Before today I had never heard or seen the phrase ‘Blue Light of Death’ (BLOD). I hadn’t needed to, I never had a PS4 before today. Or, yesterday.

So, because of my ongoing Skoolie project, I tend to be pretty active looking for cheap and free building materials on Facebook, Craigslist, and Freecycle. One of my favorite Facebook groups for free appliances and furniture for my bus has been my neighborhood’s Buy-Nothing group. I got my fridge, my secretary desk, and a good number of other smaller materials from this group over the years.

Yesterday someone in the neighborhood offered the unthinkable – a free PS4! Not something I’d have normally gone after, but this one was intriguing – It Didn’t Work, and the owner wasn’t sure what to do with it. Throw it out? Recycle it? I piped up and offered that I’d be happy to try to figure out what was wrong with it, and hey presto, now I have a free Playstation 4. I figure, if nothing else I can maybe recover the 1TB hard drive and use it to store a good chunk of my ever-growing media collection.

So, I plug it in, and hook up the HDMI cable, and go to turn it on, and of course, nothing happens. Well, not nothing, but nothing good. The power button starts to glow blue, sits there for about 20 seconds, and then the whole thing just shuts down. I had to look it up to learn that the ‘blue glow’ is not what is supposed to happen, but is actually The Signal that something is preventing the device from powering up properly. This was the infamous Blue Light of Death.

So, I got to spend a good chunk of this afternoon watching a number of repair videos, teardown videos, and reassembly videos, and I’m starting to think that repairing it might be a bit more challenging than I’d hoped. I don’t know, I hoped maybe it was just a loose connection somewhere, but pulling the PS4’s case open and disassembling it down to the heat shield, it seemed like the unit was kept pretty well taken care of. There wasn’t an ungodly amount of dust buildup, and all the cable connectors I could see were pretty well attached.

A couple of the videos went much further than I did, getting down the motherboard, and even testing microscopic resistors connected to the RAM chips. I’m not giving up on myself yet, I still aim to try again in another week or two after I’ve taken care of more of the chores around the apartment, and maybe made another run out to drop stuff off at the bus. I’m excited about taking it apart again and really going for it, breaking out my multimeter and seeing if I can figure out where the flow of power is getting cut off. It’ll be a learning project either way, I have no doubt. Will I end up with a self-refurbished free PS4? Or just another box to go out to the trash?