Genesis Technologies GT-3.0 no audio no backlight

So I have one of these in my travel trailer and it started acting wacky after I plugged my Galaxy S5 into the front USB port to charge it. I thought I read somewhere you could do that. Well, all of a sudden the backlighting on the front panel doesn't work anymore and there is no more audio from any function (radio, DVD, CD, USB stick).


Turns out there's very little (none) online resources for this unit and a few e-mails to dealers yielded only one response, to the tune of "there are no repair facilities for these units but we can sell you a replacement!".
So, not to draw this out, turns out the problem was a burnt BD438 power transistor inside the box.

The transistor is located on the upper board behind the sockets for speakers and 12V power. To get to the view you see above you'll have to remove the unit from the RV, remove the front control panel and remove the side plates. You'll have to remove five screws from the top board to access the underside to solder the new transistor (hint: the fifth screw is on top of the unit, under the sticker).
I ordered a new transistor from Digikey for $0.72 and I was good to go.

Good luck!

An Introduction

Ok, so I've been thinking of starting a blog for some time... I'm a tinkerer and love the challenge of trying to fix stuff. Ever since I could work a screwdriver I've been taking things apart, sometimes even managed to get them back together again. :)

The web has been such a great resource for me that I would like to have a place to share some of my 'fixes' with the world. Hopefully I can post a collection of things here and maybe, just maybe, someone out there will have a search engine point them to my blog and they can take away something useful for the project they are working on.

I don't pretend to be a professional repair man nor will this blog be a work of art. The vision I have right now is a repository of pictures and notes to share how I managed to bring something back to life.
Enjoy!