While installing a new wifi antenna (antenna wire got pinched) in a buddy's white macbook (non LED model).
Unknowing what the heck happened, after putting everything back together, the backlight DID NOT work.
I thought it could have been the inverter, I put a new inverter in from another macbook that had logic board issues. NO GO.
The LCD worked just perfect, you could see that it was working fine, just no light at all. The backlight HUD displayed just fine also.
Took it apart and hunted around the board for sources of power around the port of the backlight plug(that runs to the inverter)... I noticed the far right terminal on the plug was only getting 2ish volts, on my girlfriends macbook that WORKS, that same pin received 10v until the backlight was manually turned off (holding down the "lower brightness" button). Pin #2 sends 0-5v, depending on how "bright" you have the backlight set to, just in case anyone has any nifty mods in mind, I thought that could be good information
ANYWAYS, I found a point on the logic board near the backlight plug that supplied 10v+ solid power. I closed a circuit with a wire from that point to the pin #4 of the backlight plug. BAM, we have light!... Fixed.
This happened once before on another buddy's macbook, we put a new inverter in it, no go... he was loaded so he just dumped a lot of money on a new logic board and was up and going. I guess there's an extremely sensitive resistor somewhere between that 10v point and pin #4
here's a picture of the fix.
Unknowing what the heck happened, after putting everything back together, the backlight DID NOT work.
I thought it could have been the inverter, I put a new inverter in from another macbook that had logic board issues. NO GO.
The LCD worked just perfect, you could see that it was working fine, just no light at all. The backlight HUD displayed just fine also.
Took it apart and hunted around the board for sources of power around the port of the backlight plug(that runs to the inverter)... I noticed the far right terminal on the plug was only getting 2ish volts, on my girlfriends macbook that WORKS, that same pin received 10v until the backlight was manually turned off (holding down the "lower brightness" button). Pin #2 sends 0-5v, depending on how "bright" you have the backlight set to, just in case anyone has any nifty mods in mind, I thought that could be good information
ANYWAYS, I found a point on the logic board near the backlight plug that supplied 10v+ solid power. I closed a circuit with a wire from that point to the pin #4 of the backlight plug. BAM, we have light!... Fixed.
This happened once before on another buddy's macbook, we put a new inverter in it, no go... he was loaded so he just dumped a lot of money on a new logic board and was up and going. I guess there's an extremely sensitive resistor somewhere between that 10v point and pin #4
here's a picture of the fix.