Burning F9P on standard 4.5 board

Hardware PCB
1

Good day,

I recently installed my Teensy, IMU and F9P ublocks board onto my standard 4.5 PCB adn it seems my board is trying to start a fire! Quick over view that led me here, I installed the voltage regulators myself as they did not come on the board. I connected +12V to pin 22 and -12V to pin 23 and fired it up. LED’s all looked good and voltages tested good. I programmed and installed the Teensy, IMU and F9P boards and fired it up again. It all seemed good, connected to my laptop, set up UDP comms and ran the simulator and it all seems to be working great…

I started to hear some buzzing/shorting crackles and smelt burning. I powered it down and took all the boards off and inspected it, couldn’t see anything. Reinstalled it and tested it again, after about 20 minutes I started to smell burning again. I left it powered up until I started to see smoke. The smoke is coming from the 5volt or ground pins on the top middle of the F9P board. I powered it down and removed the board. Measured across 5 volts and ground have high impedance/resistance between them so no short on the board I think, I powered the PCB back up without the F9P board and have 5 Volts between 5V in and ground. I installed the F9P board with it powered down and measured resistance from the top of the board to the bottom of the PCB on each of the 3 connections separately and they all about 0.8 ohms so I think there should be no heat build up because of the connections. Any suggestions on what could be causing this or where to look for issues? I tried looking at the PCB schematic but couldn’t see where those voltages and grounds all go. I’ve attached a picture of the board as is currently and circled in purple where the smoke was coming from, the LEDS on by the AMP connector don’t match the communication/power statuses currently as I took the picture before I got the UDP comms sorted.

Edit: Just making a quick edit to say the PCB has no issues when the F9P is not installed.

IMG_7148
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1 Like
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I had the same issue, I even spoke to the ardusimple tech guys and they said to check the solderings on the header pins. And clean the board after soldering from flux and soldering paste.

I did all that but it did NOT help imediately… it stopped smoking after few times of using it and its now running for 2 years in a tractor with no problems. Its not smoking anymore :wink:

3

Thanks, I’ve got some contact cleaner so I’ll reheat the connections and give and a good clean and go from there. I might reach out to arduosimple also, thanks!

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I tried it again and it only ran for about 5 seconds and shorted itself. Still power up over USB but it might be done now.

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Done? Fried or… ?

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Fried.

7

What went wrong? What did you try to do?

Send an email to ardusimple if they will accept it has 2year warranty!

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I didn’t do much, resoldered the connections. They were good solders, no shorts or anything. I was using a current limited power supply to test it, I think it might have adjusted the current to allow a couple amps instead of one, that might have been enough to burn it faster. Probably freed the built in regulator on the F9P for that feed as it still seems to work when powered by the mini-usb port. I emailed ardusimple.

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Well, in the worst case scenario, you can rig a cable to go from the AIO to the USB port. To save the card.

11

Yah that’s a good option. I want to make a base station also for better accuracy so might use it for that, it all takes time though when things don’t go as you want them to though. I need a clone or time machine or something haha.

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I’m pretty confident in my soldering but it looks like there was a contaminant or my solder connection was bad. I removed the header on the ardusimple board and redid it. Powered back up and is communicating with no errors it seems, and no smoke! Thanks for replying to my post. Happy harvesting.

1 Like
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So was I but I haven’t been able to find a mistake. Glad it works, have a good yield! :smiley: