Let's play Spot the Cold Solder.

lazylion_ca@lemmy.ca to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 152 points –
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This is a circuit board from my slow cooker. It quit heating a week ago so I opened it up and found a broken wire. That was easily fixed.

I figured while I had it apart I should look at the display board and see if I can fix the missing segments. I resoldered the one pin but nothing changed.

Unfortunately my eyes arent what they used to be so the others someone pointed out will be a challenge.

5th pin down on the far left side in the picture.

There's no solder on the pin.

Most of the joints are questionable, that one is flat out bad.

Oh, that makes more sense. The heat from the malfunctioning cooker may have resoldered these points badly.

I was curious how like half the points were bad, and that could explain it.

e: especially since they’re all at the bottom half of the board. That was closest to the heating element, right?

That'd be about right. There's insulation inbetween.

Unlikely any heat from the slow cooker did anything. Solder melts at 370F. A slow cooker is never going to get anywhere close to that hot.

Strange that all the bad points are in the lower half of the board, and that most points in that half are bad, then.

e: could a malfunction make it heat beyond 370f?

It's most likely that it's related to the original manufacturing. These will be machine wave-soldered, not hand soldered, and having quality vary across the board isn't impossible if the setup/operators were less than ideal.

Perhaps. It still seems odd to me that this board was mounted vertically inline with the heating element and the bad parts I identified line up with that, before I knew that was the case: