So I finally contracted COVID, felt shit all weekend, and marginally better today (Monday).
Thought it'd be good to play some games to pass the time, so I dusted of the old PS3, plugged her in and to my shock it wouldn't turn on. No lights, no beeps, dead as a duck.
Some google searching showed it's most likely a power supply fault. So out come the screwdrivers and the multimeter. Once apart and watching a few YouTube videos and reading repair tips I finally figured out how to trick the PSU into thinking it was turned on. 12v and 5v outputs measured just fine. Hmmmmmmm.
Next step was connecting the power supply back in, this time testing the 5v leads read 1v, strange. Unplug and the pins read 5v, connect the lead 1v. Grrrrr, somethings.not right.
Time to look up the price of a replacement powers supply, $40, 2 weeks wait and no guarantee it'll fix it, I'll keep trying my repair.
Then I recall one of the repair videos where one guy had plugged in a cell phone charger to the 5v lines. At the time I thought it was super sketchy (and in the video he claims he doesn't know how he fixed it), but at this point I was willing to throw it in the bin, so why not give it a go.
Hunted through my box of old cables and found a 5v charger, snipped the plug of the end, parallel wired into the playstations 5v line, turn everything on and low and behold the red led lights up. I turn it on, led goes green, fan spins up then everything shuts down. Fuck, so close.
So I'm hopeful now at least there's some life in there, I unwire the cellphone charger, connect all the factory wires back together. Plug it in, red light is illuminated, great. Turn it on, light goes green, playstation spins up and appears to be working. Yah, now to put it all back together.
Plugged it into the TV, confirmed it worked played a few rounds of Call of Duty online, job done.
Sure it took me nearly 3 hours to fix. But proud to have made my PS3 work again.
