Rudi’s Electronics Blog

iPhone 3G: Worth replacing the LCD

My friend (also an engineer) dropped his iPhone 3G and cracked the LCD and touch panel.
He tried to replace the LCD and touch panel, but he failed and gave up.
He decided to get a new iPhone 3GS instead, and gave the broken one to me.

He told me that I would waste my money and time trying to fix it.
I replied to him, “I’ll show you what I can do.”

I bought the LCD assembly from Ebay (the supplier is from HongKong).
Sadly, the new LCD assembly has a crack on the LCD ribbon cable when it arrived. Possibly, bad handling during delivery.
I contacted the supplier and he re-send a replacement for the LCD part only to me with the shipping cost paid by me 😦

Replacing the iPhone LCD is a lot easier than replacing the NDS Top screen. It took me about 20 minutes to replace it.
However, you need to be careful when bending the ribbon cable. It can crack and the LCD becomes RIP.

So, what is the total cost? I estimated it would cost me about $80 for the parts, shipping and my 20 min time.
For some reason, the iPhone LCD is much more expensive than the NDS LCD.

🙂 Yay, now I have iPhone. Oh wait, I now have 2 iPhones cause I already have my own iPhone.
Well, I guess now I don’t have to share iPhone with my wife anymore. We now have one each!

Enjoy the video.

NDS Lite: If possible, avoid repairing the top screen by yourself

The top screen of my Nintendo DS Lite was suddenly broken. I was not sure exactly what happen. Something might have fallen on top of the screen and cracked the top screen.

I decided to replace the screen by myself since it is pretty cheap to buy from China or Ebay. At that time, I didn’t know yet how hard the dissambly process would be.

Once the part arrived, I went to Youtube for any tips.  Thanks Supermodchips!

I took me almost 2 hours to replace it. Whoa…. It was quite difficult to just replacing the top screen.
I cannot understand why we have to disassembly the whole thing. Why not just the top assembly? It was a bad design for repair work.

Nintendo would probably pay quite a lot of money for the production line. There are a lot of things that are hard to assemble which cost the production time and throughput, for example:

• The top LCD ribbon cable has to be round folded to fit into the plastic;
• The speakers need to be soldered to the ribbon cable of the top LCD assembly;
• It was actually quite difficult to connect the top LCD ribbon cable to the socket on the PCB. As you can see in my video below, my first two attempts failed. I then asked my wife for her hand;
• The black wifi cable! Whoa… It must be put through the small hole underneath the game socket. I tried hundred times to get it through.

The production team in the company that I work for would complain a lot if they are asked to assemble NDSL.
Many times, we have to revise the design of our products just to make the production easier and faster in our company.
I wonder if anyone in Nintendo production line ever whinged.

So, what is the total cost? I estimated it would cost me about $75 for the part and my 2 hours time. I would not be surprise if someone charging more than $100  just to replace the top screen.

Next time, if the top screen breaks again, I would rather buy new one.
My advice: If possible, avoid repairing the top screen by yourself.

Hope you enjoy the video.