Finished soldering everything and the ardustation worked using a 12v battery via the barrel jack( hope i used the correct name for that). I cant seem to turn the ardustation on via that source, and ive switched batteries that are fully charged and verified to work with other devices. The ardustation is fine, as everything lights up (led, screen, buzzer etc) when i power it via the ftdi.
Ive noticed there are other points on the board that are marked 5v and 3.3 and was hoping that perhaps i could attach an appropriate lipo via a bec to the 5v. Is that possible or is it going to burn something up ?
Can the power jack barrel thing be replaced, does it burn out ?
When it stopped working, there was no smoke, smell or anything, it just stopped.
Replies
The 12 volt jack goes to a voltage regulator which has two surface mount resistors that determine the value sent to the rest of the board. The ratio is set for 5 volt output and it is a linear regulator. You can certainly supply 5 volts to the output side of the regulator (or the +5 line on the header that the FTDI connects to) without damaging the linear regulator. My guess is that something happened to the voltage divider surface mount [something that caused the voltage to be changed from 5 volts. This could be that one of the two resistors opened up. Another possibility is that on some kits, 3DR soldered the wrong resistor for the voltage divider which caused only about a volt to be generated. I interacted on the forum with 2 people who had this happen - although you said it initially work - which would indicate that both resistors were working at some time. Check the 5 volt line voltage while 12 volts is hooked up to see what the voltage is to see if the regulator is working or not.
Heino