We have spent some time over the last week working on an ipad 5 that someone attempted to replace the screen on themselves.
Unfortunately this repair was with us about a week to get it back to its full glory.
It was brought in as after replacing the screen it would not power on. We connected to our ammeter and got 0.08/0.09 amps which is incredibly low for charging an ipad
We opened the ipad very easily as the replacement adhesive was very weak, straight away we could see that the home button flex had been torn. We removed the screws and gave the board a quick visual inspection. From initial inspection we could see that the power and volume button connector had been damaged. Also the connector for the home button was cracked and the main shield had marks making us think it had been removed before. None of this damage would cause the ipad not to turn on. We removed the main board EMI shield to inspect the components and saw no obvious damage.
We removed the board from the ipad and connected to our DC power supply to see if the ipad would boot. When connected and bridging power button the ipad would turn on and function, when then plugged into our ammeter we would only pull 0.08-0.22, constantly jumping which is still very abnormal. So from this we knew that there must be a fault on the charging circuit.
We then tested the voltages around the tristar charging ic and they seemed ok without checking to schematics. We then inspected the surrounding area and found a slightly damaged resistor, near where the pry marks on the shield was. we replaced this and the ipad would now charge normally.
From here we where able to test the device to ensure there were no more unknown faults before proceeding to repair the known issues.
Next we found a replacement power button fpc which matched the ipad air 1 connector, this was fitted which restored the volume button functions but not the power button. We checked the flex and found that one line from the power button was broken and repaired the flex.
We then turned to the home button, luckily the damage was on the connector side which is an extension flex, meaning instead of repairing the flex one track at a time we can actually replace the cable which is much easier to do and only needs basic soldering instead of lots of tiny micro jumpers.
We then tested this in the cracked connector on the board and although the connector was damaged it was still working fine, we decided that this did not need replacing.
As the ipad 5 is still a fairly new device we have not seen as many of these so do not hold as many spares in stock, this is the main reason for delays in this repair, along with the fact that schematics are available but no board views so components are much harder to identify than older models.
Nevertheless we returned the ipad to a very happy customer that was over the moon to have their precious ipad back in full working order.
