Board failure - U6 chip burned out. Any tips?

[Riboflavin 1]

Hi,

 

Has anyone experienced a burned out U6 (voltage regulator I believe) chip on the main control board of an Ultimaker 2? I had the chip replaced and tried it again, but it burned out immediately, so I think there is likely an issue or short elsewhere - perhaps others have had this issue?

 

The printer is about 5 years old and has had moderate use, including a lot of time in a hot box, printing ABS. I first thought that maybe the heat had cooked the chip over time, hence me replacement of U6 was a first try.

 

I want to get the printer working again, as it is great, but don't want to chuck a new board on it before I understand the problem.

 

any help much appreciated.

 

many thanks,

Chris

[Torgeir 133]

Hi Chris,

 

I'll think this happen (reported) in here once as far as I'll remember.

 

As this regulator make 5V DC, you may try to use an ohm meter to see if there is any direct short.

This mean it's something wrong in the main PCB, but could also be the converter's sub components.

Also the diode D16 is something that's fail in such an "inductive" converters.

There is an instrument named trackers, handy for identifying components with shorts.

There is repair centers that handle such repair..

 

Good luck

 

Torgeir

 

[dbrgn 11]

Same problem here... UM2+ is about 6 years old.

 

@Riboflavin did you solve your issue? The chip would be easy to replace, but if it's just a symptom and not the cause, we should find the cause first...

[dbrgn 11]

Diode D16 was also broken, as @Torgeir suggested. Will replace U6 and D16, let's hope this will work.

 

I found a few "classic bugs" on the PCB... Could they sufficiently conduct to kill the regulator? I assume a component failure is more likely...

[Alexjwb123 0]

Hi, I had same issue. Got it repaired and the same component died again.

 

I bought £60 board through aliexpress , fitted, updated firmware and works fine.

[dbrgn 11]

6 hours ago, Alexjwb123 said:

Hi, I had same issue. Got it repaired and the same component died again.

@Alexjwb123 did you also replace the diode D16, or only U6?

[Alexjwb123 0]

Ah just u6.

I didn't realise diode needed replacing too,

[dbrgn 11]

I can confirm that in our case replacing U6 and D16 helped! The UM2+ is again printing happily, for the cost of about 2$ of spare parts 🙂 Already has almost 5000 printing hours.

 

In order to replace the parts, you'll probably need a hot-air rework station, solder paste, flux and maybe a desoldering station (vacuum pump) for cleaning the pads after desoldering. I ended up both desoldering and desoldering the IC with the hot-air rework station.

Edited August 24 by dbrgn

[Torgeir 133]

Hi @dbrgn,

 

Way to go.. Thanks for the feedback!

 

The Power supply is in general the fault of about 80 percent of all failures in the electronics, -in general.

So about 20  percent of the failures is of other causes...

 

This is all said by experience over a long time. 🙂

 

Thanks

 

Good luck.

 

Torgeir.

 

[dbrgn 11]

Here's a blogpost with a summary of the repair: https://www.coredump.ch/2020/08/25/ultimaker-2-repair/

Edited August 25 by dbrgn