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greiginsydney / Intervalometerator

A multi-purpose time-lapse DSLR camera controller
GNU General Public License v3.0
55 stars 9 forks source link

Power board fault short circuit problem #120

Closed wj7106 closed 2 years ago

wj7106 commented 2 years ago

Hi, I have a short circuit problem with the power supply board today. The power supply part of the whole PCB board is short circuited. After inspection, I found that the power supply board for raspberry pie 5V is short circuited, resulting in the short circuit of the whole system, including the solar MPPT controller. I removed the 12V to 5V power supply board, and the short circuit of the whole circuit disappears. Can I improve the PCB power supply part to avoid the short circuit of the whole system due to a module power failure?

greiginsydney commented 2 years ago

That's disappointing to hear. I hope you had heartbeating enabled and didn't lose too many images?

Was this a genuine Pololu supply, and were there any contributing factors like extreme heat or extreme over-current (e.g. by running a Pi 4 on the 500mA supply)? I chose the Pololu family at design time because I don't have the experience to design my own, and to date I've not had any fail.

I can't see any improvement you can make that will protect against such a fatal failure, other than adding a fuse. I don't know if a PTC device (like a PolySwitch) will help, as it will potentially add an upstream supply impedance ahead of the regulator. Any outboard over-current limiter just adds another link into the chain and becomes another potential failure.

- G.