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Tell Louis that a lot of folks appreciate his content and it would be nice if he would stop getting hit while on his bicycle. Brains are fragile.

eBikes can be quite fun compared to other modes of transit, its Louis's choice whether he wants to risk biking (or doing anything for that matter).

Our streets should be safer for pedestrians and bicyclists, cars get free reign and little in the way of fines or charges when a pedestrian or cyclist are hit and injured.

I'm a cyclist. I live in New York City.

I gave it up because after getting hit 3 times and the driver drove off, including an MTA Bus that ran me over from behind and an NYPD officer that refused to take a police report for it, I decided that it's not worth it.

Wow, that is awful! SPD is a pile, but they've never refused to take petty theft reports and have chased down hit and runs for me in the past.

Have the bike lanes gotten any better in NYC? I'm lucky enough to be near a separated two way bike lane that crosses a few other separated bike lanes here in Seattle, which has alleviated most of my fear of getting run over. Matted leaves covering the lane are a bigger threat than cars :P

They didn't take a police report from me because the hit and run was by a city employee.

No, they have not gotten better.

Ooof, city employees get special treatment here (eg: they are less likely to spend the night in jail or get ticketed), but SPD will still file a report and send it to our prosecutor.

I would recommend biking with a camera if I were stuck with what your dealing with :c

When doing this I typically use a very small and controllable butane torch with tin foil as a heat shield over nearby components.

Even then I always communicate to the person that the repair is intended to facilitate RECOVERY ONLY and that all bets are off on the machine being long-term usable again. Usually this is only useful for large BGA chips. Unfortunately Apple laptops made the past 10 years use BGA chips almost exclusively through logic board design.

Save yourself some headaches and get a dedicated reflow station that you can control by temperature. Butane is way too hot for anything other than soldering in plumbing. Even a knock off 858D is going to perform leagues better than a torch.

FWIW, I did this with a 2011 MacBook pro 17" 7 times, and it worked every time. Each time it worked for about 3 months, and then the video card would glitch out again. Finally, apple did a warrantee extension on that logic board and replaced it.

Just my 2¢ to say that it does work sometimes.

If you had to do it 7 times, that doesn’t really sound like it “worked”.

Well, it took a non-working laptop - video glitched and unusable, to one that was working for 3 months. Was it a permanent fix? No. But, it sure beat buying a new laptop on short notice.

Sounds like my home theater amplifier (Pioneer VSX-921). The audio DSP chip gets too hot during normal use and desolders itself ever so slightly, which gives the error UE22. Someone figured out that taking a hot air gun to the chip fixes it, but I had to re-apply the fix about every three months.

What angered me even more was that Pioneer USA acknowledged the problem and would either repair or give you a replacement model, but Pioneer EU pretends everything is fine and dandy, even when you point them to Pioneer USA its stance.

Would a fan help?

No idea, I gave it away for free to a solder-handy guy who was unemployed and needed something to drive a 5.1 set he was gifted from someone else. I did try a heatsink, but that didn't help noticeably.

There's nothing that the folks who are willing to pay for home theater audio gear love more than adding an acoustical noise source.

Usually it's not the chips actually desoldering so much as it is thermal cycling causing the solder joints to crack. Most ICs can't really survive being heated to solder melt temperature for an extended period.

Either way, it's pretty bad that they didn't do something about it. That's indicative of a pretty serious manufacturing or design flaw.

It sounds like it did work, the problem is faulty solder.

There's likely nothing wrong with the solder, but with the lack of flux.

Its Monday, I think there is a widespread lack of flux today.

this man speaks a good point

Between 2011 and 2013 Apple had a repair extension program for video issues. This is how they fixed them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaGHcBZjmWA

I did this 3 times with a HP laptop from 2010-2011 and had the same experience, the graphics chip would last 3-4 more months.

My understanding was that the oven repair was/is mostly for when GPU’s had to move away from less based solder due to EU regulations but hadn’t gotten non-lead based solder right yet.

