Damaged Surf Pi 1.2 - Troubleshooting

[Something Random]

Hello

I built a surf pi kit a number of years ago, I had it all working really well and it was detecting great. I was ready to assemble coil/electronics onto an arm and take it out however I carelessly left some neodymium magnets which were serving to connect the batteries together in the box with electronics and they caused the batteries to short against some random components on the PCB. Since that day, the detector powers on, and even seems to work(just barely) at detecting metal objects when passed over the coil. It's performance is about 1% or what it was but there is definitely a very slight difference in tone when an object is waved over the surface of the coil, but not even close to usable. Ive repeated the standard device tuning procedure but it definitely seems to have sustained some damage. What's the best way for me to isolate the issue? I have a DVM and a single channel scope. There's no sign of physical damage on PCB components.

Thanks

[waltr]

Hello

I built a surf pi kit a number of years ago, I had it all working really well and it was detecting great. I was ready to assemble coil/electronics onto an arm and take it out however I carelessly left some neodymium magnets which were serving to connect the batteries together in the box with electronics and they caused the batteries to short against some random components on the PCB. Since that day, the detector powers on, and even seems to work(just barely) at detecting metal objects when passed over the coil. It's performance is about 1% or what it was but there is definitely a very slight difference in tone when an object is waved over the surface of the coil, but not even close to usable. Ive repeated the standard device tuning procedure but it definitely seems to have sustained some damage. What's the best way for me to isolate the issue? I have a DVM and a single channel scope. There's no sign of physical damage on PCB components.

Thanks

First check that all Voltages are good. Do this on every chip + & - Voltage.
Sometimes a bad chip will be warm to hot. Put your finger on each to feel. If hot replace chip.
If all are good them start replacing chips.

Last pull all the chips. Go to the beginning of the Surf PI instructions and insert chip per instruction step and do the test for that step.
If good move to next step.

[surfdetector]

After following though with the instructions that Waltr gave above, you may want to review my series of build videos for the Surf PI. They will show you , stage by stage what you should be getting for waves forms etc.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...UGJdTK59YEC2gE