A Digitone Repair Story

Elektron Gear Digitone/Digitone Keys
#1

It started stuck at boot up screen, some errors in the test menu run also appeared.
I opened a ticket (no warranty obviously) and asked for repair help. No repair help but got a very fair price for a board replacement from Elektron Support.
Since I used to repair all my synths which is cool and sexy to save gears also not to produce e-waste made me try my luck with the Digitone repair.

First session, opening up, checked the power lines, was looking for sign of damage but everything looked fine.
Second session, did some mechanical tests and found that issue was gone when I bent the board a little bit! This means a mechanical contact issue of a solder joint or a circuit line. I tested the BGA chips one by one and found one of the processors as suspect number one. When I pressed it down with my finger DN booted up when I released pressure it stopped working. So probably a BGA solder ball contact fault.

I don’t have equipment to reflow a BGA chip. Fortunately I work in a factory manufacturing electronic boards and managed to find a technician with the professional reflow station. He reflowed the suspicious chip with infra preheater and hot air and DN came back to life!

I am happy but also feel a little uncomfortable about the future repair support.
I think “Right To Repair” is absolutely a must for us. We are artist, humanists and not consumidiots.
Elektron is famous about long time firmware and hardware support and I would like to see support for self-repair service.

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#2

Nice job! Enjoyed the story!

2 Likes
#3

I can’t agree more, massively important and has a big influence on my purchasing decisions.

And huge Kudos :+1: to you for diagnosing and then fixing your Digitone @cema I think that job falls outside the scope of a simple repair for most consumers, but it is certainly encouraging to know that perhaps a mobile phone repair shop or hacker/maker space could easily repair this fault in the future for someone else should it happen to them, so thank you for documenting it.

5 Likes
#4

Nice one! And yes right to repair is a must. It’s a shame reflow stations are so expensive and hard to get.

I hope the tech will become more available to consumers so we can continue to fix our stuff

2 Likes
#5

You can get a temp controlled hot air gun for fairly cheap now, think I paid ÂŁ40 for mine.

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#6

I was still in warranty when I had sticky button issues with my DT and they said it was fine for me to open it up w/out voiding it to adjust the faceplate. So as long as you communicate & don’t fry the board, they’re probably pretty cool about it. So did you get a replacement board sent and fixed the original?

#7

Repair is better option than replace.
So I replied I really appreciated the replacement board offer but repair is my plan A.
Also in my mind I had the +Drive 100% full and not everything backed up on the computer. Now some projects came from the digital underworld.

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