Without wanting to wish you any bad luck... I hope you find some more defects soon!!

Okay folks, if you haven't guessed the fault yet, it's closing in 1 HOUR, (midnight here in Australia, AEST).

Paul.

Competition is now CLOSED.

The fault was that the middle track wasn't quite drilled out enough, so there was a very fine trace of copper still causing conduction and preventing the system from shutting down.

Ahhh - that was my next guess

Okay, I overshot the usual 1 week repeat for the defect but here's the next one (to be fair, I did have another one submitted to me by a good person but I'm still working on that ).

The prize for this week is a mystery, even to me - yes I'm serious, I don't know what I'm going to offer up yet, so consider it a big of a lucky-draw.


So here we go, straight out of the reflow oven.... (these are PLD-BAC-ESJ base units)

Paul

Status
Glory points: Neilmy, Dusk, Gussy, DonQ, gman326, mudman1959, glydr, sparkysko, Charles Beener, littlewing78
Prize claims: Kentucky

Defect: A resistor on the back of the 3rd board from the left has gone vertical (tombstoned).

Okay, got two successful responses so far

Dead easy

(I thought it was a fitting response... heh)

PM sent

Okay, comp is now closed... until next week

The fault was, as many people correctly spotted, the resistor on the 3rd board has "tombstoned". This happens sometimes if there if the part hasn't made proper contact with the solder paste on one side, when the reflow phase occurs the surface tension of the other side is more than sufficient to yank the part up into the air.

Paul.

update - prize is claimed, now it's all for the glory!

Wow, can you believe it's been a MONTH since I posted the last defect, or so it seems.

Here's the next one, symptoms are simply that it doesn't start the discharge process for the lipo cell #3, the other two cells discharge fine.

Hint #1 - There's no solder bridges. Anything you think is a bridge is not, it'll be likely flux slag reflecting the halogen lights

The prize... is a lipo Normaliser, only one of these to give away so BE QUICK

Also, an adjustment on the glory-points schedule, we'll work it like this from now on;

1st correct = 3 points
2nd = 2 points
Everyone else gets 1 point after that, that way it means that we can get shuffling of the leaderboard based on their response times

Paul.

Stats

Prize: RCHMC (USA)
Glory: DonQ (+3), mudman1959(+2), glydr(+1)

Defect: The small inductor (grey block, looks a bit like a capacitor) on the right hand side is missing solder on the pad closest to the camera.

Switched to PM - Sorry about that pldaniels, I wasn't thinking or reading apparently.

Hey there Taco,

PM the guesses Don't want everyone knowing

Paul.

Hint #1 - There's no solder bridges. Anything you think is a bridge is not, it'll be likely flux slag reflecting the halogen lights

Here we go again

The sheeded paper fibers aren't the fault and the TACO chip is meant to look a bit grubby.

PM me with the fault INCLUDING if you want the prize or points towards the 3 month price.

For glory points - 3 points to the first correct, 2 to the second, 1 point for all the rest.

The prize for the first correct prize claimer... a low voltage alarm / readout ( http://nqrc.com/?vp=PLD-LVA-MINI-NI ).

The prize for the second correct prize claimer... one each of the new PLD Voltage protectors ( PLD-VP220, VP470 and VP1000 - http://nqrc.com/?vp=PLD-VP1000 ).

PRIZES
Main prize: glydr
Secondary prize: Dusk

SCORES
neilmy: +3 pts.
kentucky: +2 pts.
gman326: +1 pts.

DEFECT: The 470 resistor on the front-left didn't have its pad soldered during the reflow, instead it's resting above the actual PCB pad.

Main prize arrived thanks - so tiny!

This one will go on my new small slopey - a Wasp. Am thinking of attaching such that it is visible through a little window.

Nice.