Hello,
I‘m Jannes, I‘m 25 years old and I‘m studying environmental science.
As well as other matters, what probably brought me there and here was my willingness to fix things. More detailed electrical and mechanical things, which usually are thrown away as soon as they break. I learned a lot from my father, who spend a lot of time repairing things.
So back in the days it all started with the Nokia N900 and the E7, one of the first and also last smartphones by the original Nokia brand, the micro-USB connector was broken and i had to solder it back on. I went on with a HTC HD2, where I got into the Android custom ROM scene for the first time. The HD2 was a Windows phone which also booted Android quite well, but tended to break the flex cable to the touchscreen so I had to replace it several times, back then there wasn‘t any iFixit guides or such… letting the HTC go I got an Iphone4 or 4s, I can‘t even remember how often I had to replace the screen on it because I drove over it with a car or such things, nevertheless I always got it back to life.
It was also around that time I started to repair phones for friends and also just getting broken phones from them. So I also got two broken Samsung Galaxy S2, one had a broken display the other a defective mainboard, so the only logical thing for me was to combine them into one phone which worked really well after changing the Samsung software for a custom Rom, I think it is still working with android Q (!)…
Which brings me to the main topic of this post, my Xiaomi mido(s), I bought one used on ebay and was quite happy with it, until it wouldn‘t charge anymore and only a red light started to flash when i wanted to start it or connected it to a power source. The only way of charging it was to flash the original stock rom or mount it as mtp device to a computer. After investigating the battery which was still alive, I deduced the fault to the Power control module which must have had a broken resistor. So I ordered one somewhere in the web not knowing that also the cellular module was included in the PCM-board, which lead to faulty receptions and bad mobile data speed. To fix that I bought spare parts of a guy who thought his fingerprint reader was broken, which is a quite famous software fault on the redmi note 4x. I got everything of him except the touchscreen and display and replaced my faulty PCM board. The phone worked like a charm once again. Until my touchscreen threw some errors, there was a cross where no touches were recognized. So i bought a new touchscreen and replaced it. With testing for / e / starting, I couldn‘t use my daily phone to flash test builds whenever I want, also i had all these spare parts flying around which assembled correctly would make not a completely functional phone but still enough for a testing phone to tinker around. I started to put all that together and voila I got a second mido just from spare parts.
What I’ve learned from all this is, if anyone needs new phones, first check on iFixit if your old one is still repairable and second step if it isn’t, go to iFixit again and check repairability of the phone you are looking to buy, they give scores for most phones regarding just that.
Regain your privacy! Adopt /e/ the unGoogled mobile OS and online services
