Repairing my son’s Mr. Owl night light
My two-year-old son received a Mr. Owl (Meneer de Uil) night light as a gift from a dear friend of mine. There’s a button on the base that you need to hold for two seconds to turn it on or off and then It has various light settings: blue like Mr. Owl and two or three levels of brightness of very unpleasant white light. You change the setting by tapping Mr. Owl and the light changes. Oh, and it has a built-in li-ion battery that can be recharged using the supplied micro-USB cable.
My son has never seen Daily Fable (De Fabeltjeskrant) but he instantly loved tapping Mr. Owl on the head and seeing the light change! 😆
After turning it on for the first time and letting my son play with it for a bit, I decided it was time to charge it. You want your batteries to be charged when you need them, right?
I take the micro-USB cable, plug it in and… “snap!”, followed by something rattling on the inside. Looking into the place where the cable goes, the entire USB port had broken off! Either I’m unlucky or this is some low quality engineering. How am I going to explain to my son that daddy broke his new toy? 😭
I decided I was going to fix it, how hard could it be? The whole thing clearly is built out of two parts: The owl “sculpture” and the base that contains the electronics. There are no visible screws, and it must be child safe, so it probably snaps together somehow. I started prying with a long screwdriver, but man is this annoying. I heard some cracks (no way back now 😬) and with quite a lot of force I managed to separate the base from the case. I indeed managed to break some plastic, but no so bad that it would be visible on the outside, if I could get everything back together that is.
Sorry! Please excuse my bad pictures, it was late, and I was very annoyed.
The breakout board with the USB connector was so flimsy. The connector was soldered on, it wasn’t a through hole component as you would expect from something that gets a bit of force. Below is the result after soldering it back on. It’s probably not going to last forever, but it will do for now.
Close-up of the board. There are four white SMD leds and a single blue one on the right. I’m curious why there are two unpopulated spots on there. The “tube” on the bottom right is a vibration sensor, something like an SW-18020P, that is what makes Mr. Owl react to being hit on the head.
After having soldered on the connector, I put the board back in the case and tried to plug the cable in. There was a slight problem, which was that the connector was seated so deeply that the USB connector could not properly plug in. 🤦♂️ I decided to cut of a bit of the plastic with a craft knife, which you can see in one of the pictures. It’s not perfect, but you can barely tell and it works great. Now it was time to reassemble everything, but there was no way I would be able to get it back together due to the force I had to apply when taking things apart. There had to be another solution. The sculpture is quite stiff, but it looks like the material would give a little if heated. Out came my girlfriend’s hair dryer and I heated the base for a minute or two. I could feel it becoming softer! With a bit of flexing I managed pop the base right back in. There’s a little bit of damage on the bottom of the base because of the force I used when opening it, but it’s hard to spot. It works great again and my son doesn’t even know that something happened to it!
A few weeks later I found the exact same night light, brand new, on sale for only 1 euro! Maybe they are so cheap because of a high failure rate?? 😉
Another thing I’m tempted to try is to convert it to USB-C using a breakout board, which would be more convenient. Maybe some other day, I have quite a few things I still want to do.