#311 – An Interview with Louis Rossmann

Louis Rossmann: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Recorded August 10th, 2016. Episode 311. An interview with Louis Rossman.

Dave Jones: Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog. I'm Louis Rossman from Brooklyn. From Brooklyn. G'day, Louis. Thanks for joining us. Well, I was going to use my usual line. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for joining me. There is no Chris Gammell today. He took the day off. Yep.

Louis Rossmann: Many will be disappointed. I'm the substitute teacher.

Dave Jones: Fantastic. Introduce yourself for those who, well, probably for the few of our audience who haven't, heard of you, I guess.

Louis Rossmann: Well, my name is Louis. I have a store in New York that does, you know, basic electronics repair and just niche hardware. I do a YouTube channel where I show people how to do those repairs. I just talk about business, things like that. I expected about maybe 30 people to watch and listen. And for some ridiculous reason, 190 something thousand watch and listen, which to this day, I will never understand. But that's where I am now.

Dave Jones: Yeah, your channel is massively popular now. 194,000 subs. That's one of the biggest engineering channels out there.

Louis Rossmann: Which is odd because there's nothing on it that's about engineering.

Dave Jones: Oh, but it's electronics slash repair. So you're in the kind of the same space that I am.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah, there's a bit of a distinction there because I get comments every now and then going, this person, look at how he did this. He's not a real engineer. And I'm like, yeah, that's the point. Yep. Yep. Yep. I wanted to go to school to be a therapist. I don't know how I wound up here.

Dave Jones: So do you have any handle on who your majority audience are? Because you do a lot of Apple stuff. So I can imagine you would just be found by random Apple fanboys. Your videos would just pop up and they might be freaked out by this guy who's repairing Apple products or something. Do you have any inkling of who your core audience is?

Louis Rossmann: Yeah, there's a few different groups. The first are the people who are looking for an answer key, which is cool. There are people that, again, instead of looking at a schematic that's 77 pages for a month or six months to try to figure out what everything does, they look at this and they get an answer key on how to fix their problem and how to make money. So those are like the small repair shop guys that want to stop outsourcing component level repair. Then there's the group of business owners that may not do exactly what I do, but some of the business talks and philosophy stuff that I talk about applies to them. And then there's the third group of people that I respect. I think it's awesome. I will never understand it. The people that I get all these comments like this is the Bob Ross of electronics repair. I don't know what he's doing, but I listen to this at night to calm down. There are people that comment. They say like, I prepared my dinner. I got my tea. I sat down and I watched you try to solder a wire under a BGA chip for two hours. And I don't know. I don't know how to fix cars. I don't drive. I can't imagine myself watching a car repair for two hours for fun. Right.

Dave Jones: You're going to have to. Bob Ross. Who's that? Sorry. That must be an American thing.

Louis Rossmann: Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's some guy that does this. He does painting. He shows you how to paint on TV and he goes, okay. So today we're going to be putting the brush over here and we're just going to be making a little bit of strokes along the scale. It's one of those things where you may not know how to paint, but you can, his personality made the show. Painting may not be interesting, but the way he painted made it interesting. And I don't think I have even a quarter of the talent that Bob Ross did. Like I didn't even know who he was until my subscribers brought it up and I honestly wound up spending 45 minutes watching him paint and I didn't even know where he started, but it was like, oh, this is relaxing.

Dave Jones: You use the key word there though, personality, because YouTube is personality driven. And that's why I get like comments from people like, I know nothing about electronics. I don't know what you're talking about, but for some reason I just like watching your videos and watch you open mail and do and tear down things, but I don't know anything about electronics. And that, like, that just baffles me.

Louis Rossmann: But there was the, yeah, there was this one guy that made, Eli, the computer guy, and he had a bet saying, I bet in three to five years, yeah, that you're going to be doing content for a living. And the moment that I realized that he may have something to this, there was this, it's not when people like your stuff, it's when people hate your stuff, but they consistently watch it. So I get if I have an eight minute video and you reply to something I said in the first 30 seconds and say, you're an idiot for this, that, and the other, but whatever. But when I have, like, when I read a comment and I, and I, and I was just about to, you know, go past it, but then I go, wait a second. You, you hate my stuff and you regularly post, but you commented on something that I said an hour and 37 minutes into the video. So you hate what I do. You hate what I stand for. You think I'm an idiot, but you listened. I know you didn't just click on that video and landed an hour and 37 minutes. You watched the whole thing. So when I realized that people can actually, it's kind of like my friend explained, like keeping up with the Kardashians, like you have all these people that get on Twitter and say, her makeup was terrible. She looked like a slut, this, that, and the other. Fuck that woman. But then next week they're back watching the Kardashians on TV. And I, you know, I hate to compare myself to the Kardashians and that kind of stuff on TV, but it's one of those things where people will actually hate you, but they'll still watch your stuff just because they find something about it interesting.

Dave Jones: I know. It's weird. I get that. Like, I'm like, I've had it with you. I'm, I'm not watching your videos again. A month later, they're commenting on my videos again, you know, like unsubscribing. Yeah.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah. Like I'll get comments on my channel saying your stuff is going downhill. I used to watch Dave too. And he did the same thing you do. And his content is going downhill. And that was a comment I got six months ago. And the really interesting thing is I hadn't kept up with a lot of your stuff until that HP rebuild video. But I was reading the HP rebuild video. It's like, I recognize these people's names watching the stuff. It was the same person who was complaining six months ago. And it's like, you hate it, but you watch it.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Have you ever, have you considered that because your channel's kind of like mine in that you have a lot of different target audiences who like it, who subscribe for one reason or another, and they may not like a particular style of video and they subscribe for another type of video that you do like your business people, for example, who might only want to watch your business related rants and things like that. Have you thought about splitting the content out to separate channels to try and better satisfy the different audiences or?

Louis Rossmann: I've thought about it. And the thing is, there are people that come for the business stuff, there's the philosophy stuff, and then there's the actually fixing stuff. And people who came for the business advice are like, I don't care about an RTC circuit. Like, why is this on my screen? And for the most part, I just think that they skip and stop watching it. So the reason that I haven't split it is somebody may have come for board repair, but they have a store and their store is the same problem with hiring that I'm talking about in the video. So now they watch that and they get interested in that or vice versa. I mean, if I made a different channel for every type of video, it would be just, it's a nightmare. Honestly, if it pisses somebody off that much that something appears in their subscription fee that they don't want, you know, unsubscribe.

Dave Jones: I've never understood that. They like the, from the title and you're, it's not like you use titles that are deceptive, you know, like it's exactly what it is. And if you don't like that type of video, just don't click on that. Just wait for the one you like.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah. There's stuff of yours that I watch and there's stuff of yours that I don't watch. It's just, I don't like, I'm not, I'm not going to say, oh, you, you can't do this. You can't do that. It's just, I don't know. I'm sure that we could easily turn this into a one hour therapy session about our comment stream. Let's go.

Dave Jones: Now, Lewis, what are your feelings towards your mother?

Louis Rossmann: Which is exactly what Chris told me not to do.

Speaker ?: Right.

Dave Jones: Chris isn't here today to go, so we can just talk about any crap we like. This is good.

Louis Rossmann: I think he explicitly said, do not turn this into a YouTube therapy session.

Dave Jones: Right. He did email us, didn't he? And kind of like tried to lay down the law before we started the show.

Louis Rossmann: I think the most genuinely fun part of doing this and what's kept me doing it for so many years is seeing that there's so much talk right now in the US about like the middle class vanishing and that there's no more middle class. Yeah. We're going to fix it by bringing manufacturing back, which no, they're not going to build TVs in Michigan or Manhattan. Well, we're going to bring it back by raising minimum wage. And one of the fun things I noticed with this channel, and I didn't get it until people started messaging me from it, is you have this, you have these devices that nobody knows how to fix, supposedly, because nobody in our field knows how to work on them. And I know that that's not true. There are hundreds of thousands of people that know how to work on them. They're engineers that got their master's or bachelor's degrees. Then they, you know, they worked for three years at some entry level job. And now they want to make $90,000 to $200,000 a year to be an engineer. They don't want to deal with yelling customers or these $100,000 to $200,000 one-off repairs of consumer stuff. You know, it's just boring. Exactly. So my idea was, if I can teach somebody one-fifth of what the engineer knows, will that person be able to do the job for one-fifth of that engineer's salary? So like, you may not be an engineer. You may just be somebody that flips burgers for $6 an hour. The person who flips burgers for $6 an hour, if I can teach him one-fifth of what the engineer knows, can he then make $40,000 or $50,000 a year and actually provide value? Like, be able to go to a recycling center? Because there was one guy that messaged me that came as a student. He used to work at a pizza store as an assistant manager. And he watched this stuff for three or five months. And then he started his own recycling company. He goes through these buildings and he will pay them for the right to go through every floor, throw away all their stuff, the good stuff, the bad stuff, the junk, like, you know, just this old furniture. And he will get stuff that like, that for virtually nothing that he can then resell for six or 700 bucks. And like, this is his way of going from working at a pizza store to living a middle-class life. And that's what's really motivating me now. It's like, there's this, that you can actually, and I'm not saying that, you know, obviously doing what I do is the solution for everybody. But just this idea that you can like take a skill set and apply it somewhere where they're not applying it and just find a way to make it work so that it helps people and it fulfills some type of goal. That's great.

Dave Jones: I mean, you're, and you run classes, right? Out of your shop. You can go take one of your, what is it, like a week-long course or something?

Louis Rossmann: Yeah. And the whole idea, yeah. If you have a store and you don't want to stop outsourcing border pair, bring all the stuff that you were about to outsource. I'll show, I'll work with you in real time and we'll work on it and we'll work on my queue as well. And I give people a 140 page sheet of homework to do before they show up, which it scares people. It's not as bad as most people plink it out to be. I include a couple of pictures in it, but I give them 144 pages of homework before they show up. And I say, read through this and message me if you have questions. And it's just, and they show up with, with, with boards and you know, the whole idea is they should be able to go back and say, okay, we're not going to outsource this to this company for two or 300 bucks. We're going to do it in house.

Dave Jones: Right. How many people do you get joining those courses?

Louis Rossmann: I would say only a couple of months. It's not like a lot. Yeah. I used to do it with somebody else where, where there was about eight to 12 students at a sitting. And I start, I only do it one-on-one now because ultimately if I say, does this make sense? You can, you can nod if you're within 10 or 12 people and then you can get away with not knowing it. But if you're the only one there, I can say, does this make sense? Yep. Yeah. Okay. So, so, so, so if this is, so if this component is shorted, will I have 12 volts here at zero and they go and you're stuck. It's like there's nobody around you to answer. No, that's right. Yeah. So I can figure out if you know what you, so though, it's not a lot of people cause it's one-on-one, but the whole idea is if you show up and you actually pay attention that you should be able to go back home and do this. That's great.

Dave Jones: Now, going back to the Eli, the computer guy thing, you may, he, he bet you that you would be doing this, what, full time, the content creation full time within what, six months or something?

Louis Rossmann: He said three years, five years just to make it safe, but he believes three.

