Patrick,
First off. I just want to say that this post is made with purely the best intentions and is intended to be constructive feedback so please don’t take this as nit picking or flaming the product because I want nothing more than the BEC issues that seem to still be occurring with to high of a frequency to be fixed once and for all. And rather than sitting around complaining (which is what I have been doing...sorry guys) I figured I would at least try and spend some constructive time feeding back my observations. I make my living as a product development engineer and have been designing/developing consumer products for many years, and yes this means chasing down nightmare little problems that seem impossible to identify. So I can feel what you guys are going through right now. And if there is one thing that I have learned when trying to solve a problem is to start eliminating variables and other minor problems even if they don’t seem obviously directly related.
Could you guys be chasing what you are thinking is an electrical design or component problem when in fact it’s actually a mechanical case design issue causing the component failures? I just want to throw that out there. Here is what I mean and what I am seeing:
I have a brand new V2 here that I just took out of the box and I have been looking over this thing for a little while here. One of the problems we have seen a bunch of people post about is the little white fan plug breaking off of the bottom of the board. It’s obvious that you guys over at CC have also identified this problem because in the V2 it appears that a soft foam pad has been put under the plug. Presumably to cushion the plug from contacting the hard case bottom and breaking off. I had the plug break off on my V1 and saw this pad "fix" on the first V2 that I purchased. (That has since gone bad with BEC issues.) I wanted to look at this a little closer before running my 2nd V2.
I actually think that the foam pad is making your problem worse. I just pulled the foam pad off of my brand new V2 and set the controller board on top of the base. The board is obviously high centered on the plug. (See the pictures below) I can set the board on the base and the edges of the board don’t even contact the edges of the case that are supposed to be supporting the board. All of the pressure is on this one little fan plug component. The plug is soldered onto the board that has the BEC circuits on it that have been giving everyone fits. I'm not an electrical engineer here, but I do know that a cracked circuit board is a good way to make an electronic device stop working, or at least do something unpredictable. This just seems to me to be a MUST FIX item. Even if it isn’t causing the problems with the BEC that are happening now. It seems obvious to me that every time I land a jump or hit a bump, the BEC brain board is taking a hit and eventually something is going to give. The plug... or the board… or both?
When I measure the height of the board support edges of the case bottom they check 4.8mm tall. When I measure the height of the white plug to the main board that sits on those supports it measures 5.42mm high. This is an obvious interference of at least .6mm. This doesn’t even take into account the small amount of flex that the components might see in a jump/bump related impact which could make the interference even worse
The pad looks like an attempted quick fix, but it seems to me that the pad just adds mass under the exact point that is creating pressure on the brain board and actually making the problem worse by crating even more constant pressure on it. When the case bottom gets snapped closed it presses on the plug and keeps a constant pressure on that spot. Hell… It might even be creating a minute fracture the first time the case is closed at the factory and the ones that fail never even had a chance.
Could this pressure on the brain board be your problem? I think it’s possible. And I have heard a couple of your Techs say that the people that have one go bad usually have more than one go bad. Rather than the components in their electrical system being the cause of the repeated failures in the same setup, could it be the way they are mounting it causing additional stress on this component? For example they are mounting it directly to a hard chassis with no padding. And the guys that are mounting it to something softer or on Velcro or something aren’t having the problems.
I am going to guess that you guys have already thought about all of this, but I just wanted to throw it out there just in case.
Here are links to a few pictures to illustrate what I am talking about.
