Greetings,
I’ve recently assembled the K8098 Audio Analyser kit - board v. PVPA20’2, however on power-up there’s absolutely no response. The LCD backlight LED illuminates but there is no other activity. I’ve had another electrical engineer have a look at my construction and the check the schematic, and we are sure it is all correct. Taking various voltage measurements confirm that the correct power is being supplied to the microcontroller at the corresponding pins from the PIC datasheet. We have also considered that the contrast of the LCD display might simply be set to too low a value, and have had a look at the datasheet for the display module to see if this could be changed by adjusting any resistor values on the display module, but had no success with this.
The board we have stipulates that the external oscillator (X1 and C12, C13) are not required for the microcontroller. We did notice that some pins seem to be floating at about 1.5v, however I haven’t yet been able to have a look with a scope to see if these are in fact signals.
Does anyone have any troubleshooting advice for readings I could perhaps take to help diagnose the problem?
If you are positive that everything is correctly assembled, then it should work.
Contrast setting is set to a default value by the microcontroller, so you should not worry about that.
Can you supply LINKS to HI-RES and SHARP pics of your assembly (both solder- and component side), so that we can take a look.
If we cannot spot a problem, then we can examine your kit. In that case, please return it to Velleman Projects Tech. Dept. Legen Heirweg 33 9890 Gavere Belgium.
US residents: please call (817) 284 77 85 for RMA#
I have the exact same problem. (also PVPA20’2)
I bought the kit today, and soldered it together without too much messing about.
The only problem I had was that I had to desolder the connection pins that go from the PCB to the Display unit, and in doing so I ripped a few of the copper lanes. I solved this by scratching off a bit of the paint and soldering directly from the pin to the scratched copper lane. The connection is fine when I measure it with the multimeter.
But for the rest…
I plug it in, the display backlights, and then … nothing. The LM317t gets pretty warm, but nothing else.
Could it be the PIC is faulty/not programmed correctly?
We do have excellent customer service, by real people, not by machines.
Our support people work hard from Monday to Friday 5PM, so we are sorry that we could not answer your posts this weekend.
It is unlikely that the controller is defective.
If the LM317 gets too hot, this indicates a short somewhere.
Since you have damaged the PCB, it is very difficult to troubleshoot this unit without being able to examine it.
We’d suggest that you return it for inspection/repair.
You can return it to:
I am having an issue with my K8098. It seems DOA. I just bought two of them from Amazon. I am not going to assemble the other since I see a lot of folks having issues. Do they work? No power no light no nothing. Without the ICs, I see only 2.2 volts on pin 3 of the LM317. It is not hot, but that hardly seems right. The schematic is out of date as there is no crystal. so It is very hard to troubleshoot not knowing what other things are different. Please help.
If it still doesn’t work out after following the above tips, and follow (check step plan manual berte regards polarised components), you can always return to shop where purchased for RMA request, the shop then starts the RMA procedure.