Dave Jones: And you hinted there that you found that he might be right. Is that?

Louis Rossmann: Well, the, the, I think that he was right, that there was a chance of him being right from the moment that, again, I saw that there were people that hated me, but they were, they were commenting not on the minute mark. They were commenting at the one hour and 37 second mark. Like, cause that, that's the thing. When you have people tuning in who hate you, you've got, I mean, there's, there's, there's something to that. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Louis Rossmann: And it's like, it really wasn't my intention for more than 30 people to watch this. Like I thought 30 other stores in the U S that are tired of outsourcing to L2 and Asset Genie are going to say, Hey, I hate L2 and Asset Genie. I want to do this myself. And like the number of people that watch just fundamentally does not fit in with what I, I expected.

Dave Jones: But same here. When I first started this, I thought 50 or a hundred people, if I made it to a thousand, that'd be like a successful show and I'd keep on doing it. And you know, like I had no idea where all these people came from. It was an absolute shock to me. So, so can you see yourself doing, moving over to full-time content and having somebody else do the board repairs and things? I know you've got other people working in your shop, don't you? Yeah.

Louis Rossmann: I've actually found, I got, I got somebody about a month ago who he took the class a year and a half ago and he was coming back to New York and he won't, and he was looking for a job. So I actually hired an apprentice and he does most, he does most of the stuff. Like I would say 90% of it just as, as good as I have. And the other 10% he'll figure out, it just takes him an extra 20 minutes. But yeah, it's, it's hard to find people like that, but I, I, I could, I, I can't see myself doing this as full-time. I could see myself doing something and then talking about it on camera, but I can't see my, I don't know. I feel like I would run out of stuff to talk about talking to a camera. Like if I have an annoying business deal with some, uh, you know, new partner or I have, I'll make a business video. Or if there's a board that's being a nightmare, I'll do a board repair video. But without the actual business, there's nothing for me to create content about. It would be true.

Dave Jones: Yep. Well, you would lose that part of your audience in the core board repair or, or maybe with your apprentice is doing all the repairs. Maybe you could somehow feed his stuff into your videos. Like he's doing all the grunt work, actually troubleshooting and you can maybe have more polished content because your, uh, content's very real time. It's like, if it takes you half an hour to repair a board or an hour, it's half an hour or an hour long content. Right?

Louis Rossmann: Yeah. I've thought about just a lot of people have said, why don't you fix this? Why don't you work on a drone? Why don't you work on this washing machine board or something? And it's cause I, I mean, if somebody gives me a $40 drone that flies, it's like, I can't fix this for a dollar. But if, if I have, if the, if YouTube ad revenue actually paid enough that it was a job, then I'd be open to doing all sorts of different content that wouldn't make sense financially from a retail perspective, but I could do that from a content perspective. Like if YouTube gives me 40 or 30 bucks a day, I can't spend all day fixing, you know, 40 year old gear that nobody's going to pay for. But if YouTube made 400 or 600 a day, then I could say, okay, I, you know, I'll let that's fix a Moran's 1060 today, or let's work on this drone board that I, cause I don't care if I fix it or don't fix it. I'm still going to get paid for the video. There's this stuff like that. But I think a lot of people have wound up subscribing just because I hate to say it, just the whole, the concept of giving the middle finger to apples. Like there's literally an online, there's this one video that I did with one of the things that Apple likes to do is they give the software that tells you how to fix the machine to the people that are not allowed to actually fix the machine. I think this, this is the equivalent of giving porn to a eunuch. I don't understand the logic behind any of this. The software that says, Hey, sensor VP zero R is not working. Check this one. Are the people that are not allowed to check the sensor. They're allowed to take the entire thing and toss it in the garbage. That's the sign. Yeah. So it actually took me about six weeks and I did. It was like the late, late August. I did video one mid October. I do video two because it took me that long to actually find the sensor. I was looking at it when, when you look at it, it's obvious, but you have to look at it at 45 or 90 X to even see the damn thing. Wow. So at the end of the video, I said, you know, so I gave the middle finger to Apple and that literally became a meme that was on the front page of imager for like, you know, two weeks, I went out, I went out on a date at the end of June and the person, uh, Googled me cause they've, uh, she figured out my last name. And the first thing that showed up on Google image search is a gif of me giving the finger. And she's like, is this you? And I'm like, no, no. It's a power button. No, no. Oh, maybe.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's brilliant. That is brilliant. Yes. Apple is, uh, we could probably spend the rest of the show talking about, well, do you want to talk about it now? This huge thing where you were getting sued by Apple and it went viral. It hit the, tell us a story.

Louis Rossmann: I got a call from their law firm and their law firm said, you know, we want to speak about this, that, and the other. And they didn't sound very happy about it. And I immediately hired an attorney. It's like, I've had enough legal issues with other companies and I know better than to just start talking on a recorded live attorney. No. And my, I hired an attorney and, and here's the, here's the thing. The reason that I thought that was not going to go very well, I have a friend who, you know, have you ever, do you, what type of phone do you use out of curiosity?

Dave Jones: Oh, I got an air Sony Android thing. Sony Xperia. Yeah.

Louis Rossmann: So I, I don't, I don't use iPhones either, but the iPhone four has a back glass that you can slide off. So you take off these two proprietary screws and it slides right off. It's a worthless piece of the phone. It's worth, this thing has got to cost the scent to manufacture and it has a little Apple logo and it breaks all the time because Apple's one of the only companies that's actually going to make the back of their phone out of a crackable glass. I could, I could throw my Motorola 3G out the window. It may have a dented corner and a cracked screen, but the back is not going to crack on the iPhone. And this was a business and then, you know, 2010 to 12, there were hundreds of thousands of people buying the glass, you know, this little black glass for a few bucks online and selling it to their customers for 10, you know, saying we'll replace the cracked glass on the back of your phone for 10 to 20 bucks. And it worked because Apple wouldn't replace the back of your phone. They, they, they, at the time they just weren't doing that. So you, you, it was ridiculous. It's like this thing literally slides in. There's no flex cables, screws installation. Easy. And my, my friend was doing this and he had, and the thing is it had the Apple logo on it. His store got raided by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Oh, I mean, I get like the law, but like immigration, like people with, he was a Marine, so he wasn't too scared by it, but like people with guns and full bodies, whatever, like they, they showed up at his store, you know, and they've done this to a couple of other companies. There was a lot of it in 2013. So, and these people did not receive contact from an attorney. So I get contacted by an attorney and it's like, oh shit. Yeah. And, and then, and so far I still haven't, I actually haven't heard back from, uh, from after my, my first week of contact with them. So my attorney said that they said, oh yeah, there's some content in one of your videos and we would just like that, that, that, that not be there. And they're obviously referring to the fact that there is a schematic in the video. Right. Okay. Now I have a couple of issues with this.

Dave Jones: But they didn't say that? They didn't say schematic specifically? It was all?

Louis Rossmann: Uh, they said, uh, I can actually find it on Skype if I scroll, cause I don't want to wind up saying something that's not true. So I'll, let me find this. But yeah, and it's obvious that it's the schematic because when you look at the, at the seconds in the video that they're complaining about, that's where the schematic gets shown. Uh, but, and they say, you know, we, you know, we just want you to remove that part. And as you know, if you get a certain amount of views in a YouTube video, you can't edit it. You can't. Yeah, exactly. So I would have to delete it. And I have, I have a couple of issues with that. The first is that, uh, uh, the, here we go. They said the, they want me to remove the video showing portions of Apple's confidential schematics. That's what, that was their wording. So if the issues I have are a, uh, I would have to remove the entire video, which I don't want to do. I can't even edit it. I lose the, that video has a million, a million views. People are clicking that from all over. Even if I were to re-upload the video, anybody who clicks onto that, who has sent it or emailed it or whatever, they click it. They're just, they're not, they're not going to find what the video. The second thing is that I have 200 or two to 300 videos at this point with the same thing. So you're saying that you don't like that this one video has it. So I get rid of that. Okay. But what's going to happen tomorrow when you come knocking for another one and another one and another one? Like, are you okay with these other videos having it? I have no idea. So I sent the, you know, I, I had my attorney send them the very polite version of, you know, if you'd like this content removed and you don't agree with me showing people that where a fuse is located, and that's something that I want to get into with the fuse later. If you don't want me showing people where a fuse is, that's, you know, you can, you can file a DMCA claim like everybody else. Exactly. Um, cause the thing is I spoke with a few people that, uh, and I, there was actually somebody for good morning America that wanted to do that wanted to have somebody on the show and talk about this. And the reason that this is not discussed is that every time one of these large companies does something like this, they don't want to get the negative press, but they also don't want to test the waters with whether or not what they're doing is right or wrong. So they will, they won't send a cease and desist in writing. They won't say something in writing. They will call you. They will say things that make you want to delete it. So they can walk away from it and say, Hey, we never sent a cease and desist. This guy decided to delete his own stuff. And because of that, there's no story. So I'm thinking if I, if anything happens as a result of this, it'll be drawing a line in the sand, which is ultimately, uh, now the schematic I showed, I understand that there are trade secrets. I understand that trade secrets exist. I don't believe that a fuse is a trade secret. What I show in the schematic is, I'll show you, there's a 3.3 volt power line that shows up when the machine is in S4 state. S4 means that it's hibernating or anything above. So hibernate, sleeper on. So you have 3.3 volts with this in an S4 state. You have a zero ohm resistor, which for all intents and purposes here, it's like one 30 second a watt. It's a fuse. And then you have a connector for the trackpad and the keyboard. So this is a fuse that sits between the 3.3 volt power line and the keyboard and trackpad so that if you spill something, which is very, if you spill anything on your trackpad instead of the machine dying, the fuse blows.

Dave Jones: That is not a trade secret.

Louis Rossmann: That is laughable. Like, I mean, I'm sure, you know, maybe 1650, this was some, this was trade secret, but like, are you, I mean, the stuff that we're calling trade, like that's the thing people say that this is trade secret and confidential. It's like, it's just embarrassing how little some people know when they say that. It's like, in 1965, if you wanted to say that the SM bus communication used to allow a laptop to read the battery percentage off of the battery was fine. Make the argument. But like, it's 2016. Acer is not going to say, oh my God, we couldn't have a machine that could charge a battery. But now that this guy put the schematic on YouTube, I can rip it off from Apple. It's like, it's not, you can't call this proprietary or trade secret information in a 2016 society. Yep. So, so I sent back a letter saying that and I haven't heard back since. Now, we have a couple of ideas as to what's going on. Behind door number one, they figured out, oh, we actually like this guy. We're sorry that we did this. My bad. Behind door number two, they are going through filing a claim on every single video I've ever done. Right. It's, it's, it's really one or the other. And I have to wait to figure it out. My receptionist has joked and said, maybe they'll wait until after Trump becomes president and everybody loses their mind and is pulling their hand out about that. And they don't even notice that they took down all your stuff, which is actually, that's what I would do. I mean, I would wait until after the election and everybody's incredibly mad. That's, you know, that's.

