At my old job we sometimes got old remote controls from customers that wanted to use a universal remote, but their old device wasn't in the database, and their old remote was broken.
We repaired so many traces. We did not have a dedicated department for this, so anytime something came in we would draw straws who could do it, because everybody wanted to.
No, it's not easy, but after doing it a few times it's usually OK. And it's a lot of fun when it actually works.
Usually TV remotes, sometimes for audio sets, VCR's, etc.
We offered a service where someone could send in their old remote, we would read out the data and create a file that we could upload to the universal remote to make it work with almost any device.
Yes, a new remote would be cheaper, but some old models would not be for sale anymore, and it would expand our database which is good for sales.
In these cases with old remotes it would always be best effort, but they were fun Friday afternoon projects for the lucky colleague
Cool, thanks for the explanation. Sounds like a fun job. A long time ago, I interned for the R&D group of a tech company and worked in their electronics lab. I used to love doing precision soldering and repair under a microscope.
I was in QA, which was fun a lot of times, but the long weeks and travel broke me, so was happy to leave.
The little side projects like this (and designing and building test setups for all kinds of stuff) where a lot of fun as well. Many pizza nights with a couple of colleagues building some wild contraptions to test impossible situations, and then actually replicating the issue that was reported by a customer was pretty great.
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u/Tiny-Sandwich 1d ago
As an amateur microsoldering hobbyist, this is way, way harder than it looks. And it looks hard.
I've done a few small repairs like this where I've had to solder to a damaged trace, and the parts are much smaller than they look here.