Green Notification LED stays on even when phone is off

[AngelOfAnger]

Here's the deal. My phone got wet. I cleaned it and dried it out. Residue was left in between the LCD and the digitizer so I took it apart to clean it.
Ever since putting the damn thing back together, the green LED stays on all the time. If I shut the phone down, the light is still solid. I don't know when I have notifications anymore, because when it's on the thing is solid all the time as well. I know this can't be very helpful for battery life. Have any of you experienced anything like this? Any ideas on how to fix this? I'm thinking I might have just gotten dirt or something on a connection somewhere. Anyways, any help is appreciated.

 

[SMMAssociates]

Angel:

Have you tried the "battery pull" reboot? Or a suicide reboot? Or the really nasty "reset to factory" acts?

If none of that works, I'd bet on a bit of crud or a solder ball holding whatever lights that light in a solid "on" state. Seems likely after the sort of mess you were in.

A serious stripdown and cleaning might be in order.... The one thing I don't know is how that LED is lit - could be software, hardware, etc. Sounds like hardware to me.

(Just IMHO, but if the software - actually, probably firmware - is farkled enough to do this, something else should be trash, too.)

I'll believe anything, though. The Droid X version that I started with about a year ago reminded me of Windows 98ME. Flaky at best. The dumb thing decided to let incoming calls ring the phone, but if I tried to answer, nothing was there. Cursed it for a while until I remembered the concept of re-booting ....

(The latest version of the OS seems to be reasonably - knock wood - stable. I have almost exactly a year to go, and may bail out. Windows Mobile was more stable, and never barfed to the point that I had to suicide the phone. Twice, so far, with the Droid. Kinda sorry about this because I like the phone.... Guess I'll go chat up the space cadet who sold my daughter her iPhone.... Sweet little girl, but I'm not sure how she found her store in the AM without help....)

Regards,

 

[AngelOfAnger]

Thanks for the reply and sorry I've been away for a while. I did a full tear down and replaced the LCD since it had some ugly spots on it from the water. The led doesn't work at all now, so I might replace the little strip that its attached to. My screen looks damn good now though lol. I'm still trying to decide if I want to replace the damn led strip now or not haha

Sent from my Transformer using Tapatalk

 

[SMMAssociates]

Angel:

I'd rather have a working screen ....

That strip could be wired in so many different ways that you may never quite get it right.

I'm presuming you've got some experience in this sort of thing, but I'll lecture anyway ....

When you're lighting up an LED these days (especially with a blink), all kinds of goofy stuff can be used to do it. You can, for example, power the LED directly from a "main" feed (3VDC and up), and switch the ground by way of a "driver" IC or a couple components (one or two transistors). Or you can ground the LED and switch the voltage to it the same way.... Meantime, the "feed" from whatever's telling the driver components to light (or turn off) the LED can be of either polarity, and from about any source. The blink, for example, could be coming from a microprocessor (there's at least one) that's handling the timing of the blink, or the steady state, and hitting the driver just for the extra current.

Or there may be no driver at all - the processor could be capable of driving the LED by itself.

Or the steady state action could be one driver, and the blink coming from the processor, or vice versa, or....

(I'm just getting warmed up.... )

IMHO, it's still likely that a bit of crud or a solder ball is the real culprit, but finding it could be fun, and it's probably not worth the effort. If you have the itch to pop out that little board, look for semi-microscopic crud - green stuff, etc., an solder balls. Might get lucky....

Reminds me of a friend's kid, many years ago, who tossed his dad's Motorola HT (Ham Radio) into the toilet 'cause dad was yakking on it too much for the kid's choice. Once my buddy cleaned and dried it, it worked better....

Or the time my daughter jumped into a pool with a brand new phone in her pocket, 2 days before heading off to a couple weeks at a camp. I grabbed the phone, cleaned and dried it, to no avail, and ended up buying her another one (I was a very wealthy man until my wife found out about it ). The old one sat for three or four months, and I happened to notice it one afternoon. A partial re-assembly, just for the heck of it, gave me a working phone! The wife had been asking for a new one, so I put it back together and called the carrier to activate it for her. It's still working, although "retired" for quite a while. (I think it's Analog, so it's not going to do anything useful anymore, but that's another story.)

Good luck!