Dave Jones: What about the option that you simply called their, well, you didn't, you actually called their bluff. And. Yeah. And, and they don't want the negative publicity from it.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah. So there are some attorneys I spoke to that said, I don't think that a schematic, that this is a machine, this is a drawing made by a machine. So they said a drawing made by a machine generated drawing is not copyrightable. And, and I paraphrasing a conversation of a month ago, so I could be getting some things wrong, but this, I don't think a machine drawing of this is copyrightable. And further, it's a drawing, it's a diagram that illustrates what you've been given. So everything that's in that schematic, granted, practically speaking, I don't want to go through every single point in a board with a multimeter and make my own diagram. But you could. That sounds. I could, if I had an absolutely nothing better to do and, you know, I had a multimeter and I was willing to draw for, you know, a year or two straight, I could make a diagram. It's just, I don't, I don't want to, but I could. So that is a drawing of what I've already been sold. I've been sold the computer. I can open it with my screwdriver and then measure everything. How can you call that a secret or confidential when you've already sold it to me? All this is, it's a drawn form of what was already sold to me. I, you know, if this was source code to the operating system, this would be a different discussion. But this, I'm not asking for source code to the operating system. I'm simply sharing a quarter of one page of a 76-page document that represents what you've given me. Yep. And, like, are we really at this point in society where me showing a consumer where a fuse is on a product that breaks all the time is something that actually has to be taken to court? Because I saw this as a terrible thing at first, but now I'm seeing it as a good thing because the video they chose, it's not how the RTC circuit makes PM sleep S4L show up. It's not some, you know, crazy current sensing circuit so that the backlight doesn't blow when you spill water. It's a fuse.

Dave Jones: Exactly.

Louis Rossmann: It's the most fundamental building block of any electronics. So, like, they chose the best video to actually make this an issue. Because...

Dave Jones: From a point of view of losing any court case that comes up, yeah.

Louis Rossmann: If I cannot convince the general public that a fuse is not a trade secret, then I have failed as a content creator, an electronics professional, a salesman, and a human being. Totally. Totally. I need to be... I should be able to make that case that if you look at this, that you cannot rebuild... And if I was giving away information that allowed somebody to literally just, you know, plug and play into a 3D printer, recreate the entire machine in five seconds, I'd get it. But that's not...

Dave Jones: That's not... It's showing a redrawing schematic with a fuse. Now, where do... Like, you can buy schematics to Apple products, right, on the black market. Where do they get them from? Are they official Apple schematics that leaked out? Or are they redrawing or what?

Louis Rossmann: I don't think it's... I think... Well, I think there's some PDF redrawing or some machine redrawing because some of these drawings just suck. Like, you'll see... Huh. Where is the enable signal coming from? Where is this one wire coming from? And then you'll see on the other side of the screen, there'll just be a box that keeps looping. And I'll go, okay, maybe the box that keeps looping goes to this and it will. So... But for the most part, the fact that they keep in all the logos, including the Apple logos and dates, tell me that it came from Apple. But I... It's like if you Google 820-2915 schematic right now, you will find multiple websites where they are selling that for $5. Like, there are tons of... So, I understand, even if they wanted to be mad that the schematic exists, I understand that they're mad. I don't think that they should, but if they want to be mad, I get that they're mad. That's fine. Take it out on the guy who stole it from your company. Exactly. And then resold it to every Tom, Dick, and Howdy on the internet for $5. A 13-year-old with his parents' PayPal information can buy these schematics for $5. Like, I paid $100 or $200 at one time to buy this entire zip file that came with everything. And that's how I got it. It's like... So, the other argument to be made here that one of the attorneys mentioned to me is that since they have done zero takedown notices on any of these websites that have been just at the top of Google for over four years... Right. You're not... This is not a secret. You're not protecting the secret. It's like...

Dave Jones: Interesting. So, what... What is going to happen from this point? Do you think nothing? Is that the most likely scenario? They'll just give up?

Louis Rossmann: I'm strongly leaning towards, like, them waiting for Trump or Hillary to get elected, everybody to lose their shit because they hate these presidential candidates. And then five days later, my channel goes away. And nobody cares because they're too busy bitching that Trump became president or something. Again, from a media or, I guess, a PR point of view, if I were working at Apple, I would do nothing. I would let it all die down and let people think that I overreacted to everything they said on the phone. And then after the presidential election, I would just hit, you know, delete. I would take all those 1,200 claims I filed at once and just submit them to YouTube and have the channel go away. But the other thing that could happen is they could simply not care. Right. Of course. I don't know.

Dave Jones: I think that's the most likely scenario.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah. But I've never seen – here's the – my attorney said that it was silly of me, one of them, because I went through a few before I found the one that I want to use now. One of them said they are not prepared for – you know, they came to you nice. This is a company that never calls you, that is never – like, they're not courteous. Like with my friend, they're the type of people where, again, ICE is going to show up at your store before you hear a word from them. They're not the type of company to not send a – to call you before they send a cease and desist. And so they said that, you know, you should probably take that as, you know, just delete the video. Like just do the smart thing and delete it. I took it as, okay, maybe they're doing that because they don't have a case because they don't want – Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And there was one attorney – I think so. I think that's most likely.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah. And there was one attorney that told me, yeah, we've done cases like this where companies will actually put – you know, they'll have a human draw things into their schematics and documents just like little artistic figures so that they can actually copyright it because they can say it's a creative work. Yes. Have you ever seen – I don't know if you've seen any of these schematics for really new stuff where they have the – like what the hell is a cartoon drawing of a human doing in here? They do that because that enforces the copyright because the machine did not draw that. That's a creative work now.

Dave Jones: On the entire page, even though you're just – like it's all computer generated but you do a little stick figure down the bottom and bingo, it's suddenly copyright.

Louis Rossmann: It's like some of these – I forget the name of it. I got to message him and find this because it's cooler now that I'm actually talking about it. But there's – they have this schematic and then there's like – you know like the grade A under A YouTube videos? It's like just, you know, this entertainment comedy channel where the stick figures. There's drawings. It's stuff like that. More professional but like that in the actual diagram. I'm like here's the buck converter. Here's the silly crap. And the silly crap is there so that they can say, oh, copyright. This is not a machine generated document. A person did this. This is a creative work. And no, no, it's not. You put a fucking stick figure in there. But yeah, the one thing that I've visited doing is if let's say they say that I can't have that. But can I redraw the schematic myself using my own – because there are people that have said, look, you can redraw it using this program and just get rid of their logo. And whether or not using the schematic online is legal or not legal, that's an argument. But if I literally just take their schematic and like draw it in red and delete the Apple logo, a judge or a jury could see that as a wise-ass action. Whereas if I just draw it myself in my own way with hands or what I've been doing in videos now, Microsoft Paint.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I've seen that.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah, I'm doing it to try to demonstrate how silly it is that this is a copyrightable work. But if I do that, then maybe it's fine. The only thing is that this would – I have like 300 videos that are between 40 minutes to an hour too long. That's a lot of work.

Dave Jones: No, it's something you can't do. Why do you think Apple have such a problem with guys like you actually repairing products and showing them, showing how to repair products?

Louis Rossmann: In the beginning, I thought it was one of two things. Either A, they want more money off of their own repairs and off of people buying new ones. Or B, that they did not want people fixing them improperly and giving it to them. So they have a flat rate system. Again, for a certain machine, $750 flat rate to figure out what's wrong with it or $1250 if it's a higher end one to figure out what's wrong with it.

Dave Jones: $1,250.

Louis Rossmann: This is accidental, by the way. I just want to be – there are certain machines where for $280, they'll fix everything wrong with it if it's not accidental. 90% of it is accidental. And it's easy to accidentally damage. I'm not – whether you like the operating system or not is subjective. But the fact that these are very – in terms of liquid and even moisture alone, it's easier to kill these than it is a Lenovo. That's just objective fact. You can pour a gallon of water into a Lenovo. It comes out a drain hole and goes around taping the board. You get nail polish remover from your manicure and this and it just eats everything. So – what was I just talking about? Ah. Yeah. So I thought maybe they just want to – they were tired of people sending it back to them after repair attempts. Because if they get something with a blown backlight fuse and they charge the customer $750, they can just turn that board around to somebody else. If they get something that somebody who doesn't know what they're doing tries to fix it and destroy it, they gave the customer a new board for $750, but they can't reuse the old one. But what I'm starting to think as time goes on is that they're getting more and more people trolling them in China and just blatantly knocking off their stuff that they want to make somebody an example for intellectual property, trademark, and copyright and trade secrets. They just want to make somebody an example because they're getting owned so – they're getting owned so badly in China. It's insane when it comes to this stuff. Like they're people just blatantly ripping off many aspects of what they're doing. And I've talked about this in other videos. Like for example, the entire supply chain that they have – that most small independents have, it's sad that it's come to this. But it's just because we are not – I can't go to LG or Samsung and go, I want to buy $1,000 of the screen for $100,000. Please give it to me and I'll wire you the money. There'll be a plant. I heard this from one of the vice president of sales at Intersil five or six years ago. He said somebody is – they probably have to make 15,000 machines today and they get 15,500 screens. Somebody in middle management says, eh, we got 15,000 screens today.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Louis Rossmann: And then those 500 winds magically disappear and that goes to a vendor that then sells it to us. I mean those are – that's where almost every single screen that you see to these products on eBay came from in one way or another because you can't – But I get that they don't like that.

Dave Jones: But are there genuine ones and fake ones on eBay?

Louis Rossmann: Well, when it comes to laptops, there's no fake. There's just genuine stuff that didn't make the cut because a machine made a mistake and stuff that genuinely should not have made the cut because it's just garbage. Right. So usually we're getting stuff in the middle which is stuff that didn't make the cut because the machine had a conniption that day and these are all perfectly fine but the machine said that it's not. Thank you. So there's stuff like that. I haven't been to Taipei to see all of this for myself. It's just what I hear from people who know more than me. But I understand why they would want to crack down on that. So I think that like I could be a really good example of this because I have a video on YouTube showing how to fix these products, showing the schematic, talking about their practices with a million views. You know, it brings attention to it and I think this would be a great like little whack-a-mole to make an example out of other people. Right. I don't know. It's an opportunity to be the mole or win. I would like to not be the mole.

Dave Jones: You want to be the hammer. Well, no. Yeah, yeah. No. Well, no. You don't want to be the hammer. I don't want to be either. You don't want to hammer anyone else.

Louis Rossmann: I just want to be the tech sitting in the chair.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So tell us about the right to repair bill that you've been fighting for in Congress and other places.

Louis Rossmann: The entire idea is that what I do should not be cool. I mean, people hear like I have to log in to these secret servers and pay somebody, you know, deposit money in their bank account. And after I do that, this is before I could just PayPal schematics. I could deposit money in a bank account. And after that, I can get a schematic. Or I have to PayPal somebody at this strange email, 300 bucks. And then afterwards, he'll email me at the email I put in the comments to where I can get schematics. Wow. And I have to find parts from these vendors that got them out of the back of a wig. It sounds like some kind of strange, shady drug deal. And the idea is that this is a nerdy industry of people that should. Like, I just want to come to work, click, and just buy a schematic with my credit card and just have it show up.

