Still worth working out what/why things weren't working.

As much as parts are reasonably cheap you don't want "luck" to play a part in how you build things.

It does look like you could have made a few minor mistakes -with the original soldering - which is cool it's how we learn - but it's worth taking the lessons as they come

I generally suggest "bench" testing all parts prior to permanent use - I power F/Cs off USB and run up their configurator and let them sit on the bench for 24+ hours running. Stick a load on the output of BECs and run a few battery packs through etc etc

Please share regards the minor mistakes with the original soldering... all seemed fine to me, the mistake was not testing it before soldering everything up.

As i said for £8 it's not worth the time troubleshooting any further. If you think so then you are lucky to have so much time on your hands

For a start, and only because you asked for it, you have bad joints. You got the wires too hot, melted the insulation up away from the joint, in many cases the wires could be twisted over to short on neighbouring pads etc.

My point about cost isn't about spending hours and hours finding fault components on the board, it's about looking at what we do/have done and striving to continuously improve - my soldering, not perfect, my builds, not perfect, and given my income spending AUD8 on a PDB isn't an issue, but if I make a poor job of it that's AUD8 I'm spending replacing a part that will take 3 weeks for a replacement to arrive (or cost considerably more to get locally with a couple of days).

Yeah, I really do need a proper solder station and must admit and my soldering is not going to pass any IEEE inspections; but it should do the job. Certainly no shorts anyhow. Think I was just unlucky, seems to be common with these low cost Chinese circuits, sometimes they just don't work or blow easily.

No problems with the Kombini I brought to replace this. Only issue I have now is a seemingly blown MicroMinimOSD. Worked yesterday, today it doesn't. Apparently it's a good idea to use zener protection as they are prone to blowing if there's a voltage spike when you plug the power in? Pfffft.

WTF on the OSD! That totally sucks, some symptom of cost cutting in manufacture I guess

(17-May-2017, 12:02 AM)Aaron Wrote: WTF on the OSD! That totally sucks, some symptom of cost cutting in manufacture I guess

Replacement one came, works fine.  Interestingly the green serial data LED works whereas on the old one that never worked so perhaps it always had an issue.