Repairing Digital Sidecar

[jacob.lamberson]

I am with team 4360 (Spudnik), and we seem to be having a problem with our digital sidecar. It seems to have shorted out on the U3 (for sure) and the U7 may be damaged. The U3 has a big hole in it. It has worked before, but then we came back the next day, and it didn't work. Our plan is to replace the U3 with a new one from digikey. I found some schematics at http://www.usfirst.org/uploadedFiles...matic%20v7.pdf. It is surface mounted. We are almost certain that the U3 and U7 are the same thing, but have been wired on the board to different voltage regulators so they output 5v and 6v, respectively. It doesn't currently work right now. The BAT light comes on, but the 5v and 6v lights are off. We made sure the ribbon cable has continuity on all pins. We also ran the vanilla program as well as the one we will be using (Labview). So, basically, our question is; has anyone attempted to repair a digital sidecar like this and succeded (or failed)? Any input would be great, as bag n' tag is tuesday!!! The digikey link to the part is http://search.digikey.com/us/en/prod...2-5-ND/1016495.

[EricVanWyk]

I've never managed to burn out those chips, and believe me I've tried. Before you replace the chip, look for surrounding damage that might have caused the fault in the first place: You don't want to replace the part just to have the original cause to break it again.