Based on the pattern of the failure. I.e. gradually failing over time.
I suspect it might be a simple component like a capacitor that has failed, causing one of the power supply rails to stop working. Capacitors mostly fail in a short.
It should be pretty easy for a repair shop to fix.
If the cause is something else, then it might be uneconomical to repair.
If you have the knowledge, you could probably test the power rails with an oscilloscope to check they are all steady.
It is a shame that FW don’t release the full schematics and boardviews as it would be much easier to repair oneself then, and people could upload youtube videos explaining the various faults people have found and then help everyone out as a community.
For example, for mobile phones and some manufactures laptop that have released the schematics and board views, it also includes details of what the voltage should be at various test points. Making it easy of anyone to diagnose problems without needing a repair shop.
On one device I came across. The EC would measure the volts on all the supply rails and it let you do a test whereby it would try to power on the device, take a measurement of the volts, and report that back to the test engineer. Thus saving one even having to use a oscilloscope or a probe. One could also manually supply volts to the EC in order for it to carry out the test, even if the EC was not getting power properly. It just made fault diagnosis a lot quicker.
There was also another option, once the power rail test passed, to do a more full BIST test, whereby it would test a majority of the motherboard.
It appears the EC does take some temp measurements and fan speed measurements, but does not appear to take supply rail measurements.
Edit: Didn’t know about schematics being open until last night.
Schematics, and other material are here on github
See also this repo, it has some additional material.
Well… The following was their reply, I repost it here to prevent false hopes and disappointments, and to take little bit off their workload from support.
Thank you for reaching out, I appreciate your interest in accessing the full schematics and your reasoning behind requesting it here, however I’m afraid that we are not able to provide schematics under NDA to individuals, at present we can provide schematics to repair centers through an approval and NDA process. There are a number of reasons why opening up schematic access to individuals is not practically possible though I’m not at liberty to discuss these, I hope you understand.
Please understand that self repair is at the heart of our mission at Framework, so please understand these conversations and efforts are ongoing with our various manufacturing partners.
Strongest reason, I guess, is protecting some intellectual property of their suppliers.
I hope they find a way to give us complete information.
It’s going to be a process slowly getting better quality schematics unfortunately. What sucks currently is that there is basically nothing for the power system other than the block diagrams and power rail ordering. Considering it’s a bunch of IC it’s going to be a bit interesting. Pinouts can probably be found in external datasheets and other leaked schematics from larger companies.
It’s unfortunate I can find better schematics for competing products on the internet. I hope that they provide more of what they can of the full schematics if possible at minimum.
Researching the datasheets will be easier than identifying the SMDs, I’m sure. And if this board is not salvageable, the results will still make a useful post or GitHub PR to the unofficial specs repo.
Thanks!