Shibby's blog

Christmas is not too far away from now and Santa Claus already brought me a gift: a nice faulty electronic toy 🙂
When people usually take back the faulty device to the mall, I prefer to repair it myself as long as it’s possible (and also because I bought it from Amazon and I didn’t want to send it back since I could not find it elsewhere).
This toy called « Jojo pot de colle » (I only know its French name) was supposed to follow the kid, guided by a carrot shaped infrared remote control that the kid attaches to his wrist. Actually, it wasn’t able to do anything else than running round and round. So, my first guess was a battery issue: wrong! A motor issue: wrong too! So after opening it and re-soldering a broken wire with no luck, I’ve played with the oscilloscope around the IR receivers that the toy uses to move towards the kid. One of these receivers seemed to be faulty (no IR reception), but it was actually a PCB issue. These components pins are bent so much that one of them pushed the pad away from the single side PCB and broke the connection to the ground.
One more soldering later, the toy was working like it should have since the beginning.

http://dl.shibby.fr/blog.shibby.fr/Toy_repair/JojoPotDeColleRemoteControlProtocol.pdf