I got a really nice deal off of Willhaben: a DJing controller from Native Instruments (Traktor Kontrol D2) with a built-in screen and lots of controls. The only problem: it was sold as defective, description said it won’t turn on.
This thing is only compatible with NI’s propritary windows drivers and is not even a class compliant midi controller. There is absolutely no support on linux.
Since I already had 2 working devices I bought it for around ~100€ (inkl. shipping). 2 days later it arrived, and of course it was dead (as advertised).
My idea to find the issue and fix it was to open up a working one and the broken one, and measure / compare voltages across the two.
First of all, it looks like this is a really complex device! 3 PCBs with lots of components, multiple microcontrollers and a huge and expensive FPGA!
The issue was identified very quickly right on the power board, where the power supply is connected to, an inductor that is in series with the supply was not conductive anymore!
Since conductors are useless parts anyways we can easily bridge them to get the supply voltage across them:
Are they used as some sort of fuse? To they filter our high frequencies from the power supply? No idea but the device works flawless now and it has already been tested at the next party for live DJing:
I would call this a complete success! Yey
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