Dave Jones: From the manufacturer, official.

Louis Rossmann: I want to send Samsung or LG or one of Samsung or LG's brokers a purchase order and just know that the parts are going to show up and that I'm not, like, wiring money to a scam artist. Because that does happen. I'm sorry. I've just wired 2,000 bucks away and I just pissed away the money. I want – this should just be a basic industry like every other industry. I want to buy a part to do my job. I buy it. I want a manual. I buy it. I'm willing to pay. I would pay three times as much to buy the manual legitimately than I would through these ridiculous means. I'm okay with it. But the issue is the option doesn't exist. So the whole idea is – and the bill is very, very vague. This is something that manufacturers shouldn't even – it uses the word fair so many times or fair – I think it was the word fair or equitable. And, you know, what is fair? Like, they could determine –

Dave Jones: No, it has to be determined by a court of law.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah. Yeah. And they could argue for what is fair. It's not like I'm saying I want parts for 10 years at the cost that it costs you to provide them. Like, no, I don't expect you to sell me a part to a 2007 machine for a dollar. I expect that a device that – that I can program an SMC for a device that came out six months ago. Like, reasonable. Fair and reasonable is a big part of the bill. We want the ability to have parts manuals so that we can do these basic things to make things work again. So that I don't have to either choose to, you know, find a schematic on a shady website or spend five years of my life, you know, going – measuring a board to find out where the keyboard fuses.

Dave Jones: Why do you think this just hasn't automatically happened in the past? Why aren't manufacturers doing this? Is it the manufacturers going, no, we don't want our products repaired or no, we couldn't be bothered or, you know, what? I thought that would be a good differentiator these days, you know?

Louis Rossmann: I don't – I mean, I don't mean this in an insulting way. I don't think I'm old enough to understand the culture shift. Like, people who grew up and were doing this in the 50s through the 80s back in the age when manufacturers would give you this on the back of the TV.

Dave Jones: You got a schematic in the back of a TV. The schematic would be pasted in the back.

Louis Rossmann: I wasn't born in that era. I didn't grow up in that era. So I don't understand how that culture managed to shift. I grew up in – I mean, I grew up in this culture. Now, the only reason I'm familiar with the old culture is because I started working in recording studio environments or broadcast studio environments. And even though that was in 2007, 8, 9, and 6, the gear that was being used was like a Neve 8088 from 1975 or 76 was still being used. An SSL J9000 from 97 was being used. A Pultec Equalizer from 1951 was still there. So they still had – even though that mentality and that culture of repair had been dying, it was still there. So I don't know what changed. I think – I mean, most of those devices were devices where you buy it and you pay a high upfront cost and it's supposed to just always work. I think a lot of these new devices – a part of it is simply –

Dave Jones: It's the culture. It's the throwaway culture, you think?

Louis Rossmann: I think a part of it is throwaway culture and I think a second part of it is admittedly somebody goes to a third-party place. The third-party place ruins it. They go to the first-party service center. The first-party service center is now screwed more than they would have been. Right.

Dave Jones: So they got jack of it? You think the manufacturers might have got jack of all these cowboys fixing stuff and go, ah, it's just not worth it. Why bother?

Louis Rossmann: Yeah. And I mean, and also it probably doesn't contribute to their bottom line at all to release this information. I mean, just the system. Oh, no, no.

Dave Jones: I certainly wouldn't.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah. For me to request the information, I have to request it from somebody. Then I have to pay somebody. Then you have to determine whether or not I'm somebody who should receive it. Like that's a big question with this bill. Should it be everybody who receives the information or should it be only certified stores? Right. Does it have to be certified stores or can it be anybody that has a business license? So like I have an appliance and home electronics repair business license, but I'm not Apple certified. Should I be allowed to get it because I have a license and I'm not Apple certified? There's a big thing to do about who should be able to get it. It creates bureaucracy and it creates trouble for the manufacturer. But at the same time, there's a lot of good it can do for the world. A device that is able to capture and edit 4K video in real time should not be sitting in a landfill because of a dead resistor. Exactly. It's crazy. That's the thing. There's more of those devices even just in this stupid little niche industry. I'm sure there's so many other industries that are just like mine that I haven't met. But just in this little industry, there's so much stuff sitting out there that if I retired from having an open shop to the public and I just took in all these devices, I'd be busy for 30 years. You need people to go through and fix this stuff.

Dave Jones: But why hasn't some big manufacturer caught on that this could be a differentiator against their competitors and have a logo on it, like a repairable logo and the schematics are on our website and go for it? Why? I can't believe that market forces haven't sort of – are they not smart enough to do that?

Louis Rossmann: I mean, it probably creates – it's going to create a little bit of a mess for them. Let's say somebody tries to fix something that would have been out of warranty because they dropped it or spilled something on it and they try to fix it while it's still in warranty. They botch at fixing it in warranty. They try to pretend that they never tried to fix it and bring it to the store. I mean, it creates a pain in the ass for them. But at the end of the day, you can create policies to deal with that. I've created policies. I have a store in the East Village of Manhattan. I mean, I deal with a very high concentration of eccentric and eclectic nut jobs that come into the store every day. Like, there are ways to deal with these things and you can create policies so that it makes sense for you. Totally.

Dave Jones: You can just put them out there with the world's biggest disclaimer that says, you know, if you send this to some non-authorized repairer, then, like, don't send it back to us ever. You know?

Louis Rossmann: And it's a really growing field in things like data recovery. So, with your phone, you probably have an SD card slot. Your idea of data recovery is, like, pop. I have my card. With iPhones and iPads, the data is all, you know, on the chips that are soldered onto the board. And they're matched to the CPU and encrypted. So, I mean, that... They're right. You can't even take the chip. They're fully encrypted. And I understand. From a privacy point of view, that's a great thing. But if you want to... I can't just desod... Like, I could desod the chip from an older Android phone, the EMMC, put it into a little, you know, into something. And then I could just put it in an SD card reader. You can't do that with the iPhone. So, if somebody... Let's say it gets dropped in a toilet or the ocean or even... This has happened. People have gone running and the sweat from them running, having the phone in their pocket for music, that will actually wind up destroying the phone. I destroyed a BlackBerry 8330 that way. I went running. I didn't notice how disgusting I was when I went running. I took the phone out of my pocket. It was drenched in sweat. It never turned on again. It rebooted. So, this is... And the thing is, Apple offers repair services at high prices. But when it comes to data, they offer nothing. If you have a phone... If you have an iPhone 6 with a shorted CE5202, which is a common one right by the Wi-Fi chip. It's on the corner. If that capacitor is shorted and you give Tim Cook a million dollars and say, get my data, he will not remove that capacitor so that the phone can boot without Wi-Fi. Like, there's literally... There, it's not even like third-party repair. When it comes to data recovery, you don't have options. I mean, I'm... Unless you're on the most wanted list in the FBI.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. Well, yeah. The Boston Marathon phone. Yeah. Like, that's kind of... Isn't the cloud supposed to solve that problem?

Louis Rossmann: It is. And that's the... And users are users and they never use it. And, like, I mean, there are a lot of people that do use it, but all the... Again, but the people who do use it are probably not the people that are coming to me willing to spend two to four hundred dollars to get their stuff. Users are careless. People are always going to be careless. And the person making fun of the person who is careless is the person that tomorrow is going to do something really stupid. I don't even... I try to just stop making fun of user carelessness. There's doing something really, like, idiotic where you know you're breaking something and you don't care. But then there's just carelessness. And most of the people that show up, they thought that it was working and only half of their stuff got uploaded. Or they have, like, you know, or the entire thing wasn't backed up. It happens. So, I mean, the cloud is a great thing, but for a mistake like that, shouldn't there be an option so that even if somebody wanted to pay $30,000, somebody could get access to a manual and do this? It's just silly that there is no option in the modern world. Totally.

Dave Jones: It's just nuts. What? Like, so what's happening with this repair bill? Is it...

Louis Rossmann: Last year, it didn't go through. This year, it didn't go through. Actually, last year, there were a lot of people in favor of it. And it didn't go through. We all visited last year. And one of the reasons that I... That it at least had a chance last year is because we got to debunk a lot of the BS. So, there were... We got to talk to a lot of assembly people, senators, assembly people's aides. And my favorite one of all of this, and it's just the one that, like, I think is one of the few things that will actually raise my blood pressure when I discuss it, is where they were talking about how... Oh, the lobby has said that when you use a schematic to run a wire, you've then turned it into not an Apple computer. It's now a PC. And you don't tell your customer that you turned it into a PC. So, by releasing schematics, we're helping you misrepresent Apple products to consumers. And that this is consumer protection because we're not going to allow you to rip off the consumer. And, I mean, it took no more than 90 seconds of me explaining why this is the most ridiculous horse shit in the world. And it took all... It took, like, all 26 years of patience and, you know, skills to not just explode and blow up inside the Senate chamber. Because, I mean, that is such bullshit. It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. I mean, the shit that they... Like, the shit that these people come up with. And I don't know if it's the fact that the politician is out of touch with technology, so they misinterpret what the lobbyist said. Or the lobbyist actually said that. I don't know. Because, again, it's like a game of telephone. But the fact that somebody in that building actually thought that and there was nobody there to correct them is a big part of the problem. All the people who... There are so many people who talk about how government should be and how law should be and how the world should be amongst their friends at a coffee shop, at a bar, at a Yankees game. But they don't actually visit to talk about it. And that's one thing I learned is that if I want change, they listen. There was one of these aides that actually decided, I am going... I didn't have breakfast today. It's about 3.30 in the afternoon. I have a 15-minute break. I could either get breakfast, I'm hungry, or listen to you. And they chose to... And he chose to listen to us. He didn't eat that day. Awesome. They do... The thing is, everybody thinks, you know, the politicians don't... Yeah, yeah, yeah. They don't care. Okay, maybe the presidential candidate will say whatever they need to get elected. Maybe they don't care about you. But these, like, again, the local politicians, they'll listen to you. This guy, I could tell. He was hungry. He didn't eat his meal. He didn't go out to his planned lunch and breakfast. He stayed there to listen to us talk about this bill.

