Hey guys. I am looking at being sidelined for a good month due to health issues. So I am looking to essentially give myself busy work moving forward to kind of fill that time when I am out. So what better way to do it? Board work of course...........
I acquired this board a long, long time ago. I have not touched it at all. I gave it to Rob Anthony probably 4 years back to look over it and see if he has even seen this aftermarket DMD controller board before (which he has never seen one from the manufacturer at the time). I don't think he really did much with it considering replacement boards are cheap enough to just replace. So he advised against spending the money to invest in components and time to fix this and suggested to buy a replacement from Jim Knight (formerly? rottendog).
Long story short. This board works. The issue is that it works for 15 minutes, then fails. It gets garbled. If I let the board sit, I can reboot the game and it will work again for the time frame of about 10-15 minutes. I popped it into my DR who last night just as a refresher to the issues, but this time around I put a laser temp sensor to the locations of the board. I am seeing that the Q6 component temp is OBSENELY high. I touched it (before I touched it before I got the temp sensor) and got burned. I did notice that it is different from the other 2 transistors, so it seems it has been replaced before. So I am assuming that's the failure component. With that being said, I am trying to figure out what is causing this. Clearly the board got re-worked due to the hack on the back with the shoddy solder work and socketed chip. I have no problem doing a rebuild if its necessary but I am not particularly sure that it is necessary. I am aware that the transistors do not have heat sinks attached to them. I would really like to acquire a few from a junked board eventually, but I am sure that the missing heat sink is not the culprit here. That Q6 is just getting too hot.
I am mostly looking for a reason as to what is seemingly shorting out that Q6 transistor. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
