Downtown Doug Brown » Hardware repair of an Elgato HD60 S that only worked on Mac
Here’s a weird problem that I’ve never seen before, along with my eventual hardware fix. After my previous Elgato Game Capture HD60 S HDMI capture card LED repair escapades, I recently ended up trying to find another modern revision of the same device so I could dump its SPI flash chip in order to be 100% certain that the data I put into the flash for the animations was correct for the newer model. I took a chance and bought one for cheap on eBay that was sold as not working at all, but looked like it was newer based on the case style and arrangement of the back panel:
Unit powers on when connected to computer, but all computers we’ve tested this with refuse to recognize it as being connected.
Even using a known-working USB 3.0 A-to-C cable, I replicated exactly what the seller claimed. When I plugged it into my computer, the status LEDs blinked white as they were supposed to, but Windows 10 almost immediately played the USB disconnect sound. If I left it plugged in long enough, I would sometimes see a message on the screen about a connected USB device malfunctioning. I didn’t care that it was broken though. To be honest, I was more excited about it having working LEDs.
That excitement quickly faded when I opened it up and discovered that it was an older model of the HD60 S in a newer enclosure — it used an MStar MST3363CMK chip for HDMI capture instead of the ITE IT6802E, and the microcontroller was a Nuvoton NUC100 instead of M031. It was still based on the CYUSB3014 at least. I already had a couple of working examples of these older versions of the HD60 S, so I couldn’t really learn anything new about the LEDs from it. Instead, I was left with a new interesting challenge: could I fix it?
