New user who made mistake when assembling his first HM :p


 

DominicCyr

New member
Hi!
Sorry if some sentences are not grammatically correct but english is not my first language.
So... my name is Dominic and I live in Port-Cartier, a small town on the north shore of the St-Lawrence river in Quebec, canada
It's my first attemptto build the HM and i've made a mistake when assembling it. And there are few issues that we probably can figure it out, with your help.
It's a 4.3 with a RPi 2B + thermocouple

First issue is that the LCD dimmer is VERY sensitive... I see black or nothing within 1°.
Second, the first probe indicate +-400°F without K probe in it

And my mistake was to plug the LCD board upside down in the base board (the two 5 pins connector).
I've fried something and I hope we can figure it out what is burned with some test.
Since, the red led flash once when powering up and the LCD show black block on the top line

For this summer, the next steps are to find someone local (or in canada) to print me something to build a rotodamper for a little smokehouse and the SSR for the sous-vide

The pictures were after my mistake

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20170125_223914_zpsi8h6lohs.jpg
 
Sorry, I'm really not good at tracking things like these down. There are a few people here that are really good at doing that though. Let's hope they chime in with some helpful information, I'm sure they just got wrapped up with something else in the time being.
 
I'd like to help but I've never built a v4.3. It would seem the most logical things that would fry if you plugged the LCD board in backward would be the shift register IC or the LCD board itself... but lets not jump to conclusions on that, perhaps it did no harm at all.
The black squares on the LCD is exactly what you would expect from an unprogrammed ATMega, then again you mentioned something about the probes reading wrong so it must be programmed... Does the web interface work? Did the LCD ever work properly?
I zoomed in on a couple of your pics and the solder work looks shoddy in places. I would suggest that you take a hot clean soldering iron and go through the board and reflow the solder in each solder joint, making sure to heat the trace on the board and the leg of the component, the solder should flow and even out and end up nice and clean, then clean the board with isopropyl alcohol and a soft brush (let it dry before you power up!). After that plug things in and boot it up and see what you get.
 
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Thanks ralph. I'll tru to resolder it.
The LCD was working before, but the dimmer was very sensitive.
Maybe my RaspberryPi is a problem at some point. I have a pi 2 Model B v1.1 board. I'll try with a newer one, I just get a Zero by the mail
I'll do some test and I will come back with some result
 
Just for the record, the HM will function completely on its own without the rPi, you will just be lacking the web interface. So you can remove the rPi and eliminate it from being the cause of your problem.
It's not impossible that your HM started out ok but had some bad solder joints work loose after handling it, re-seating the display board etc.
As for the contrast pot on the LCD, this is the first I've seen of it being mounted sideways on the board, that seems a little kooky to me. I would check those solder joints, make sure the green resist isn't scraped off the ground plain near the solder joints so it could short out. I attempted to look at the schematic to try and give you more advice but it seems the latest hardware page doesn't have a schematic image available, when I click the link there are lots of files but none of them seem to be a graphic image of the schematic, it looks like an eagle file is there but I don't have eagle on this machine... so that's a bummer, I used to pop up the schematic to try and help people out, guess I'm not going to be able to do that any more....
 
I can't tell exactly what was wrong, but it seem to be the chip on the LCD board.
I've ordered a new LCD kit and then everything works fine! :D
Now i'll try to figure how to get this work with my cellphone (y)
 
The LCD data does go through that chip, the shift register, so you could be right... or it could have killed the LCD board. At any rate, glad to hear you've got it working again.
On the cell phone, you can connect through a web browser on your phone just like a computer, or you can use the apps that are available... "Pit Droid" for Android phones or "Pit Meter" for iPhones.
 
thanks all.
and the 400 degrees on the thermocoupler was because I have soldered the 10k resistor on the R18 hole. We do not have to solder it unless we use 4 normal probe
 
Everything is now working fine on the network!
thanks for everyone in this community! (Y)

now will look to complet my sous-vide setup and the roto-damper :)
 

 

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