Also I wrapped most of the board in foil only exposing the GPU, and I put the board in hot and then killed heat after one or two minutes.

I thought it was great as a kid without any means to a new computer. Friends would give me their broken computers and I would fix them for myself.

The right repair I guess depends on what you can afford and what you’re willing to risk.

They replaced your logic board under warranty after you'd baked it 7 times?

It was a special repair extension program that they only put in place 2 years after the original warrantee+Applecare timeframe ended.

There is a water damage sensor, but not a put in oven sensor ;)

If there was it likely wouldn't make it out of the factory haha

I have a 2013 MacBook pro that just dies at random times. I could never get them to confirm that this specific year had issues.

But I have always suspected that it was something with the board and poor solder connections.

https://www.apple.com/support/exchange_repair/ - looks like a battery and SSD program currently on that laptop. Maybe check in?

Unfortunately those two related items are for 2016-2018 models

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w57ObM3pYXw

I believe this is the one that explains it. Or the one before it. The reflow over time goes back to how it was, if it works at all.

I did the same with my 2008 MBP 15" and it worked, for a while. I then lent it to a friend who had it when the fix stopped working - he figured out that another solution was to simply wrap i in towels and turn it on and leave it like that for a while - it got hot enough to reflow itself!

No it didnt, Solder melts at >200C. Its bad nvidia gpu die bonding, heating it up to ~100 softens the glue and relieves stresses temporarily.

Im amazed there are CS people on HN not knowing basic physics.

Not sure whether to upvote for useful information or downvote due to the unnecessary insult tacked on the end. :/

This is not an issue that putting in the oven is going to resolve. It's an issue with the die of the GPU. By introducing heat stress to the die it may be "functional" for a short period, but it is not a fix. This fallacy has existed for decades and was most prevalent in the Xbox 360 days. This is why the "towel method" was said to work, but was never a permanent solution.

I have that same 2011, and had been using it headless as a third machine with VNC. A recent bad update screwed it up, and I was going to call it quits but then found two work arounds.

Temporary (actually fairly permanent, but if the laptop goes to sleep you run into the backlight problem where it won't turn on until you poweroff the laptop and then back on again)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=765954#c65

Permanent

https://realmacmods.com/macbook-2011-radeon-gpu-disable/

A toaster oven is a somewhat standard way for soldering SMT components in hobbyist circles.

I don't think I would like my first attempt to be on something expensive but its possible.

https://www.freetronics.com.au/pages/surface-mount-soldering...

http://www.electricstuff.co.uk/smtoast.html

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/technical-articles/introduc...

You mean a toaster oven with precise temperature control.

Appliances like this can swing +/- 20 degrees at minimum. Doing reflow in this is suicide without reworking the temp controls.

Exactly, you need a toaster oven (pref an IR one) with an accurate temp control that will run a temperature profile that matches the solder used on the board ... in particular it needs to bring the temp of the board to just below the solder melting point and soak the board so it's all at that temp, then quickly spike the temp over the melting point so it all melts at once, otherwise you put silly stress on everything as some stuff melts and some doesn't and you risk tombstoning and other evils

So don't just stick stuff in your oven

You probably should use a hot air gun or a reflow oven, but the toaster method should provide similar results if used properly. A non-nitrogen, non-convection, infrared radiant heating reflow oven is basically just a precise toaster oven.

You can achieve radiant heating of particular sections of a board by cutting aluminum foil to expose or cover particular board sections. You can insulate the board to prevent excess heat soak, you can take apart the oven to force it to ramp heat more slowly, and cooling is trivial. You can also remove moisture ahead of time by enclosing the board in a plastic bag with silica gel or calcium chloride, or a very long, slow heat ramp. (Or just leave the board in a sunny window in a dry environment)

The above is correct. Do not do it. In addition, even with hot air soldering equipment, "reflowing" the chips on the board is not a reliable method of fixing the problem. Even if you temporarily improve things, symptoms will likely re-appear.

