Soldering Pipo

A friend handed me a Pipo M3 tablet that's gone into some kind of screen freeze and asked me if I could fix it. Although I do have a soldering iron, I'm not really good at such things but I was willing to try. And it worked:

This is what I did. First a picture of the two diodes that I bought:

There's a website (http://www.slatedroid.com/topic/41687-solved-mod-pipo-m3-touchscreen-issue/page__st__20__gopid__749161#entry749161) with a brief description of a possible fix and I used that as a guideline. The trick would be to solder a Schottky diode 1N4148 or 1N5819 to bridge two very tiny parts on the board. I bought both diodes and used the tiniest of the two.

Opened the back using a credit card to un-click the front/back connectors. The electronics were insulated by thin plastic sheets fastened with sticky tape.

I used the soldering iron to temporarily disconnect the red wire (the plus wire from the rechargable battery). Then I used gaffer tape to isolate the parts the diode would be touching, to make sure no unintentional shortcut would be made:

 Bent the legs of the diode to fit the two connectors it needed to connect with:

 Stuck the diode in place:

 ... did some soldering, using the camera with macro lens and a magnifying glass to check what I'd done. The left leg should maybe have been heated longer but if the tiny blob had spread it would have made more connections than I needed.