Dave Jones: They will often form policy based around just a couple of people talking to them. The squeakiest wheel gets the oil.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah, I'm not... I'm not... If you say a ridiculous argument and I'm not there to refute the ridiculous argument, then, like, the ridiculous argument doesn't sound... Because you could say almost anything and have it sound... Like, you can have it sound sensible if you explain it in a certain way. Absolutely. But, you know, like... I mean, you could say that a capacitor is called a capacitor because it's based on a bottle cap. Because that's the way it looks. And if I'm not there to show you what a capacitor actually looks like or to explain any of this, that sounds great. It sounds... You need somebody else to be there to present a counter-argument. And I understand if they're dealing with policy issues on immigration, on the economy, on, you know, like, civil rights or any other type of issue that's at their office or, you know, budget... Do I give budget to the education or to the police department? And we're here arguing over fuses. Like, if there's not somebody that shows up to present a counter-argument, then they're going to listen to the argument in front of them. And I went from being somebody in my early 20s who's like, screw the politicians, they don't care, to when I visited realizing I understand why they don't care. When was the last time a repair shop owner decided, I'm going to close my store today. I'm not going to make money. I'm going to take a train ride so I can talk to these people. Nobody does it. Exactly. And I feel like this year, I feel like it didn't go through because we weren't asked up. I think we should have just went up and talked to lobbyists on our own and tried to, you know, get back into the Senate chamber again this year. I think we should have done that, but we didn't because we were never asked and we're busy with our own businesses running and, you know, running like chickens without a head. So we didn't do it. And Xerox, Apple, IBM, and another company, I think Cisco, but I don't want to say that without checking my email. But I know it was Apple, IBM, and Xerox all showed up and they presented their counter-arguments against the right to repair bill. Wow. And our arguments were not there because we weren't. Yeah, yeah. So who are you going to listen to? No, exactly. The smartest of Apple, IBM, and Cisco or a non-existent argument? Like if you can't even show up to present your argument, why should we listen to you is probably what they're thinking.

Dave Jones: Half of winning is just turning up.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah, and I didn't even have a tie-on last year. I didn't have a script. What I did is I showed up with a motherboard that was dead that I ran a wire on, you know, to the time-on pin of a buck converter I see. I just ran one wire and I showed them this is a $750 product. When I remove this wire, it becomes worth a $20 product. This wire is worth a cent. So this, it takes something out of the landfill. And also, rather than this going back to China for it to be refurbished by whoever for, you know, $2 an hour, somebody in America can charge anywhere between the one cent the wire costs and the $750 Apple costs. It creates a job in America. You don't need a certification to do this. You don't need a college degree to do this. It creates, you know, just a turnkey job for anybody who has common sense, who can, you know, spend the time required to figure out some of this basic stuff. And it also fixes the e-waste problem. You can say that you care about the environment now. It creates a job. It makes something work again. It's a compelling argument.

Dave Jones: It's a completely compelling argument.

Louis Rossmann: It takes 90 seconds to explain this to somebody. And when they see that I plug it in and the light turns on and the fan spins when I put the wire, they're like, okay, you don't have to explain anymore. We're done. And, well, you know, we're on board with it. It's just you have to show up to make the argument.

Dave Jones: And will this, like, if it ever gets passed, will it be like a national federal law or will state-based laws? I don't know how the U.S. works. Like...

Louis Rossmann: This one was a state-based one for New York. Right, it was. It would still have to get passed for other states. I would like this to be a federal one. I would like this to be something that covers... Ideally, it would be something that covers, you know, everybody. But I don't know enough about international law to know even how do you do that. I don't even... I don't know. To be honest, I don't know a lot about... I'm not a lawyer in America. I don't know the entire process. But anything is better than nothing. And this would have been a step forward. It would have set some precedent. And it's something that's going to be applied to a lot more than this. Like, right now, I'm talking about whatever, disposable consumer electronics and cell phones and data. But, you know, this can apply to, like... Where else is technology going to go over the next 40 or 50 years? And how much... You know, it's going to apply to a lot more stuff. This can apply to drones. Like, we don't know what drones are going to be used for now. We don't know what most technology is going to be used for right now. I went to this show, this Hope, this hacking convention. It was an absolutely amazing thing. You had designers, engineers, hackers, programmers come from all around the world to share ideas, not judge. They had this huge space in the Pennsylvania Hotel. If I knew about it before, I would have went to every single event. I learned about a lot of things they were doing. There's a bed that exists that will tell if your significant other is having sex, what type of sex she's having based on responses it gets from sensors inside the bed. It sends it to you, including where she is on the bed, where the impact is, the speed and the intensity of it over Wi-Fi. Like, two years ago, nobody would have thought of this. But there's going to be... It's silly, but there's going to be so many areas where technology takes control over our life. And if we back down here on something as stupid as a laptop and a cell phone, like, where are we going to be when it comes to your car, you know, your drone, your time machine, whatever the hell it is that's going to be the new thing in 2050?

Dave Jones: Why aren't you an Apple authorized repairer?

Louis Rossmann: Because it sucks. I mean, there's nothing that I can do. If you come to me and you say, I spilled a drop of water on my machine, I have to tell you that's $150.

Dave Jones: Oh, so you've got to charge the Apple rate.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah. As an Apple authorized... I'm not allowed to fix motherboards. I can get the tool. But once I have the tool, if all I had to do to get all this stuff was pass a test, I wouldn't even be bitching right now. Like, if all I had to do to get a schematic was, like, they have me show up. They go, okay, solder this. Okay, what do you do if this problem exists? I would go through that test. I would go through the bureaucracy and I'd be fine. But if I go through all of that bureaucracy, I take all those tests, I have to do everything their way. If a single key on your keyboard doesn't work and a liquid sensor got tripped, that's $750 or $1250, depending on the model. I can't just replace your keyboard. Wow. I understand why they do this. They don't want to have a system whereby you have 100 or 300 retail stores in the United States and they have these, you know, the people making 10 and 12 bucks an hour doing diagnosis on all this and customers coming back saying, I just paid you 300 bucks and now this doesn't work. Because liquid damage is like cancer. I mean, it hides everywhere. It's hard to find at all. Yeah. You don't want to have a $10 an hour worker rooting that out. But it doesn't work. It doesn't work for me. I can't tell a customer, I know you paid 1,200 bucks for this, but you have to pay me 800 to replace what is essentially a keyboard. I don't know how I would stay in business. And the second reason I don't do that, I'm not sure exactly what Apple's policy is right now, but a lot of major manufacturers require that you sell a certain amount of their product per quarter or per month to keep your certification. Wow. And this is what happened to me with Lenovo. So let's say that I have to sell $60,000 a quarter. And that's a very conservative number. Let's say I have to sell $60,000 a quarter of Lenovo laptops to be an authorized repair center. And you come in and there's something wrong with yours. What is my inclination going to be? Is it going to be to sell you something from the window or is it going to be to fix yours with an option? Yep. Like if my only option I can offer you is $750 and I have a financial incentive to sell you the laptop in the window, I'm not a repair store. No, that's right. As a repair store, I have a financial incentive to sell you the resistor for two or 300 bucks because that's profitable. And also I don't have that incentive to sell you what's in my window. Because the stuff in my window is just the stuff that people never picked up after a year. If it sells, it sells. If it doesn't, somebody else will buy it. So I feel like being an authorized repair center, the way that the policies are written up, is fundamentally incompatible with actual repair. If you want to be in retail, become an authorized repair center. If you want to fix stuff, it's awful.

Dave Jones: Yep. What is the hardest part about modern repair? Because you, you know, rip off huge BGAs like they're nothing. And, you know, that sort of thing scares the crap out of me, quite frankly. Like modern stuff, it's like, you know, I'm a bit old school repair. I know it's possible, but there's got, you know, it looks like there's so much trial and error behind learning these sorts of skills.

Louis Rossmann: Well, I remember one of my best tech mentors that worked alongside Avatar Studios. He was really good at this. He had over 30 years experience. He was an electronics engineer and well-educated, good experience. And he told me, this is all dead because SMDs make things unfixable. And this guy is still to this day much smarter than me. If he put even a quarter of the time I did in, he would have done 10 times better. But I still remember hearing that from somebody in their 50s that was experienced. And I look back on him saying that and I think to myself, like, there was, yeah, isn't that cute? There was a time that you actually believed in. That was right. Everything is scary when you haven't done it. Exactly. Yeah. So the soldering part, yeah. I mean, I bought a HACO FR801 many years ago and I decided I'm going to replace this one ship because I think it's what's bad. I didn't know what it did because I don't have a damn schematic. I don't know what this does, but it's blue and I know it's supposed to be black and not blue. So I'm going to take it off and put a new one on. And half of the stuff around it just knocked off and I damn near wanted to cry because it went from being semi-working to totally dead. And that happened over and over and over. And it's this trial and error process. Because like right now there's a lot of, even outside of my content, there are people doing content on how to do these small BGAs and other nightmares. Right. And 2007, 8, 9, like I remember Googling how to replace a QFN package. There was a class that you took for like maybe 2,000 bucks. Yeah, yeah. Which it's, you know, like I'm, it's, you know, I'm 18 years old. Fuck that. And then there's also the, there's also, there was a guy that had a PC board that had a bunch of traces that were literally like these Vs in the board that you could actually dig a pen into that you could fill with flux and solder and then just bring it all the way to the chip with no components. And so I'm just looking at this like, what the, this isn't, this, this is like showing me how to swim with swimmies. I mean, this is in a, in a pool like that, that's, that's not how to be an Olympic swimmer that's going to race. This is, this is not real. And it was incredibly frustrating. So it was just a lot of trial and error until it made sense. A lot of it is becoming comfortable with a microscope because once you can actually see what you're doing, it's not scary. Oh, totally. Yeah. Because like if I'm looking at something from the, for example, if I tilt the board up at an angle, I can see how it solders. I can see the actual balls themselves under the chip. I know if I did something right or wrong, it's easier than before when I was just, because I can see it with my eyes, but I'm still half blind if I'm looking at something that's like zero, two, zero, one. Oh, crisis. So, yeah. So a lot of it, the soldering part, you can overcome with experience and just watching somebody else do it, finding techniques that work for you. But the part that really sucks for me and the part that I hate the most is the complete lack of having somebody to call me an idiot. Like a lot of people will say, you think that you're a genius because of this, that, and the other. And I think the opposite. I think I know exactly who I am. I'm a college dropout that cheated on his chemistry regions to get through high school that couldn't pass pre-calculus. I want to be able to talk to somebody just like in the studio business, have them say, you're doing this all wrong. Why the fuck did you miss this? This is how the circuit works. And the reality is there isn't any of that. I have to look at it and I have to guess what happens and in what order. I have to guess, does this chip know inherently from firmware to create this voltage? Or is there SM bus communication that's going to do it? Because there's no data sheet for the chip. That's also proprietary. There's no data sheet for how the chip works. Everything has to be a guess. So the part that sucks is, again, you'll know how a basic buck converter or a basic transistor work, obviously. But how everything goes together. What signals have to be present for this signal to be present? That's a very frustrating question. Because there's nobody out there who's going to say, oh, you're being an idiot. You missed that. You need a signal A before you get signal D. And you really just have to guess. And that's just staying up until 5 in the morning for 5 or 10 hours on end. Just guessing and finally finding a board where it's like, oh, this thing doesn't work because it's smoked. And when this thing is smoked, before I fix it, I'm going to measure every single signal that is and is not present so I can see how this relates to that. And there's a lot of time and research that goes into it. So right now, I do a video or I look like I know what I'm doing. Because in 15 minutes, I'm like, well, PM sleep S4L is missing. And that's because CIS clock 32K is going above 1.7 volts, which means it's shocking the PCH. It's easy to say that after you spent the 16 hours figuring out if there's a relation between RTC and PM sleep S4L. You don't see the 12 hours of work that went into that. So that's the part that sucks. No information.

