Avian’s Blog

Last Thursday Andraž's laptop charger died - a LiteOn 19V 65W universal laptop power supply. He went and bought a new one the same day. And since I can't stand watching people throw away what could be perfectly good electronics I took it to have a closer look at it and maybe salvage any usable parts.

First there was a problem of how to get through the casing that is obviously designed to keep curious people out. Seriously, this thing is built like it is housing a nuclear reactor. It took quite a lot of sawing, heating and prying to get through an outer plastic and an inner aluminum shell.

After I got to the circuit the error was quite obvious. There was a bad contact on the board. Maybe it got loose because of a mechanical shock or maybe it was badly soldered in the first place. Anyway, before it finally blew itself off there was probably some arcing because tiny balls of solder were blown around the circuit and melted into the inner wall of the casing.

After properly soldering the blown connection and a bit of touching up some of the other suspicious points I connected it to the mains and it worked!

I did some more tests with the power supply under around 50% of it's maximum load and it held up perfectly (I didn't have a large enough resistor at hand to test it at full load). A quick calculation shows 160mΩ equivalent series resistance, which is quite nice. It will definitely come in handy in this or that electronics project.

So, thanks Andraž and I hope your new charger will serve you well.