I’ve got this Philips Speed LX shaver which was awesome before it burned out. I was a little miffed since I had just replaced the head, blades and bought a year worth of consumables for its automatic cleaner and wireless charger.

I took it apart assuming the battery went but the battery (14500 3.7V) was fine. The controller board was melted. It created enough heat to distort the plastic parts. What went wrong? No idea. The first thing that came to mind was that the battery discharged into the controller board but if it did, not by much since the battery was at 3.3V. Well I guess that could have happened. Perhaps the wireless charger did it? Wait that’d be more of a trickle thing so perhaps the board did grab power from the battery and melt.

Anyway I slept on it and woke up with the idea of just rewiring it, jumping the controller board. In fact I just wired the motor to the charging outlet. I then took the cable from its wall wart and spliced a USB jack onto it.  So not I can run it from my solar charged cell phone boosters. Plus it’s an upgrade from 3.5V to 5V.

Process

I can see that at one point it leaked water in since the motor had rust. This thing is supposed to be water resistant but apparently not. And especially with the melted controller board since it distorted the case along the seal lines…

I drove the motor with a lab supply. It seems to draw .34 Amps at 3.7V and .45 under load.

Published on: Aug 5, 2018 @ 05:49