Dropped my mosquito racket and it stopped delivering charge to the bars. When pressing the button, the red light comes on, a bit flickery, but no charge to kill mosquitoes with. Suspecting some loose connection, I opened it up to see why, power going into the circuit board, but no power coming out. Presuming one of the four components on this board is stuffed.
My question is, and I must qualify I’m not looking for fatherly advice on what to do next, but rather just curious if someone has actually successfully repaired one of these mosquito exterminating rackets? Looks like just a capacitor, maybe a heat sink and two resistors.
Thanks. I had a poke around, couldn’t seem to complete a circuit with any of the connectors on the board, except for where the wires go in. I don’t really have a clue what I am doing though, so that could be a factor.
Photos? We have people here that understand electronics a bit…
Generally, I guess much of the electronic stuff inside your racket can’t easily break from being dropped. So the guess above, that something might be simply mechanically bent, dislocated or disconnected. That might be repairable.
These things are so cheaply made that something will break… surface mounted component and all that, and you would also need some equipment for tracing bad circuit and all that.
I know we shouldn’t waste, and I just spent an afternoon cleaning trash along the beach, but isn’t a new one just a couple hundred dollars? Is it worth the hassle to fix it if it’s not intriguing?
Well, maybe something broke… problem is you need some equipment to find out which. And the part that broke could be the size of a grain of rice. Good luck finding that, and finding the right part to replace it with.
Here are some photos. Everything seems connected okay, can’t see anything obviously disconnected or bent out of shape. The wire out of the PCB to the charged racket wire is pretty strong.
What about the PCB? I mean it looks a bit bent. Everything else is inside that black structure which looks like it’s potted in epoxy, so there’s no fixing it.
Many consumer electronic is like this… not user servicable.
Assuming it’s any of those parts… a replacement will cost more than the racket.
@bdog So it seems noone here fixed such a thing before. You asked not to give “fatherly advice”, which I would of course respect. In case you’d like to debug together though I’d be in
No clear signs of damage, as you already mentioned. First step would be try new batteries - just in case ^^
If that doesn’t help: Do you happen to have a multimeter / ohm-meter?
If yes, I’d suggest (while there is no battery inside) checking the resistance between the two wires going to the racket:
If this is shorted, that could mean some damage further up inside the wire mesh part, as suspected by @ponlaihop . If yes then maybe checking the upper mesh part for any bent areas and re-aligning could help.
If not short… hmmm… The black thingy @Taiwan_Luthiers mentioned is a capacitor, probably the most stable part in the whole thingy. Actually, none of the parts look especially fragile to me. Depends a bit on the drop… anyway, everything except for the transformer (yellow plastic tape around it) and the transistor (black half-round thingy next to the red LED) can probably be checked with a multimeter.
Yes the PCB (printed Circuit board) seems a bit bent. Maybe not a huge issue since it seems to be an ultra-cheap single layer type, which likely is much more stable than the fancy multilayer ones I normally work with. You could still check the underside of it to see if any trace is visibly broken, or any of the solder joints look broken. Worst case: Take a photo and let us check.
Oh by the way: Caution, high voltage on that capacitor (black big box with two wires coming out of it)! Better not touch it, or at least not after the thingy is fixed ^^
Seems a tiny bit more complicated: I see 1 capacitor, 1 transformer, 2 resistors, 1 transistor, 2 diodes, 1 LED.
Actually, there seems to be repair videos - like this. Funny! I guess we can figure out whats wrong, seems like lot of resources online
Thanks very much for these pointers @olm. Trying to locate my multimeter, I really hope I brought it over. I will update the thread when I make some progress.
They have maybe a couple of dozen models in that place, but they’re not expensive.
I don’t think I paid more than, say, several hundred, and mine seems to work totally fine and accurately for anything I’ve used it for (e.g., when measuring voltages on a regulated power supply or the resistance of a resistor, it’s been spot on). I haven’t noticed any lack of reliability. How would that show up?
