I have a Switch Lite, and unlike with Switch board, I only have the one. When I got it, it was… disgusting. But it would turn on, and boot to an error code. Looking around, it seemed the most likely cause would be a bad M92, so I opened it up and had a look in that area. One of the caps around it was shorting, so I swapped it out for a new one and changed out the shell completely.
Today I put it back together enough to test. I got backlight but no picture, and when I turned it back over to look at the board I started to see smoke coming from the chip shown below.
I’m not sure how I would have damaged it, but it’s clearly dead now. Annoyingly, any markings it used to have are gone. Does any one know what this thing is? Its just above the RAM / SoC shield.
Wow, these are harder to find than I thought they would be, lots of BD8316GWL-E2, but they seem to have a different number of connections in the middle row…
I am in the UK, there was one on ebay at £6, which I have gone for, but only gives me one attempt. All the other stores I can find have them at £1 - £2, but ship from the US, so £12 shipping!
Ah, I did wonder if it was that one. I have just the one donor board (so far!), and I haven’t used that chip yet. Cool, two tries with re-balling then!
So the seller I found for the chip was clearly not above board, as it never arrived. So today I went through the process of removing, reballing and fitting the one from my switch donor.
I plugged it in enough to test, and it proceeded to boot, and I saw both the Nintendo and Switch logos absolutely fine. I even saw the home screen for a few frames (which is more than I had to start with suggesting my previous M92 swap worked). But then the screen went black apart from a handful of pixels down the right hand side, which are still fine now.
I have tried re-seating the LCD connector, but that made no difference. Did the LCD outright die on me? If so, could it be due to something wrong on the chip I just replaced? I don’t want to buy an LCD is I dont need one, but even more so I dont want to replace it to have it die on me instantly!
This is my pinout from a regular switch board, sorry I haven’t done one for Lite but you should be able to decipher whats going where. Do you get your +/- 5V rails after prompting the console to boot? (careful with your probes here)
And by reseated the LCD con do you mean you reworked it? as that would be my guess, possibly a bent pin or burn maybe? which is possibly causing the IC to fail or the rails to sag
Think your right that it’s probably LCD related though I have never seen a failure like this where presumably some lines have shorted to one another causing the 8316 to fail, is there any evidence of corrosion, bending or punctures in the LCD ribbon flex? does any fiddling with the LCD ribbon change anything on the display?
Might also be a good idea to inspect the backlight IC and passthrough ribbon connector too, I don’t think this will be your issue if your currently getting backlight but it’s all too common on Lites for this IC or surrounding components to fail and/or the ribbon or connector to char so might be worth checking
It’s really weird. The fact that it was working all the way up to the lock screen and I was being very careful not to move anything! Moving the LCD ribbon etc didn’t seem to make any difference to it. There’s no corrosion on the connector at all on either the board or the ribbon, and no tears / holes visible with it all installed. I will give it a look over once I take it back out again. Maybe there is some damage at the LCD end of the connector.
Maybe it was the otherway round, maybe liquid or other got under the 8316 IC or some other fault causing it to fail and it took the LCD with it
I know a lot of the regular Switch revision aftermarket LCDs are refurbished in China and the ribbon cables are really poorly bonded to the glass coupled with the terrible LCD to Zinc midframe fitment can cause lines and artifacts on the LCD, If you tweak the ribbon LCD side it can bring the picture back, so you maybe right, something similar may be going on here
I set it all up outside the case so I had access to the ribbon. Most of the time it made no difference, though there was one time when I got more of the screen showing again and then moving it around did change how much I could see. I may poke at it for fun, but it feels like something failed with the connections on the lcd end.
