I have the 56 volt version oDrive. I am driving two D6374 motors each with an 8192 encoder. I set it all up and tested with a 12 volt supply (a deep cycle marine battery) and got it all working. I am using the RC input mode and have my Tx/Rx allowing me to drive the motors in both directions with joystick control. My intent is to operate with significantly more power and amperage then with my testing.
I bought a couple of 5000 mAh 6 cell LiPo packs and charged them up. I hooked them up in series and measured a nominal 4.2 x 12 = 50.4 volts. Then I didn’t do any reading to see if I needed to change any settings and just plugged it in!
There was definitely a surge. I heard a pop and saw a flash out of the corner of my eye near the right end of the board where the power indicator is. I didn’t hard plug it, just started touching the connectors and quickly withdrew. I heard my PC bleep indicating that the USB connection had come alive briefly. It was not immediately clear if I just saw the LED flash or a surface mount component arced. Upon closer inspection, I noticed a trace to the last capacitor on the end near the power LED on the bottom side of the board had blown out (see image).
Before I noted the damage, I had already plugged it back into the 12 volt supply and it seemed to be operating. But I didn’t do any serious checking, just verified I could turn my motors both ways under control. So did I burn it up or not? Can I just solder a small gauge wire in place of the blown trace to fix this? What did I do wrong and/or what is the correct way to configure and to power up/down the oDrive with higher voltages like this?
No configuration is needed for different voltages. However, it does not have any reverse voltage protection, so make sure you don’t plug it in backwards
What really? The board works with 12V after that trace exploded? I’m impressed… I’ll ask about the trace.
There could be a copper or solder defect around that area, or C60 itself might have shorted.
However there are other, smaller caps, that hold DCBUS against GND too, and logic supply demand isn’t too spiky, and the regulator can reject movement on DCBUS anyway: so if the ODrive works fine, you may be okay without any repair and just keep an eye on it.
Just remove the remnants of that trace so it doesn’t short against anything.
If you want to repair it anyway, I would suggest de-soldering C60 and discarding it, and getting a new one. Inspect in the suspicious area marked in the screenshot. Then solder in a replacement and bridge a wire to somewhere down the trace.
C60 is a CGA5L3X7S2A225M160AB.
Man my eyes are getting old. It’s difficult to see what is going on for me and this isn’t even that tiny. I attempted to take a better photo oriented like your image.
There seems to be a spatter near the lug on C60. Is that lug grounded? Wondering if a solder splatter or wire filament found its way to short across to the DCBUS? If the cap were bad, wouldn’t it have been more explosive? (ME here, not EE, so give me some latitude in my theories!)
I think I am referring to one of the “can” style caps C11 - C18 when I mentioned the “lug” above, as opposed to the SMD C60 component. You can see the C60 in the image above does look a little cooked.
I will remove the blown trace and replace the C60 and hope it was an errant solder splatter or wire filament that caused this in the first place. However, this was the bottom side of the board when it happened, so I don’t really buy my own theory…
I’ll follow up if I have any more difficulties after this.