If the problem is indeed in the connections below BGA chips, the proper solution is reballing, which involves desoldering and lifting the entire chip off the board, cleaning the entire area, then reballing, placing and soldering it in again. This is a non-trivial operation that requires specialized equipment.

> the proper solution is reballing, which involves [...] reballing

Sounds like that will take forever.

For an ordinary individual, perhaps, but not for a domain expert. There are people out there who do this for a living and are quite good at this. Just like we advise others to leverage our expertise in software. We should leverage theirs. Specialization, ftw!

edit: oops didn't see the recursion joke :(

(It's a recursion joke)

At the very least get some no clean flux under there.

But it worked for four people on the internet.

You can find more reports than that on HN alone (in the comments)

Worked just fine for me on an early 2007 Mac Book Pro that had a known Nvidia GPU issue. I did it in late 2012, when it was only worth about $200-250 on craigslist. After the bake, it worked fine for the next 2 years, but I was paranoid it would crap out again, stopped using it as my primary after a year.

I followed the instructions from : http://russell.heistuman.com/2010/04/27/cooking-the-books-or...

> The right way to do it involves a directed hot air gun and proper equipment so that you aren't imposing excessive thermal stresses onto the board as a whole. If you don't know how to do that, then please send it to someone who does. There are several good repair outfits out there right now who specialize in this and can help you out.

Even this method is fraught with danger, at least if one is doing it at home. I have decades of experience with soldering and repairing boards with SMT components and I am hesitant to use a heat gun on a board unless it's a last resort. A couple of years ago I had a Mac mini 2011 logic board with the infamous AMD Radeon BGA warping issue, and I attempted a heat gun repair following best practices. I got another six months out of the board before it started having video issues again, and another attempt to revive it failed. I didn't have anything but time invested in it (it was given to me as scrap when it failed the previous owner), but I'd never use a repaired board like that as a production machine because it will fail again and soon.

A hot air rework station, not a hot air gun. Hot air guns are too generalized an area and end up melting/moving the wrong components.

"This DIY method is like doing cardiac surgery with a chainsaw."

Wasn't there a funny game on Steam for that? Surgeon something.

surgeon simulator

Needed: PC surgeon simulator.

Reflowing ovens and home ovens are totally different animals. Reflow ovens use closed loop temperature controllers. A ramping profile gently heats the board to a preheat temp just below reflow (drives out moisture and other outgassing), holds it for a bit, then ramp to the final reflow temp and holds that for less than a minute (possibly seconds) before quickly backing down to preheat followed by a cooling cycle. Many manufacturers specify these times and temperatures in their datasheets for components as well.

You can turn an electric toaster oven into a reflow oven with a cheap programmable closed loop temperature controller. Though I don't know how even the heating would be or how effective depending on the model.

And this is why I spent $100 on a hot air gun for my video game console repairs & restorations instead of trying to do DIY reballing without proper equipment (which is $$$).

Consistent and controlled heat are absolutely vital when working with tiny SMD components.

In some cases there's nothing to lose. Got an old HP LaserJet free that had a similar issue and wouldn't boot. Used the oven to 'reflow', now have a working printer.

"cardiac surgery with a chainsaw" encapsulates this perfectly

The analogy breaks down completely once you introduce the concept of "not worth the cost of professional repair". We don't apply that to humans, but it's more often the norm than the exception with electronics.

That is exactly what a 'Lifetime Limit'[1] is for health care benefits, or when patents are refused because the may become a 'bad outcome'[2].

[1]https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/life-time-limit/ [2]https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/16/magazine/when-doctor-s-sl...

What's with the apostrophe in that New York Times headline: "When Doctor's Slam The Door"?

That limit definitely exists in America.

Also, is your name a Doctor Who/Ice Warriors reference?

Not sure why you are so strongly saying people shouldn't do it. I've done it before and know people who have, and it's always been for a broken/out-of-warranty machine anyway. So its either trash or will be fixed so it's not really a risk.