Hey community!

I'd really appreciate if someone could help explain something weird that's happening with my beloved n900. Around 6 months ago I spilled some coca-cola on my phone. I immediately took the battery out and let it dry for several hours. The phone worked completely fine for 2 weeks later, until the WiFi stopped working. I re-flashed my phone twice with no anvil. I lived with my WiFi-less phone for months until weirdly I tried to connect to my WiFi (about a month ago) and it worked! It worked for 1 day then stopped working. A couple of days ago I changed the wireless connection settings to '10mw' and 'power saving mode' and WiFi started to work flawlessly. But after 2 days it stopped working. What could be the problem?

(My N900 is OC to 850Mhz)

I'm thinking it may be a hardware issue? I'm not too sure

And the sugar and other gunk crystallized inside the device, shorting something. Now it's slowly breaking down or shifting inside the device and intermittently causing a short. I'm willing to bet just before it started working there was a sharp drop or hit that caused a physical change to the device, yes?

Any time you spill something onto a device, it can screw with it. Something as toxic as soda, doubly so. You're almost better off removing the battery and immersing it in purified water or alcohol to let it dilute and/or remove the contaminants before drying it in those situations. Any drink with sugar, and even sometimes water if you live in an area with "hard" calcified water.

Now that it's so long afterward, the only real solution would be to open the device and clean it (a very difficult and tedious task), or live with it... and smack it around a bit to help it loosen up whatever is causing the short. Maybe you'll get lucky and it will eventually fall out. Of course you could also get unlucky and it shift and short out something important... tough call on that one.

contact cleaner? any good electronics store should sell it in a can...

So you suggest I take it apart and clean out the wifi chip set using a contact cleaner set? How hard/long do you reckon that would take?

I really appreciate it if someone could tell me where the Wi-Fi Chipset is located in the device? And does disassembling the device void the warranty?

Even if the disassembly didn't void the warranty. I suspect the soda did.

Anyhow have you checked if it's still under warranty anyway?

Meanwhile this tread and links might interest.

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=60672

http://maemo.jacekowski.org/docs/Nok...Schematics.pdf

http://wiki.maemo.org/N900_Hardware_Hacking

Alright now I can scan and connect to Wi-Fi. I connect fine, but when I try and browse the internet it times out and never actually displays the website just the usual 'MicroB can't find the sever' message.

I used xterminal and tried;

But I got this error: Does anybody in the community know how to fix this or has had a similar issue? I'd really appreciate if you could help bring back my beloved n900!

Thanks,
Mike

with ping and neetwork problems, try to ping a local machine directly on its IP address, for instance your router (if it's setup to respond to ping, that is) or another pc -just test from another system that it should respond to ping.

If you get a response to ping, from a local machine, test if your n900 can ping an IP address (number) on the internet; do a ping from a pc to google.com or so, and it will show you the IP - then use that IP address on your N900 to ping to.

You should/could also check your routing table
route
check that the indicated gateway (gw) is indeed the machine through which you should go on the web from your network,
and then check if host resolution works; getting "bad address" on pinging server addresses on the web is an indication of not having DNS / routing / network connection configured/available.