Dave Jones: Do you think that people might get the impression that it really is as easy as you make it look sometimes to do? And there's, well, there's good, that can be a good thing and a bad thing too. Because they can go in and goof it up. It's good that they'll have a go and they'll learn stuff. But then I guess there could be a downside as well.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah. I get people who call me like, I'm not giving you 300 bucks to fix my $1,500 thing. I'm to do this. And I'll go, okay. And what I do a lot of the time is I won't even just say, go for it. I'll say, there's nobody using the second desk today. My assistant is off. You can sit down. Here's a spare board with parts on it. If you make it work, it's free. I have not met a single person in the years that I've had the current retail store that I have that's taken me up on that challenge and actually won. They wind up sitting there just damn near one.

Dave Jones: Because they haven't put the hours in. They haven't got the experience. Yeah.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah. I mean, like I watch Dancing on Ice and I think, oh, I can do that. And then I try to rollerblade and it's, oh, nevermind. But, you know, so what I'll tell people is, listen, I respect that you want to do it. All I'm going to ask you to do is, A, watch my entire video. Don't watch one minute. Because the thing that I've tried to do to make these videos accessible is I try to explain every single point. Like when I'm saying this is a buck converter, I don't just say this is a buck converter because I know I'm going to lose a lot of the audience there that doesn't, you know, again, not to be insulting, but the people that, let's say, flip burgers or work retail that are aspiring to do this. If I say this is a buck converter, so obviously I expect this here. When I say that, I know that I was part of the audience that was getting lost there. I know I've lost 90% of my audience. So I explain every single thing, every single step of the way. I've explained what the one wire circuit does at least 90 times because I just don't have it in me to say, go back to this video and watch it. I'll say that and then I'll go, screw it. Let me just explain what this does. So I say, watch the entire video, the entire thing, if it's 40 minutes and then do it. And the second thing I'll say is try on something cheap. Open up a flip phone. Open up a $50 Acer. Don't open up your phone that has your baby pictures on it that's dead before practicing on a flip phone. Don't open up your $3,000 machine that belongs to your boss that he uses for live video recording of concerts before opening up a piece of shit $50 Acer. So I mean, I try to, I don't try to make it look easy. I try to give you the impression that it's doable. The whole idea is, and sometimes I dumb it down more than I, the whole idea I want people to see is if this idiot can do it, then so can I. I want people to actually get confidence from seeing that I'm able to do it and make it look simple. So I don't want them to think it's easy. I want them to think it's achievable. I guess if that makes any sense.

Dave Jones: That makes complete sense. No? Yeah. That's great. One of the best, the funniest things I saw is when you took Linus from Linus Tech Tips to task over him using a toaster oven to reflow a BGA and thinking that he's, you know, permanently fixed it, which of course, you know, is not true. And then he came to your shop and then you guys were too busy chin wagging. You were going to, I'm going to show him how to do it properly. And you guys were too busy chin wagging that you left it in the oven too long.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah. That entire thing didn't go the way. That was hilarious. First thing that was, the entire reason that I don't like reflowing is not because of people fixing their own stuff or trying to make it temporarily work. I don't like it because from 2006, you familiar with the HP DV9000 and that entire series of shit machines?

Dave Jones: I think I've heard you mention it. I'm not familiar with it because I'm not in that game.

Louis Rossmann: I mean, like there was an entire several years where pretty much every single laptop release just had, would last for a year or so and have a dead video chip. And a lot of repair shop, you had a lot of these people that didn't do any type of repair that literally started businesses around taking a butane torch to the motherboard and burning the chip. And it would work again for 50 days. The warranty was 30 days. And well, this led to a lot of pissed off consumers, a lot of ripped off consumers, a lot of chargebacks and ultimately people not trusting repair in general. So the thing is, a lot of people in the comments said, oh, nobody can possibly take this seriously as a repair thing to do. And it's like, I wish you were a part of this community. Yeah, watch! I have people showing up to classes saying, oh yeah, I put this in a reflow oven. It's like they'll heat a tantalum capacitor. Instead of figuring out that a tantalum capacitor, when heated again, will work, they'll put it in an oven, give it back to the customer. They'll, you know, two week warranty. A month later, it's dead. So people thought I was irritated at the regular individual fixing their own stuff. I don't care. I don't even fix graphics cards. But I don't like, I know that people are going to watch that and they're going to do that. And when I was visiting the Senate, they were giving these excuses like, oh yeah, people are doing this, that, and the other that they shouldn't do. This is why we can't allow third party repair people to have, this is why we can't give them nice things kind of thing. Wow. So when I see that like one of the largest tech channels is like, look, I'm going to put a GPU in an oven. Like I just lost my shit. And then he actually contacted me and he was very nice about it. And he said, you know, would you want to do some type of video together on it? And I said, sure. If there's any way to bring about awareness for the whole ride to repair thing, I'll do it. So he, so he visited, I think is I don't, I don't use that machine to do that anymore because I bought that machine for the 2011 MacBook Pro. They recalled it in 2015. So I don't even have, I didn't have anything to work on besides this one board that had just been thrown at a wall that was fucked. So I decided to take the chip off that and reattach a new one. It doesn't work for many obvious reasons. Cause I, but also the way that it was done, like I would explain, he would ask a question on how to use the machine. He would then turn the camera on and explain it. He would ask a question about the next step, turn it on and explain it.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Louis Rossmann: And like the, when I actually watched the video, it's like, huh? Yeah. I'm just kind of like standing there staring at the camera. I look like a fucking idiot. And the thing is like, I don't think he's not an easy, he's a really nice guy. Like meeting him. I'm not just like, cause there are a lot of people that I don't like. I could actually get along with him and talk to him. We had dinner and it was, it was a fun evening. We talked about like the, the silly moderators at DFI street, the OCZ scandal with money. We just a lot of, you know, YouTube troll stuff. We, there was a lot to talk about. He was a really nice guy, but so I know that he didn't mean like, it wasn't like I'm going to purposely edit it to make him look like a jackass, but it's like, yeah, I did a really good job of looking like a fucking idiot on camera. Like, Oh my God, I did a good job of looking like an idiot on camera. Like better than usual. But it was fun though. Yeah. It was, it was honestly fun. And the fun part, the most fun is soldering the chip on. We were bitching about television. So he was, he was passionate about technology. He was saying, you know, you'll have this $6,000 TV. That has a crappier processor in it than this $50 Android blue phone. So that when you're on the, when you're switching channels, it'll take 10 seconds to switch the channel. Why is that? And while we're in the middle of bitching about $6,000 TVs that have shit interfaces, it's like that profile is supposed to go for 290 seconds. We're at like 400. Oops. Even if the board had a chance of working, it was never going to work after that. Like if you even zoom in on the chip, it's like, it's a different color than the CPU at that point. It was up. Oh, that's. I had like two people.

Dave Jones: It was a single shot deal too.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah. And it's like, it's not like I have other stuff to do it on. Cause I have BGA videos where everything went well. That's, that is, it's like I have video. I say this when you actually put up a camera, nothing will work. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the lesson I learned from that is the way that you present this, something will like if I want to highlight repair shops should not rip people off by putting stuff in ovens and I present what I present in the asshole manner that I did, it's going to come off as this jackass is mad that I'm fixing my own graphics card instead of sending it to him. Yeah. So it was like my, I know that my core, my core audience understands what I was saying, like the core thousand people that watch. But what I learned is when I'm speaking to an audience of 40,000 or 60,000 or a hundred thousand people that you have to be more careful with how everything is interpreted. So that was a good lesson for me and how to not be an asshole. I'm still going to be an asshole to some extent, but that was like, that was just unproductively being an asshole. Like for example, like with Donald Trump being president, like he has to realize that when he says, I'm sure the second amendment people can do something about it. He has to understand that when he's talking to 280 million people, that a lot of those people, even if 0.1% of them thinks you mean, oh, the second amendment people are going to shoot Hillary. Yeah. Yeah. Like that, that they are going to think that that is what Trump meant. Um, because it's something that it was a lesson that I learned from that entire experience. When you're talking to a larger audience, you have to phrase yourself better and, you know, not be as, not be as much of an asshole.

Dave Jones: What, have you got any recommendations for tools for SMD repair and rework? Yeah.

Louis Rossmann: I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Dave Jones: No, no, go.

Louis Rossmann: The first is, is a real hot air station. Um, I, you know, uh, I would, I've tried a lot of the cheap stuff like the 850 AD and the IOE and the UU. Right.

Dave Jones: Yep. I have never gotten it. The ones you get for 50 bucks on eBay. Yeah.

Louis Rossmann: And the thing is that this, and I always wondered like, how are these actually working for people? Are these all show reviews? And then I started reading forums and a lot of people are saying they work. So then I started hitting view all posts and I see what they're working on. They're working on single layer, dual layer PC boards.

Dave Jones: Not really. Eight layer motherboards. Yeah.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah. And the thing is after 2009, Apple started, you can just feel that it's a different material. It doesn't feel as glossy. It's a, I don't know enough. I don't know anything about PCB design. Again, I'm, that, that's not my thing. I don't, I don't know anything about it, but I do know that when I, I look at it and you feel it, it's made of a different material. And those PC, the old PC boards absorbed a lot of heat. See, Apple does machines are almost kind of made to like cook themselves from the inside out rather than have real ventilation. Dare the computer be a quarter of an inch thicker.

Dave Jones: Well, they hold a lot of heat because they've got the ground planes. They'll have several layers of ground and power planes in there and copper retains that heat. Yeah. Very well.

Louis Rossmann: Like after 2009, the heat sinking and the, just the, the way that those boards absorb and dissipate heat was insane. And then again, after around 2012, after 2013, I noticed the material looked a little bit different again. I, you can't remove a keyboard connector with even the Hakko FR801. That was a $650 station that I loved. I couldn't get that connector off. So what I do is I heat the bottom of the board because if you heat the plastic from the top, it'll just burn. I couldn't get it off at that thing after the half hour. I had to use the JBC. That's like an $1,800 hot air station. So the, so if you're working on any of this, what makes it a lot easier is buying a real hot air station. Like, um, well, what do you know? A good friend of mine, Jess at iPad rehab, she was almost at the point of tears as a figure of speech, you know, just, and then at one point, literally at the point of tears, she actually wound up sending me a picture of her with a tear coming down her eye with a board that she was holding up as, uh, cause it was like four in the morning and she couldn't get an LED driver soldered. She was using a crappy station and I offered to express mail her mind. And if she would express mail it back after she soldered the chip, just so that she could realize that there's a difference. And she bought one and she's like, Oh, cause she thought it was her. That's the thing. People think it's them. It's that they don't, I don't want to say that the tool is going to make you good, but if you give me an eight 50 AD, I'm probably not going to fix anything with it.

