Pete's Log: A good waste of a half hour
Entry #1913, (Repairs)(posted when I was 42 years old.)
It was real windy last night, enough so that we had at least three brief power outages. My recent UPS purchase seems to have done its job. While everything else in the house powered down each time, the laundry room data center remained up. Strangely, the power outages were brief enough (only a couple seconds in each case) that the UPS apparently didn't deem it necessary to inform Home Assistant of a status change. Now I kind of want a UPS for the garage data center.
But on to the main topic. I just couldn't resist picking at it to see if I could make it work. After picking away some of the plastic housing (and getting lucky with where I decided to start), I found what seemed to be the issue. There appeared to be a 1mm gap between the end of the red wire and the connector it was meant to be hooked to.
I was able to verify that the connector I revealed had continuity to the inner part of the plug and that the end of the wire that was almost touching the connector had continuity to the battery connector.
That gap was just not supposed to be there. Trying to fill the gap with solder didn't make sense since I figured I'd probably end up melting a bunch of plastic. So instead I just snipped off the wire before it enters the plug housing, stripped it back and soldered it directly to the connector.
And it worked!
It was even able to power my new oscilloscope.
Note that while the detected frequency and wave shape above match the configuration on my function generator (see below), the voltages do not. Someday...
Anyway, I was surprised this proved this easy. Of course, this will now most likely never get used again, since I have several more of these that just work and aren't all cut up. But it'll sit proudly in one of my drawers of bits. It feels dumb that this tiny repair job lifted my mood as it did, but I'll take it. :)