Fixing A Ubiquiti 16-Port PoE Switch With An Extra Hole

After conserving a ₤ 300, 16-port Ubiquiti network switch from getting tossed into the garbage, [Buy It Fix It] got the honor oftrying to repair it With 4 ports and their associated PoE function having some significant concerns it appeared like it may take some debugging, however after taking the cover off, the cause appeared rather apparent.

One of the Broadcom BCM5911 controller chips had a rather suspicious chip of the plastic product packaging missing out on, with extra penetrating of linked parts revealing that many MOSFETs and a diode having had their proverbial guts burnt out and were shorted too. Whatever occurred to some linked Ethernet gadget would appear to have actually left a severe path of damage that almost trashed the whole switch.

The greatest obstacle here was most likely to discover a replacement for the Broadcom IC, as this isn’t an IC that shops like Digikey or Mouser stock anymore. Fortunately it was still offered for sale over at AliExpress for ₤ 1.84, with the normal caution that it might be salvage, phony, a factory decline, and so on In this case it appears that it was a legitimate Broadcom IC, with the 4 impacted ports bouncing back to life consisting of powering a PoE video camera.

With an overall expense of about ₤ 5 plus the time invested it wasn’t a bad offer to conserve a quite good PoE switch with 16 Ethernet and 2 SFP ports.