Repairing a Ryobi P117 Intelliport Charger

Last week while cutting some walnut with my Ryobi track saw, it kept stalling on me. Turns out the battery was nearly dead because the charger stopped working and the status LEDs weren’t lighting up at all when plugged in.

I opened up the charger and didn’t see burn marks or swollen capacitors anywhere.

Then I found a video on YouTube and sure enough, the resistor at R71 was wide open, reading 152 kΩ on the multimeter.

It’s a surface mount resistor labeled R500, which means 0.5 Ω. I don’t have any resistors that size, so I soldered in a couple of 1 Ω resistors in parallel.

It’s not pretty, but it properly read 0.5 Ω on the multimeter.

I put it back together, plugged it in, and the red LED lit up. Took it down to the shop, put a battery in, and the charger is back in the rotation!

Revisiting My Resistor Organization

My supply of resistors (and diodes) has grown over the last year. The previous solution worked well, although the screw tops were a pain. I’d been doubling up some containers if the values were close enough, but had run out of cylinders, so starting chucking parts into the box.

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It went to Jo-Ann Fabrics again and was planning to buy another set of the cylinders, but they were either out of stock or don’t carry them anymore. So I found some organizers made for thread which don’t have adjustable compartments like a lot of these things. That was important because I don’t want the parts jumping compartments. The size looked good for the length of the resistors too, even if they had to be angled to fit. The cardboard label cards will make it easy to shuffle things around, compared to sticker labels, if I get a new resistor value.

I think it’s a nice improvement and will save time when I go digging for a resistor. I’m sure I can find a use for the cylinder organizer in my workshop, maybe for small screws.

Electronics by Number

I’ve been trying to think of a good way to organize my 100+ resistors. After getting a cheap 1,000 piece ceramic capacitor kit, finding a better way to organize things became a priority. At the local Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft I found these bead storage systems, which contain individual cylinders with screw tops. They work great and there were enough […]