Asus E403 no Wifi after repairing battery connector.

[CircuitRehab]

Hi! I recently repaired the battery connector on an Asus E403 after the previous person had completely destroyed the connector along with the traces.

The laptop now works perfectly on battery power, but for some reason, wifi does not work at all. Windows and Ubuntu do not detect any wifi card in the system, even after trying a few different wifi cards and installing all the neccesary drivers.

I did notice that Ubuntu and Windows do detect a bluetooth card in the system when I reconnect the network card, but the wifi side of things is completely missing.

I've checked the board and I can not see any damage to the PCI connector or any of the surrounding components. I'm also getting voltage on the PCI connector itself.

I'm completely stuck right now and would appreciate any help and advice.

Thanks

[mon2]

Re: Asus E403 no Wifi after repairing battery connector.

The design is very likely to be a mini-pcie interface style.

Locate the module and inspect the nearby dc-blocking caps that must be present for the clock lines / interface lines. If any of the caps are damaged or missing, the communication will halt from the logic board to this PCIe device.

Post clear pix of the area, perhaps we can locate the caps. Often they are 0.1 uf 0402 sized caps (from the PCIe spec) - we use 0402 in our many many PCIe designs.

Plan B is to use an external USB ethernet dongle which are quite cheap and sturdy. ASIX has a good ethernet controller and with mature device drivers. Natively supported on MAC products. Windows / Linux support as well is available.

Update - found BV files for this logic board - which version do you have ? The design is PCIe interface. Post silk screen details so we can locate the WLAN connector to save some time.

[CircuitRehab]

Re: Asus E403 no Wifi after repairing battery connector.

The design is very likely to be a mini-pcie interface style.

Locate the module and inspect the nearby dc-blocking caps that must be present for the clock lines / interface lines. If any of the caps are damaged or missing, the communication will halt from the logic board to this PCIe device.

Post clear pix of the area, perhaps we can locate the caps. Often they are 0.1 uf 0402 sized caps (from the PCIe spec) - we use 0402 in our many many PCIe designs.

Plan B is to use an external USB ethernet dongle which are quite cheap and sturdy. ASIX has a good ethernet controller and with mature device drivers. Natively supported on MAC products. Windows / Linux support as well is available.

Update - found BV files for this logic board - which version do you have ? The design is PCIe interface. Post silk screen details so we can locate the WLAN connector to save some time.

Thank you for your reply.

I'll attach an image of the area around the PCI-e connector as well as the the board numbers.

If you're wondering what all of the black stuff is on the board, the battery connector had to be glued back down with B-7000 glue as the pads to hold the connector to the board were completely ripped and missing.

I hope these photos are ok.

[mon2]

Re: Asus E403 no Wifi after repairing battery connector.

See attached for the boardview file for this logic board.

Perhaps some nearby parts flew off the board during the rework of the battery connector ?

Will study once at the office.

[vannix]

Re: Asus E403 no Wifi after repairing battery connector.

it looks like a missing component in the red circle, probably a large capacitor/inductance/resistor.
check with the boardview provided by mon2!

EDIT: check 2nd image for R2402

[CircuitRehab]

Re: Asus E403 no Wifi after repairing battery connector.

it looks like a missing component in the red circle, probably a large capacitor/inductance/resistor.
check with the boardview provided by mon2!

Thank you for your reply. I don't think a component is meant to go there. I've taken a look at some boards online for sale and in the photos, the same pad is also empty.

Thank you for your help though

[vannix]

Re: Asus E403 no Wifi after repairing battery connector.

check if you have 3v on pins 2,4,72,74 of the pcie connector. in this case that resistance is probably not necessary, although from the photo it seems that a component has been badly removed from that place.
if the +3v is present and stable it could be a problem of some signal, but mon2 is certainly more experienced than me