by Orion » Sat 16 Mar, 2019 9:50 am
Good on you for making the effort to keep a $10 compass from ending up in the rubbish heap.
I spent a couple of weeks reverse engineering a toaster that had gone wonky with it's microprocessor control. I carefully sketched out a schematic, looked up the what the various chips were, and had even written some of the code for the Atmel processor I was going to use to run the thing. I had it all figured out. Then I ran a little test and connected wire A to wire B when it should have been obvious from my home made schematic that I really shouldn't have done that. Pop! Poof! Smoke. Goodbye. Now I have a new toaster that cost $25 and the old one is adding to the giant pile of industrial debris. Oh well.
I don't really know what fluid is in a cheap hand held compass. It doesn't appear to be very viscous though. The thing I would wonder about is why the fluid is gone in yours. Presumably there is a leak you need to deal with.