Dave Jones: It doesn't have the thermal capacity. It just, it's just not there.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah. So good SMD rework is just having a good, if you have something with a bent nozzle, so you can see under the microscope. Cause I like the, if you, the JVC, cause it has this bent four millimeter nozzle, uh, that that's helpful having the four millimeter nozzle versus like six or eight or 10. Those just, there's no real air pressure. When you go below four, no heat comes out of it. So a four to four and a half millimeter nozzle on a good hot air station makes everything a lot easier, especially if you're working with a product that has 10 layers heat sinking inside of it. Um, uh, a good set of tweezers. I like those HACO, uh, CHP three S a CHP three S a cause they're very, very fine. It makes picking everything up very easy since they're very fine. Uh, a good, you don't need to really expect, you don't need a Mantis microscope. You can buy, you know, like a $300 Amscope will do wonders for seeing everything. Uh, you know, good flux.

Dave Jones: Do you recommend an optical scope? Not a, not a digital. I think, I don't know if it's a lag and everything else. Yep.

Louis Rossmann: No, I have, I used my, I tried to use mine as a digital cause it's HDMI. It's 60 frames a second. It's 1080p. It has, it has no discernible lag and it's very high resolution. My, something happened with my focus block one day where I, it wouldn't, I couldn't get it to focus on the screen and in the oculars in real time and I wanted to do a video. So I thought I'm going to do the video by just looking at the screen and it was, it was, there was no lag. It was a great picture and I tried for an hour and I couldn't get anything done. I don't know if it's a lack of depth perception, if it's getting used to 2D presentation.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I think it's a 3D depth perception thing.

Louis Rossmann: I couldn't do it. I tried for an hour and it was torture. And so I don't recommend the digital ones just because from my personal experience, and this can be different for other people, I can't look at a 2D monitor and get any work done. I have no idea where my hands are going. I don't, I don't know like if I'm going to crash into the board or if I'm moving the right direction, it's a nightmare. I, it's a very small additional amount of money to spend three. Yeah. I would rather have a really cheap, uh, traditional microscope, like the Amscope SE400, which is like 160 bucks or somewhere around there, then have a digital one. Right. Because I don't know what I'm doing. Like I can't, I can't, you know, it's painful.

Dave Jones: Fair call. And soldering ions.

Louis Rossmann: I like the Hakko stuff because it's, it's, it's really cheap. It's reliable. The interface on all of them sucks, but I don't care. I just set a temperature and I keep it there. So I like the Hakko one just because I like, it turns on instantly. You have a great, a great tip selection, by the way, is an important, important for me. So I like tips that are multi-purpose. I like having a tip that let's say has a really large elbow so that if I need a high thermal mass, it's there, but then has a really fine point. I like the knife tips so that if I want to use it as a fine point, I can, but then if I turn it around, I get the entire blade. So I don't like conical tips. Oh, they're awesome. Soldering irons have always come by default with conical tips.

Dave Jones: I know, it's insane.

Louis Rossmann: I don't, I think that's just to discourage you from fixing stuff. I don't know how you're supposed, I don't know how people get worked on. Like I watch these IPC certification videos where people are doing stuff with it and God bless them. They're much better at this than me. God bless them for their skillset. I don't have it. So like having a good, I like a, I like a curvy tip or I like, where I can do drag soldering. I like having a really fine tips that also have a large elbow so that I can switch back and forth between fine tip and high thermal mass. That makes things easy. A good hot air station makes things easy. I've had a lot of people show up that went to, let's say, wild PCS or one of those places where they have this $50 Baku, IUE piece of shit. And they say, like they say, honestly, you know, I'm not, I'm not as good as a professional yet, but like I thought I was worthless and it really is the stuff like this makes everything.

Louis Rossmann: It makes it, it makes it easier when stuff just works.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Agreed.

Louis Rossmann: Yes. I mean, I'm not saying that Weller is bad. I have a Weller hot air station. That's great. I've tried Weller stations that are great. It's just, I just use Hacko because I started with it first and.

Dave Jones: Sure. And it works and they are a professional brand and they get the job done. They make anywhere from simple stuff up to really high end stuff. Yeah.

Louis Rossmann: I mean, it's not, I'm a cheapskate. So if I could buy a $60 hot air station and it would work, you wouldn't see me using any of this. I'm just using this because I've tried the $60 one and the chip just doesn't come off the board. Like I remember spending 10 minutes with that 858 at full temperature and I just pointed it at myself just to make sure it's like, oh yeah, it burns my finger. It's definitely hot, but it's just, they don't work for these things. And it gets even worse when it comes to cell phones because you're dealing with these really smaller areas. So you need like perfect accuracy. Yeah. Like you're heating a chip, but right next to it is a chip with underfill. So if you heat the chip next to it, the, all the solder, that's an entirely new nightmare. Like you're, you're trying to solder one BGA with 96 balls and next to it is another BGA that has underfill. So if the underfill gets hot, it squeezes the balls and all the solder balls shoot out from under the chip and you're screwed. It's like you have, so I mean, this is where you're doing stuff like captain taping. You can use a penny as a heat sink. I've used a penny as a heat sink before.

Dave Jones: Nice.

Louis Rossmann: So you put a, you know, you put a penny. Yeah. Let's say you're trying to replace the U2 chip on an iPhone five. Yeah. It's a charging chip that's right next to the CPU. You put a penny on the CPU, a piece of captain tape, and then like another, a nickel. Nice. And that absorbs the heat. Yep. So that it does, so that the CPU doesn't get it. There's all, this is all stuff that you're going to figure out, but you're going to figure it out after like 10 times of popping CP balls out under the CPU.

Speaker ?: Oh.

Louis Rossmann: It's just, a lot of it is just experimenting and just being totally okay with the fact that you're going to fail miserably on something. And just hoping that that thing that you failed on is something that was cheap.

Dave Jones: Hot air rework is almost an experimental, like a, a suck it and see kind of art, unless you've done that particular chip on that particular board before. And you know, the thermal properties of the board and the chip and everything else, because you've got nozzle width, you've got airflow, you've got temperature. People think you just set a temperature and that's fine. Right. But the width, as you, I think mentioned, alluded to a few minutes ago, the width of your tip changes the airflow, which then changes the amount of heat flow, et cetera. Yeah.

Louis Rossmann: So if you're using, if you use like a two and a half or three millimeter nozzle and you have it at the highest heat you can, it's not going to do it. Whereas four millimeter, you can have it at a much lower heat and it'll work. The other thing is the heat in general. People say, what temperature do you use? I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't care. I don't even like at some point my HACO FR80 on the knob broke off. So I didn't even know where I was on the knob. Right. And it didn't, it didn't matter. Like I know, am I hot enough? Okay. So like, for example, I got this little digital, this fluke, it was a fluke temperature probe. Oh yeah. When I set my, when I set my Weller to a, when I set my Weller to 537 Celsius, I get 490 out of it. When I set my JBC to 450 Celsius, I get 550 out of it. Like I don't, I don't, I mean, this is any Weller in JBC, this is not IUE. This is well-known expensive brands. And it's that like, I just don't, and I get different numbers almost every day that I use them when I try calibrating it. I just don't care about the number. I just set it to where, you know, I work on something that is dead. Mm-hmm. So where I'm not going to be screwing anything up, I figure out what temperatures work and what areas. And, you know, I figure out when sometimes if I need more heat, I just bring it closer. If I want less heat, I take it further away. Like I control the heat with my hands and yawing the station rather, I do more yawing from like then than I do moving. But I control it with my hands rather than with setting the temperature. Got it. The number that the station reads is literally worthless to me. Like you can say 350, I'm not going to get the same result until unless I use 500. And you would have to be in the same room to figure out why that's even the case. Got it. 50% of the time is that your station is, even if it's the same model as mine, is putting out a totally different number than mine is.

Dave Jones: Because it's, yeah, it's a combination of not only the temperature of the element, but the airflow, the size, because you've got not only the temperature setting, but the airflow setting as well, the size of your nozzle, the angle you've got it at, the surrounding components, the heat sinking of the PCB. And it's just, there's so many factors that go into it. It's crazy.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah. It's something that you just have to get used to. Because the most common question is what temperature do you use for this? And like, I'll just send them a picture of the front of my, of my FL801 that doesn't even have the knob on it anymore. It's like, what? I usually go hotter than necessary because I can always, because you can always take the heat. If you just have a thermal couple and you put it on the board and you move the nozzle a quarter of an inch away from the board, you'll see a 30 degree drop. You control the temperature with your hand. You don't control it with the, you think you control it with the number on the scope, but unless you have a thermal couple on the chip, like when you're doing large, if you're replacing like, you know, a 900 ball, a large BGA, you need to do that. When you're replacing small stuff, you know, like a 28 pin QFN or a, you know, a 90 ball BGA, you're not doing any of that. It's not practical. Like you're controlling it with your hands and how far it is from the board.

Dave Jones: Do you think, is there such a thing or do you think, it just occurred to me, what if you had a thermal camera looking at the board? So instead of looking at it visually, well, maybe a combination of visually and a thermal camera pointed at the chip, would that be helpful to know, oh, look, I know this thing's going to melt at 300, you know, it's going to melt at 250.

Louis Rossmann: If you could make that show up in the microscope and that's where technology would be. But I said before, I don't know where technology is going. If you could make that thermal show up in the actual microscope ocular so that I could see it while I'm working, that would be amazing. I would love something like that because I, what I do something like that right now with flux. So what I do is I put too much flux on the board, which is a nice thread on EV. Which you get a lot of complaints over, by the way.

Dave Jones: Oh man. I know.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah, there was a lot of nice stuff and there was a lot of like this, you know, interesting, other interesting stuff there. I personally don't give a fuck. It's like you're not doing what I'm doing anyway, so it's irrelevant. So what I do is if I add too much, I know the temperature at which it's going to burn away. So if I have a puddle around, let's say I have an SMC chip with 96 balls. There'll be a puddle around the chip and then the puddle will slowly start to shrink to where the puddle is maybe a quarter of an inch outside each side of the chip. And then the rippling part of the puddle will be an eighth of an inch. Then the rippling part of the puddle will be one sixteenth of an inch. And I can actually tell what the temperature of the chip is based on where the flux puddle is rippling. And you'll see that. That's a visual indicator. Yeah. Yeah. The outer part of it has gone away. So if you take that away from me, then I don't know the temperature of what I'm doing. So I have a profile for myself. I preheat the board from far away. Then I get a little closer. Then I get a little closer. Then I know when I can go in for my last 15 seconds where I'm going to first see the chip drop, wait five seconds, and then I'm going to yaw the iron, not move it, but yaw it back and forth so that I can see the chip dance. This is all something that you just got to like figure, this is all something that you got to learn and you're going to learn it through burning some screwed up boards beforehand. But once you get, it would be nice to have, you know, the temperature show up on the board via colors in the microscope. But this is, I use flux to do that. And, you know, it's, it's a, I'm sure I'd save in the longterm if I used a more appropriate technology to do that. With heat, it really just comes down to trial and error and learning what works for you. Like for me, the little system of having flux around the chip and then knowing when the flux is at a certain point that the chip is a certain temperature works for me, it's just the feel thing. It's like the number that you see on the station really doesn't matter. If you, if I tell the station to be 500 Celsius, the board could be 100, 200, 300, 500. It depends on how far away is my hot air from the board. Like that, you could set whatever number you want on there, but are you just going to take out a tape measure and measure your distance from the board? Nobody does that. That's why it's just pointless to think about. A lot, a lot of that. Just get a really, really powerful, good station that has a good set of nozzles. I like bent four millimeter nozzles and five millimeter nozzles. And, and you'll be sad. If you find hot air rework and SMD rework sucks. I mean, I know that, I know that like the cost of entry is, is kind of high on some of this. I, when I first spent 650 bucks in the FR801, that was a month, like that was a month of my apartment rent when I bought that.

