Well I have made progress.
It seems it was the
“SY6912AFCC, Silergy, Battery Charger Li-Ion 8-Pin SOIC, marking AIQxxx
Chip causing the thing not to come alive.
Found it by mistake trying to remove it to see where a trace was going and ended up breaking the thing off because I didn’t know there was a pad under the chip
The board is fine, but the chip is destroyed
Once it was gone it fired right up 😂😂😂
So I’m asking for a bit of help again. Tracking down that thing leads to Chinese sites that I cannot read.
I searched DigiKey for “Battery Charger Li-Ion 8-Pin SOIC” but zero results were found.
Any suggestions on a possible alternative to this thing?