HP P2015d formatter board repair

[MM]

I still have my old HP LasterJet P2015d, but it has the dreaded formatter board problem, as do thousands of these printers. This is when after a year or two the printer LEDs start-up sequence is wrong and the printer stops working.

Many printers never work again, but mine does work for a few minutes. If I switch it off and wait 30 minutes, then it usually works again - for another few minutes. Basically, a PITA.

The internet is groaning with posts about baking the formatter baord at 400 deg F for around 8 minutes ("recipe" varies...) Many people do report that this fixes the problem. Sometimes it appears to be a permanent fix. In other cases the fix lasts for a few months.

The baking at 400 deg is designed to re-flow the bad solder ball joints, which apparently were bad because the production facility in China had not got up to speed with handling lead-free solder when this printer was introduced. (It happens with other HP laser printers as well, however.)

But my question is, is there not a much more professional way of re-flowing that solder? Baking seems a very Heath-Robinson approach to me, even if it does work. Several people have said that the plastics on the board start to take a hit after a few minutes. All sounds very "iffy" to me.

Now what would a professional electronics engineer do? I'm not one, but maybe if I knew what the right method of fixing was, I could perhaps locate a suitable person and give him/her 20 quid. May only take a few minutes.

Any comments?

Cheers!

MM

PS: I bought another printer (not HP!) for everyday use, so the P2015d is just sitting in the spare room, unused. When it's working, it works perfectly. I even thought of removing the formatter board, flexing it a bit (~very~ slightly!), then replacing it. But of course, that could exacerbate the problem. New formatter boards are like gold dust and cost anything up to a hundred quid, so that's out of the question. Plus there is a huge rip-off market out there with people offering replacment boards that they have simply baked themselves.

[GB]

Wouldn't this have hundreds/thousands of joints, including really tiny surface-mounted components? If so, I expect "a professional electronics engineer" would bung it in the oven at 400 degrees.

[Dave]

MM was thinking very hard :

There's hundreds of videos on YouTube about reflowing/reballing of GPUs

- ok, not a printer formatter board but they'll show you the 'proper' equipment and techniques. This is one of the better quality video's and actually shows the reballing of a (can't remember if it's a PS3 or an Xbox360) GPU, the fault being, IIRC, the Red Ring of Death. It's about

15 minutes long but interesting to watch:

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Dave escribió:

They made a beautiful job of cleaning up the chip and reinstating the solder balls prior to reflowing.

[Andy Burns]

Agreed, but all that to fix an XBOX? Buy a replacement on fleabay!

[MM]

No, if it can be repaired cost effectively, then it should. I loathe the throwaway society.

MM

[Andy Burns]

That was my point, how much do you think someone would charge for that repair v.s. buying one on ebay?

[dennis]

8<

You mean a vapour phase soldering machine? A bit expensive for DIY.

Not even that long.

if its an oldish printer used infrequently you may pay for a new one on power and toner savings.

[dennis]

At minimum wage its cheaper to chuck it, do you expect skilled people to work for nothing?

[MM]

It's cheaper, sure, but not better. Equipment is *designed* to fail nowadays. It should be made illegal. My late mum's mangle was a cast iron jobbie with massive wooden rollers. It was already old when mum acquired it. My original LaserJet III lasted THIRTEEN years with only a new toner cartridge every now and then. That was anno 1993. Today, quality is abysmal. Throw a perfectly good printer away (my P2015 is only four years old) that has had VERY little wear (home use only) simply because one or two solder balls have dry joints? This is so utterly idiotic a policy, the conservation movement must really mount some sort of a campaign to re-educated manufacturers and designers. HP should have their arses sued off in a mass class action or something. It's not like just one or two of these printers have been affected, but thousands. Possibly tens of thousands. In one case alone, a company reported having a 100 of the things.

MM

[MM]

No, the printer was barely four years old when the problem first arose. And it had not even got half-way through its only *second* toner cartridge. 1½ cartridges and the printer's f***ed due to a design/manufacturing fault!! That's really shitty service in my view. I hope HP go bust.

MM

[charles]

don't blame HP. Blame the EU for banning leaded solder. The replacement gives unreliable joints which is why there are exemptions for equipment used for "medical or military purposes".

[Martin Brown]

That is what you get in a consumer society. Same logic results in dirt cheap or free mobile phones with complex monthly contracts and cheap inkjet printers with inks that cost more per gramme than pure heroin.

There was a time when HP stood for very high quality test equipment, computers and peripherals but those days are long gone now. The good bits were spun off as Agilent. Vote with your feet. I have. (I still have a working LJ III - or at least our Village Hall does)

BTW sticking the thing in the oven for just long enough to remelt the solder and crossing your fingers is probably your best bet. It might not work if the problem is down to some mismatch of the solders or flux originally - lead free and leaded solders used together don't cooperate.

Samsung and Dell do some reasonable robust but ugly laser printers.

[Paul D Smith]

If you've repaired it, you have a reasonable chance it will keep working. If you buy if off eBay either it may be about to fail shortly, or may have been badly repaired and will fail shortly, or it might work. So how may eBay Xboxes are you willing to buy before you find a good one - or you can have some fun.

I'm off to watch the video because my PS3 repair didn't work very well so I'm interested to know what they did better than me!

Paul DS

[The Other Mike]

The conservation movement, aka environmentalists, brought this crap on us in the first place by conning governments into restricting the use of certain elements. No one goes out to design unreliable electronics, but its going to be more common than it ought to be because of them.

But on the bright side, your electricity supply will be so unreliable in the years to come due to greenpeace and friends of the earth wind turbine huggers that electronic equipment will be come irrelevant.

Welcome to the new stone age, brought to you by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.

Me, I'd burn the lot of them at the stake.

[John Rumm]

There is a subtle difference between designed to fail, and not designed to last.

If I build a PVR and specify PSU capacitors with a 2000 hour life, which is that? If I spec 15K hour caps, and as a result everyone buys the cheaper unit from a competitor that uses the cheaper components, is that better?

The irony is that its the green movement that have caused many of these problems. I would guess that more kit gets trashed as a result of the use of lead free solder than any other single reason!

Yup, when there is evidence that loads have failed, perhaps. Even then tough it gets more complicated... The laserjets that lasted forever, were premium quality bits of kit with prices to match. The modern ones that only last a few years are in many cases less than a 20th of the price in real terms. Its is perhaps unrealistic to expect the same longevity.

[dennis]

It isn't designed to fail and it would be illegal. people have been prosecuted for put timers into kit so that they failed out of warranty.

I have no doubt that you can buy a mangle that is just as good these days if you want one. It probably won't cost as much either.

Thirteen years is poor for such a machine. they were designed for lots of pages. If you buy a comparable printer now (about £3000+ in today's money) you will get a machine just as capable.

You may well have a case against the retailer, you may even be able to get

10-15% back as most people would expect a 5 year life from a laser printer. Go and ask. You can use the masses of faults as evidence to show the fault was there at the time of purchase.

[dennis]

Wouldn't it be greener to make fish food out of them and drop it in the ocean?