Dave Jones: Wow.

Louis Rossmann: And I was broke. So like, that was like, that was, that was like legitimately betting on my future just to buy that. But I had an HACO 851, which was cheaper. I bought it used for like a hundred bucks and like nothing would come off off of the board.

Dave Jones: So are they, are they like, you know, thousand pin BGAs that just will not come off unless you put a preheater on the bottom of the board and then your hot air on the top?

Louis Rossmann: Yeah. Gun on the top. If you want to replace a CPU or graphics chip or a large chip, you need a professional machine like that other one that I have, which I never use to do that. Okay. I don't use that machine because I can, I can only buy those chips from illegitimate sources. So there's, and, and those sources usually sell junk and that's also a big to do. It's like, it's not a, okay, let me replace this chip in a few minutes. It's let me replace this chip in 40 minutes. If I spend 40 minutes replacing a chip and either the chip is bad or the board is bad for some other reason and it doesn't work, that, that, that, that's not economical for me. So I don't, I don't use that. But if you want to replace like a thousand ball chip, you're doing that by hand is just, I mean, I'm sure somebody can make an Olympic sport of it, but it's not a good idea, especially for a hobbyist. But like, uh, you know, a 90 ball or a BGA with like 0.25 millimeter balls that that's doable. You can do that with the hand rework stuff like that, you know, the HACO or the Weller or the JBCs, you know.

Dave Jones: I personally find, I don't do like much rework stuff. You know, I do so little of it that it's like, I, like I lose the skill almost like if I, you know, if I haven't like used my hot air gun for like three or six months to actually, you know, remove a chip or do something, it's like, I almost have to practice again before I go in there and do it.

Louis Rossmann: It's, um, it's, it's totally blue collar work. It's not like there's engineering and there's figuring things out that, but that that's arts and crafts. I mean, when I, when I like have to take three wires and one recent video, I had two or three wires going underneath a 25 pin BGA that's a quarter the size of my pinky finger. Now there's no brain being used. I mean, that that's all, that's all arts and crafts. And that's something that just like any sport is just going to, you know, if I decide to stop running, I'm going to find it harder to run a mile a year from now than today.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Louis Rossmann: So it's just, it's just something that you have to keep at. And if I don't do it for two weeks and I come back, it's like, wait, was I actually doing this? Like, holy, how did I?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Two weeks, two weeks and you can lose the feel for it.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah. Like, cause there are times where I'll, let's say, take a few days off and my assistant will do board repairs while I do something else. And a student will come in and I'll go and he'll be screwing something up and I'll go, no, this is a watch. I'm going to show you a tactic and then I want you to try this tactic. It's like, wait, this isn't working for me. Fuck. Humans, humans were not like, I mean, maybe surgeons were meant to do this, but like we were not meant to take three 42 or 46 gauge wires and shove them under a micro of 25 pin micro BGA.

Dave Jones: It's not natural.

Louis Rossmann: And like tuck them into little craters in the board. And like I'll, and there are things you can do. Like I'll make a little, if I want the wire to not make the chip go up, I'll actually dig a crater in the board if the pad is missing. So I'll dig a little crater. I'll shove the wire into the crater and then I'll use, and then I'll use that. There's, if there's a, if the component is missing and the probe point is missing, you can scratch until you get a nub, you can put flux there. I'll take a 0.25 millimeter solder ball that I actually buy. You can buy bins of 0.25 millimeter and I'll put it on top of the nub with flux and I'll use hot air and then I'll make my own. Like you can either spend an hour with a screwing around with a pad repair kit on something that you can barely see. Or I can, or I can, this is all stuff that you figure out from just looking around your desk and going, okay, I have to make this work. What do I have around me? Oh, I have solder balls that are left over. Let me try pouring this ball on the board with some flux and heating it. And it winds up attaching to the board nub. And I'm like, let me try that again. And then I actually wound up making a pad out of solder balls attached to a nub. Wow. It's like, all of this is art. It's arts and crafts. That's nuts. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. To someone who doesn't do repair every day, it's like, that's just nuts. You know, like, wow. I mean, I can understand why you do it. I have the knowledge to understand, you know, the reasoning behind it. But yeah, I can't still help but think, wow. You know.

Louis Rossmann: I mean, when I see people figure out, like, just, this is the type of power supply I want. This is the type of board that it is. Because the board is this long, I need to put this component in this section. To me, that's wizardry. I mean, it's all, when you don't, when you're not, don't do it or you're not used to it, it seems like, it all seems like magic until it's not. Got it.

Dave Jones: Louis, thank you very much for joining us. It's been interesting.

Louis Rossmann: Thanks for letting me yabber into a microphone for almost two hours.

Dave Jones: No, well, not quite two hours. But yeah.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Awesome.

Louis Rossmann: Last question, actually, before you. Yeah, yeah. Go for it. So, you filmed your knee surgery. Did you, was that something you were planning to do anyway? Or was that something you did just after trolling YouTube comments, joked about it?

Dave Jones: No, I was hoping that the surgeon would be able to record it for me. I knew I wouldn't ever get permission to, you know, bring my own camera and gear in and stuff like that and set up and, you know. So, that just wasn't going to happen. But yeah, I asked him and he said, yep, you know, we'll do it.

Louis Rossmann: I think that's amazing. My dad had the same type, similar surgery and he had the camera up and you're like, I don't understand how you can watch that.

Dave Jones: Oh, a lot of people say that. I have no problems. To me, it's just, it's like science. Okay, yeah, I had this operation. It's like, like, it's just.

Louis Rossmann: He had the camera while it was being done to him. So, he was awake and he could see it. Oh, right.

Dave Jones: He could see it. Yeah, that might be a bit more disconcerting. But I still think I'd be able to handle that. If it was just like a local anesthetic and they were drilling through my bone, I'd probably, you know, like when you see the drill, like it's when like a big needle comes in and you go, you know, like you start to get the heebie-jeebies when you see they're about to jab you with a needle, you know. Yeah. Imagine if they came in with a bone drill.

Louis Rossmann: Oh, God. I can't even get my wisdom teeth removed. All right. Thanks a lot for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. I like your stuff and I'm glad we got to do this. Thank you very much.

Dave Jones: I love your work too. Where can people catch you? We'll link it in down below, of course.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah, just youtube.com slash Rossman Group with two S's and two N's. I try to upload a few videos every week on repair or business or whatever.

Dave Jones: A few? It seems like you're doing at least one a day. Yeah. It seems like to me anyway.

Louis Rossmann: Well, hopefully if I say a few, then when they go there and they see a lot, then it's like, oh, wow, he's doing extra work. But if I say I do it two times a day and it's like, man, this guy, what did he retire? I like giving myself the leeway to be lazy.

Dave Jones: How many videos have you got up now?

Louis Rossmann: Something like seven or 800.

Dave Jones: Right. Wow. Yep. Unbelievable. Anyway, if you want to know all about repair and business and you do lots of life philosophy stuff as well, chatting about all that sort of jazz?

Louis Rossmann: Yeah, I've screwed up almost everything that you can possibly screw up in business at a very young age. And my hope is for other people to avoid doing all the stupid things I've done. So most of that is like me at 27 yelling at my 17-year-old self.

Dave Jones: Right.

Louis Rossmann: And like if I could sit my 17-year-old self in front of this and he would ideally not make all the stupid mistakes I made. So virtually everything I talk about is something that I learned from losing money, losing time, or losing sanity and hoping that I can pass that on to other people.

Dave Jones: That's terrific. I love it. So yes, people subscribe to Lewis. And you're on Twitter as well?

Louis Rossmann: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I don't know if you tweet much, do you?

Louis Rossmann: Almost never.

Dave Jones: Almost never.

Louis Rossmann: I can't get things across in 140 characters. I can barely get things across in 140 minutes apparently.

Dave Jones: Your videos are quite long form just like mine.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep. We've got a niche audience in that respect.

Louis Rossmann: I see a lot of comments on mine and I've seen it sometimes in your stuff like this could have been a three-minute video and it's like, yeah, but I don't want to do that. I watch. No.

Dave Jones: Exactly. And I know bloggers that, yeah, do highly, in our field that do highly polished five-minute videos and it takes them 30 hours work to do a five-minute polished video.

Louis Rossmann: I mean, I could do like a, I could do a five-minute video. It's just like, every video that I would watch on YouTube would frustrate me because I would see it. It's like, okay, but how did he do that? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Why is it like, it's the same shit. It's like 5X fast-forwarded, pirated techno music. Yeah. Look, it's like, no. I want to see what he actually did. It's like, I don't want to create like the trial to the actual content that you have to pay for. It's like, this is the actual, this is the actual product. And it's like, people are asking for the trial. I don't, I don't get it.

Dave Jones: I, and I don't get people who watch a five-minute op-amp tutorial and then watch my one at 45 minutes long and go, oh, the five-minute one was so much better. It's like, do you know how much information I put in that 45-minute video? I would want to, I've watched that video.

Louis Rossmann: I would want to watch a five-hour one because I'm sure there's more that I could learn from it.

Dave Jones: There's tons more. Yeah. It's like, you can't learn much in five minutes. It's, it's, you know, not, not, not technical stuff anyway, as far as I'm concerned.

Louis Rossmann: Yeah. I don't know how to get across how a lot of this stuff works. And I like the, and even the video that the Fruity Inc. had the issue with, that was a 10-minute video. And we, we joked, I think the only reason they even found that is because they went to my channel. They saw, oh my God, this guy talks into a camera for three hours at a time. Fuck this. And they're just like scrolling and they probably scrolled by like shortest duration. And it's like, oh my God, he did one video. That's like eight or nine minutes. Click schematic is like 58 seconds in. Okay. Claim. Like, I, I think there's a genuine chance that they don't even know that my other stuff has schematics. Cause I, the sad, the sad intern at that law firm that's dealing with this is like, we have to deal with copyright in China and suing Samsung. And you're bitching at me about schematics and some Guido on YouTube. What the fuck? No. They gave it to an intern and the intern's like, I'm not watching all this shit. And then the reason that one video is the one that got shit is because that video is eight or 10 minutes. I never do eight or 10 minute videos. And I, and the only reason that video is eight minutes is because it was literally a fuse.

Dave Jones: That's great.

Louis Rossmann: Oh dear.

Dave Jones: Oh, love it. Thanks for having me. Thanks Lewis. It's been great, mate. You have a good day. Catch you next time. Bye.

Speaker ?: Bye.