Bad vibrations

Original vibration motor next to my Galaxy S3

Well, my vibrator stopped working. I dropped my Galaxy S3 the other day, and ever since, the vibration stopped working properly. And it would make weird noises. Sometimes it wouldn't even vibrate. If I shook my phone I could hear actual rattling in there.

So, like any hacker/cheapskate, I looked around online and found a $4 (free shipping) replacement on eBay. A few days later, it arrived in my mailbox.

Let me go backwards in time a little bit: I've never actually repaired a cell phone before. Because of this, I looked for some videos to see what I was getting myself into. To my surprise I wasn't overly intimidated, so I went forward.

It was a success! I actually shot the whole thing on video, but it's not edited at the moment. I will post it here when/if I ever get around to editing it for everyone (it definitely needs it).

To close this post, here's a closeup of the original motor:

Original vibrator motor

Garage Door Controller Tutorial - Solder on your homemade circuit board

My home made circuit board

This post is an alternate to Garage Door Controller Tutorial - Step 2 - Soldering. The aforementioned post assumes that you bought the professionally made PCB from my store (or downloaded the files on my GitHub and sent them to your own board hours to be fabricated).

However, I'm all about saving money, so wanted to provide you with a way to save yourself a little money (about $9 if you buy from my store, or more $ if you get your own board house to make them for you). So if you made your own circuit board, or want to learn more about doing so, read on...