Ubports edition shows nothing on screen after liquid exposure

[partytax]

I've been using my PinePhone Ubports edition with much success for the last few weeks, but last night I think it was exposed to too much liquid. I laid out a bunch of things from my backpack and sprayed bleach cleaner over them (because the plague). After I dried things off, I tried to charge and boot my PinePhone (stupid, I know) and all I got to was a backlit black screen. The backlight turned on and off a few times pretty systematically. I typically use Mobian, but I tried booting into Ubports as well. Nothing...not even the Pine64 logo showed up. When I insert or remove the USB cable, however, the phone plays a clicking sound effect, which makes me think the thing might not be completely dead. Not sure if this matters, but the phone was in a pretty hot environment for the preceding hour and AFAIK had exhausted its battery when I cleaned it.

If anyone has troubleshooting ideas, shoot.

If anyone knows what part I might have shorted/destroyed, let me know.

Thank you in advance for your wisdom!

[Subsentient]

If the sound effect is the same your OS makes when the phone was working normally, you might have only killed the screen. They're ~$30 and not too hard to replace, I replaced mine because my BH was secondhand and the screen was a bit funky. You'll have to take it apart, but if the motherboard is still good, thankfully that's the expensive part.

[wibble]

Try the serial console to see what's going on behind the scenes.

[partytax]

If the sound effect is the same your OS makes when the phone was working normally, you might have only killed the screen. They're ~$30 and not too hard to replace, I replaced mine because my BH was secondhand and the screen was a bit funky. You'll have to take it apart, but if the motherboard is still good, thankfully that's the expensive part.

I think I'll try this. Thanks for the suggestion!

[partytax]

Try the serial console to see what's going on behind the scenes.

Do you have any hardware or software recommendations for accessing the phone through the serial port?

[wibble]

Try the serial console to see what's going on behind the scenes.

Do you have any hardware or software recommendations for accessing the phone through the serial port?

The wiki pages both here and for PmOS describe the necessary hardware :
https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePh...al_console
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/PINE6...al_console

A couple of people have blogged about their experiences doing it in more detail than I'll manage:
https://bloggerbust.ca/post/my-first-exp...l-console/
https://dimitris.cc/kde/2020/05/01/USB_S...phone.html

I've got an old 3.3V FTDI USB-serial board that I haven't got round to wiring up to a 3.5mm jack yet, but have used for similar purposes in the past. I find picocom friendlier than minicom,and I've never much liked emacs. The bloggerbust.ca post includes an example of what you should see all the way from the uboot bootloader starting up, through the boot process to a login prompt, and some of the things you can do after login. Remember you need to flip the dip switch to change between headphone and serial console mode!