case it's bad. All the main passive components seem fine from the measurements. Perhaps some voltage feedback signals don't go across. To be continued.

Jokes aside, some of this stuff is assembled in Poland, and Vorwerk hires our developers for some of their software, at least used to, but the growth trap we're getting ourselves into means soon those manufacturing contracts will end as we'll get underpriced by less-developed economies in Europe. 🫣

For repairs I use a polish Yihua soldering station naturally, a locally-made microscope camera bought on Aliexpress, view the magnified image on a Motorola phone that runs a Poland-developed Android OS. Recently I even fixed a portable speaker made by our national treasure, JBL.

After work I relax on my Playstation. As my kids like to play on a Nintendo Switch, we sometimes hook it up to a Samsung TV to race together in Mario Kart. When hungry, we prepare some food using our Thermomix and some IKEA appliances made by Electrolux and Whirlpool (not Amica, sad).

I love how our Prime Minister Tusk keeps talking how Poland is the 20th world economy, how we've overtaken Japan. I smile as I wake up to my polish Apple Watch every morning, drive my kids to school in a polish Volvo, then go to work and use a polish Apple laptop there.

LED board for PlayStation 4 Pro with a broken white diode

And here is the cause of white light missing on a PS4 Pro. Already replaced the broken diode with a fresh one and I am left with a supply of white 0602 side LEDs for years to come. 🤷‍♂️

I need to improve at such diagnostics though, and also get some additional tools like an electronic load, since it's a risk using an otherwise working console as a guinea pig.

It's possible it was sending too much voltage to the gate and those can only take so much (less than 5V max). Replaced the chip, the mosfet, and now the console runs without interruptions. Will test all those supplies in a demanding game - TLOU2 it is!

however the console ran on it for a few seconds only before the home's circuit breaker popped. This time the replacement MOSFET became stuck closed, i.e. shorted between the source and the drain. All fuses survived, so I think the PFC chip needed replacement after all.

The other one had the PFC MOSFET shorted on all legs, so it had to go. Seemed that if those are shorted to the gate, the PFC IC may be faulty too, but it read fine, so I replaced the bad components, and under test conditions all voltages were seemed okay...

The naked PS4 power supply came in a plastic bag with a loose SMD capacitor which had been ripped off the board, so I soldered it back on. After having checked the critical components I connected it and it was totally fine. The console would run with it smoothly too. I'm appalled.

A set of PS4 Pro and PS5 power supplies.

The Wife said "in sickness and in health". Well, this is my sickness.

Turned out the bridge was shorting the DC- and AC pins, just so happens I had a replacement available. This time after replacing the fuse and plugging the PSU in, both 5V and 12V registered healthy, so I threw the supply into the console and it came alive!

After checking out the usual suspects - MOSFETs, diodes, fusible resistors, the main controllers, I somehow didn’t check the bridge, so I soldered on new main fuse and plugged the supply in thinking just the fuse popped which I have seen happen. Home’s circuit breaker didn’t agree with my diagnosis.

Diode bridge used in the ADP-200ER power supply for PlayStation 4.

This is a diode bridge or, as we sophisticated Poles like to call it, Graetz Bridge. It tried to ruin an otherwise perfectly fine, although extremely dusty, PS4 Fat. I bought the console in a „not working, no response” state, hoping it would mean a supply repair, and bingo!

Learned a lot from this experience, finally the inner workings of those power supplies clicked for me more or less.

Overall I’m really impressed how the entire system works to pump out so much low voltage current so efficiently. Looking forward to getting my hands on some broken PS5 supplies. 😍

Had a fresh batch from another source already coming and they arrived yesterday. I put one in and the power supply came alive!

And indeed it was. I ordered the PFC IC - NCP1612, had a pack of DAP049 chips from Aliexpress, and a weaker than needed mosfet as temporary replacement. Replaced all but to no avail. The 12V wouldn’t come up. After a lot of analysis, turned out the DAP chip lot was fake or faulty.