### Fixing Trek Stor 3.0’s blank screen

My wife’s eBook reader TrekStor 3.0 suddenly started displaying a blank screen after a fall. If you’re having the same problem and the screen is intact, chances are that the problem is identical, so I will describe how I proceeded to fix the issue.

Blank screen

Since there are no moveable parts and the screen was obviously undamaged, I decided to open it to search for the source of the failure. I discovered the problem is that the eBook reader is so slim that the case presses down on the inductors even when a minimal amount of strength is applied. In this case it was easy to pin-point the problem to a broken SMD (surface mount device) inductor, in this case a 10 uH inductor (you can read “100” printed on the inductor which means the inductance is $10\times 10^0 = 10$ uF ).

Old, broken, inductor

Having no SMD components at hand, I decided to try a through-hole inductor and see whether or not that fixed the screen.

Test inductor (through-hole)

It worked, so I bought a SMD inductor and soldered it into place.

New inductor

New inductor

And voilà! Problem solved!

Working TrekStor