Fix It Yourself

My baby monitor, a 5-year old Motorola MBP 36 monitor broke yesterday, with the power socket popping off of the circuit board (this is where you plug in the power cord, so without it, it will eventually run out of power).  Some of the soldering must have eventually worn away after five years of being slammed around by children, babysitters, and my own oafish coordination.

The power socket is that black thing in the middle, it should actually be attached to the circuit board slightly to its left.  It has four prongs, one on each of the corners.

This raised the typical conundrum: do I just go out and buy a new one for $150-ish, or try to fix it myself?  Fortunately, the internets had comments from others who had the same problem and said they fixed it by soldering it back together, so I thought, what the hell -- if I can fix it cheap myself, great, and if I can't, I'll just buy a new one anyway.  But at the same time, you don't want to mess up the fix and have the unit explode in a fire-y explosion.

I'm slightly ashamed to say I didn't have a soldering iron on hand, so we had to buy one for $8.  And I admit, I haven't done a lot of soldering before, so I took a shot at trying to solder each of the four prongs back onto the board.  I was surprised at the sudden-ness of the solder wire melting onto the iron, and then having to dab the melted-on solder from the iron onto the board -- I expected the wire to melt immediately, rather than after a slight delay and whirl of smoke, which made it a bit tricky.

I got a small dab of solder on each corner, kind of by luck.  But it felt solid in place, so I figured it was as good as it was going to without me improving my soldering skills.  Snapping the unit back together, I plugged it in and it worked like a charm.

Great success!