Saturday, July 16, 2022

Spicy Pillows

So my Pixel C tablet has been sitting at the office for a few years. I had the charger hooked up to a timer so that it wasn't being continuously charged, but apparently that can only do so much. When I finally picked it up while clearing out my former cube space, the screen had nearly popped off from the batteries swelling up.

That luckily made it a lot easier to remove the screen to get at those swollen batteries.

It was still a bit of a struggle since it was glued the whole way around, but luckily I have a good supply of guitar picks and patience, and I was able to get an x-acto blade in the gap to slice through the remaining spots of glue.

That revealed...

... some very spicy pillows indeed.

That were, themselves, glued into the case quite securely.

More prying, along with using my hot air rework gun to heat the back of the case, freed the first one up.

Hmm, it's a good thing that lithium vapor isn't toxic.

More heating, more prying, and the second cell came up.

Flawlessly extracted.

Though let's pretend we didn't see that side.

With the case now devoid of dancing pixies, we have a place to install the new battery.

Which was, luckily, quite easy to do.

Then it's just a matter of plugging the screen back in, squishing it down into the still very sticky glue, and...

That's a job well done!

It's just a shame that Android tablets are so god awful. Why did I even fix this in the first place?

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