I kept having trouble keeping the power LEDs on the dewhitening board 'on'. I did the following:
1. I noticed that the dewhitening board was drawing a lot of current (>500mA), so I initially thought that the indicators were just turning on until I blew the fuse. I couldn't find the electronics diagrams for this board, so I was using analagous boards' diagrams and wasn't sure how much current to expect to draw. I swapped out for 1A fuses (only for the electronics I was adding to the system).
2. Now the +24V indicator on the dewhitening board wasn't turning on, and the -24V supply was alternatively drawing ~500mA and 0mA in a ~1Hz square wave. Thinking I could be dropping voltage along the path to the board, I swapped out the cables leading to the whitening/dewhitening boards with 16AWG (was 18AWG). This didn't seem to help.
3. Since the whitening board seemed to be consistently powered on, I removed the dewhitening board to see if there was a problem with it. Indeed, I'd burned out the +24V supply electronics--two resisters were broken entirely, and the breadboard near the voltage regulator had been visibly heated.
- I identified that the resistors were 1Ohm, and replaced them (though I couldn't find 1Ohm surface mount resistors). I also replaced the voltage regulator in case it was broken. I couldn't find the exact model, so I replaced the LM2940CT-12 with an LM7812, which I think is the newer 12V regulator.
- Though this replacement seemed to work when the power board was disconnected from the dewhitening board, connecting to the dewhitening board again resulted in a lot of current draw.
- I depowered the board and decided to take a different approach (see)
I noticed that the +/-15V currents are slightly higher than the labels, but didn't notice whether they were already different before I began this work.
I also noticed one pair of wires in the area of 1X1 I was working that wasn't attached to power (or anything). I didn't know what it was for, so I've attached a picture. |