Inductor -- not a TVS. That's part of the dc-dc converter for the MOSFET drive.

You must have hit something HARD to break the solder joints on that part....

Does landing a small double perfectly do that? was not a hard hit at all- i landed the jump and coasted around the next corner to set up for the next jump and then had no drive power:neutral:

I dont know where his car let go

if it was a hard hit why did the solder joint on this one component fail instead of any others?

Mine let go after rolling the triple. the track is a bit bumpy, and there is a pothole around the last turn that everybody loses their car in, but would this be like a sudden damage thing, or is every bit of vibration slowly killing it?

Not trying to bash on your products or anything, just curious of the cause...

I dont think the potholes are the problem, because there are 6 other people running Mamba monster systems that have no problems.

Are you sure you remembered to put shock oil in the shocks??? Ok just kidding.
Ya, we've given people trucks that can do 80mph and there are a lot of light poles out there that are afraid. I would hate to test the G forces involved being inside that truck during a race with potholes and jumps.

Is there any form of padding or cushioning underneath the MMMs, how are they mounted exactly?

No padding besides servo tape, both were mounted directly on the chassis. no funky angles or anything.

That particular component is one of the heavier of the small SMT parts on that board (made of ferrite.) We don't see many of them breaking like that.

So do we win a prize or something?:lol:

Cant wait till those new cases, eh pat?

yay! will we see those cases?

After talking about hitting light poles in my last post, my truck split in half after I hit a garbage can at about 35mph. The MMM still works great though. We really do put these things through a lot of abuse.

j57ltr is right on the money. RoHS is a pain but some oem corps wont look at you twice if you dont have it, especially europe and medical corps. i found soem vendors were passing off LF and PB components as the same. the end caps on the components wont take so well if your using a PB solder with LF components. the fact the solder pad resembles the shape of the end cap may indicate that this has happened, or handling contamination. not sure if a tvs is a moisture sensitive device in storage though? very strange. good luck with the RMA guys.

easy as...123revo

Again, not a TVS, that was an inductor. Handling isn't an issue -- these are not touched by hand at all -- and the reels are stored in their original packaging (which includes moisture metering) until they are placed on the pick and place machines. The manufacturing facility is maintained at less than 30% RH. After reflow, moisture isn't really an issue for that type of part.

This is a ROHS part, but I've yet to see another return with that part damaged or missing.

When I looked at the pics of your boards I was going to commend you for actually hand assembling these units. But you say these are all done on a pick and place? Everything on that board looks like is was hand soldered. I see no evidence of the glue usually used to hold the component in place before it is put through a wave solder station. If you look at the chip to the right that I believe is the driver for the BEC, two of the pins are almost soldered together (LTBRZ). Most of the components look to have more solder than I would expect to see from machine soldering. I am not bashing your product; in fact I really like the features and abuse they tolerate. But the component clearly came off because of a poor solder joint. Our A/D cards use inductors about the same physical size as the one on your board and we had problems like this as well. I actually made a vibration station to test our cards because of this problem. The larger components just need more heat to properly bond the solder. We had this on inductors and some of the SMT Xtals we use. I have also seen at least one other pic in this forum where a component has come off of the board.

Jeff