So, my team's offseason project this year has been to revive every robot gathering dust in the closet for an end of the year demonstration for the school. One of the problems we have is that one of our robots (formerly our main demo bot, but we stole his RC to revive our 2002 'bot, which hasn't run for 3 years - all of his functions are running now!
) is missing his IFI RC, although we
do have another IFI RC in the closet.
Since there's no necessity for it to be competition legal, as it's for demo purposes only, I've opened up the IFI (by this, I mean I've taken the plastic base off, so that the bottom of the circuit board is exposed). From appearances, everything seems to be in proper working order, except the power ports.
Now, the main power port - from what I can tell - had been broken off, and someone had subsequently attempted to wrap solder wick around it and forge a connection, miserably failing. So what I've gotten done so far is pulled that connector off (a horrendous amount of what seems to be enamel or plastic melted onto the IFI), while scratching my head. There are two reasons for this. One is that while testing continuity through the main power port, I'm pulling 9 kilo-ohms of resistance, whereas on the others, it's 1.7 kilo-ohms. I'm also not getting any continuity through the backup power port.
I've already repaired an IFI whose main power port was similarly damaged (by me, inadvertently - the crimp on the quick disconnect was so horrendously done, that I decided to pull it off and redo it, pulling our the tab in the process). I opened the IFI, soldered a short piece of solid copper wire to the bottom of the circuit board, and then soldered it to the tab from the outside. One of the tab's pins was still intact, so I only needed to make the other pin.
However, before I repeat this for the IFI I'm working on right now, I'd like to know if anyone can think of a good reason for the discrepancy in resistance.