Power wire pulled out of plug

[qbert1]

Hello,

I searched and didn't see anything, I hope someone can help. Something fell on my power wire and the wire pulled itself from the power plug in the cigarette lighter spot. I'm handy with a soldering iron so I figure I can probably fix this myself. However when I opened up the power plug, I couldn't make out where the three wires should be connected. There's a +5v and ground connection point on the circuit board. Any ideas?

The model is a TomTom XL with traffic - there's probably more to that model id but I can't find it.

Thanks in advance!

 

[tgold]

Be very careful because the TomTom needs 5V and not the 12V from the car socket. So if you get this wrong you will smoke your SatNav. If you have a voltmeter and experience you should be able to rescue this, but otherwise play it safe and get a new power adapter cord.

 

[canderson]

You don't say which wire(s) became disconnected, but there's something you need to know regardless... The third wire is feedback to the charger that monitors the actual voltage delivered to the unit, less whatever losses through the cable (aka "remote sense"). If that wire (white, if I recall correctly) becomes disconnected with the other two (+5 and ground) in place, the charger can deliver up to the vehicle battery voltage to your unit, and it's toast. So the advice to just grab a meter and find the ground and +5 isn't enough. If you don't get the remote sense wire connected in the right place, and apart from physical evidence as to its location, you'd not likely spot it, there's a real danger of cooking your XL.

Frankly, I'm surprised it didn't rip one or more pads right off the charger board.

Since there have been several different charger designs over time, it would be hard to know where the traces would be for certain, and I'm going to agree with tgold that replacing it is the wiser choice.

 

[Andy_P]

There used to be an article on resoldering the sense wire (on early models of the charger at least) on one of the UK repair shops websites (I think it was http://www.satnav-shop.com/ run by a guy called "eldar" on the forums)

Unfortunately the site seems to have vanished now, and I've not seen 'eldar' posting recently either.

 

[Arno]

Some pages can be accessed here.
There are 19 date entries but under the heading of Help or Article I did not see any reference to the above problem.