Last summer, the plastic micro-USB covers snapped off my lovely Romanian Lumma Systems Grip Lights. I had plenty of time to find new covers, but of course didn’t and could have at least covered the port with a large rubber band, but I digress.

This spring, I carelessly rode through a few spring showers that seemingly shorted out my lights. The lights will still somewhat work when pressing the button, but they randomly turn on and off and cycle through modes all by themselves. Fortunately the laser still works. I happened to be one of the lucky backers who received all three sets of lights that I ordered, which means I still have a couple working sets to roll with, but I really want to fix up my broken left Grip Light.

I pulled two phillips screws out of the grip light and disconnected its power cable. The board slides out of the housing by gently prying up on the rubber fittings around each LED. Using my digital multimeter, I delicately poked around the PCB, which isn’t all that complicated. I soon found resistors R7, R8, and R14 to have given up their ghosts. R7 is marked 470, R8 is covered in rust and unreadable, and R14 is marked 220. I’ll try to verify R8 on another board, but it will probably be covered in dried hot glue unless I tear some away to expose it.

I don’t have the proper board level soldering gun to attempt this repair, but I may give it a shot with my pencil soldering iron and try to replace the blown resistors. Will post an update later if I can size and source the resistors.