VOGONS


First post, by GabrielKnight123

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I have been testing voltages for some case LED's on a 486 motherboard and unfortunately I blew a track from the prongs of my multimeter so I made a trace wire but somehow the pin for this negative lead is no longer grounded, I have tested this pin with continuity on my multimeter using a negative from the power supply point but it is dead. In the picture below the dead negative is the "[e]" and the "E" are negative points, can I make a wire link to any negative point In the picture or should I solder in one from the power supply negative?

PCB%20Short%20For%20Negative%20EDIT_zps0zmmc3cs.jpg

Reply 1 of 4, by dkarguth

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you might want to check some things before you just start wiring pins to ground. For example, are the current limiting resistors on the board on the supply side or the ground side? If they are on the ground side and you make a wire direct to ground, you risk burning out your LED and or LED driver. If you bridge across to another LED's ground, you are putting 2 leds on the same current limiting resistor, which can cause problems. The easiest way to check if there are resistors there is measure in between any 2 of those grounds that you have marked with the capital 'E's. If it shows ~0 ohms, then you should be fine to bridge them. However, you might want to get a second opinion on that before you modify anything.
What exactly did you touch with your multimeter that made a trace burn like that? I find it hard to believe that nothing else is damaged with that amount of current being drawn across that trace. Do you have a more zoomed-out photo of both the front and the back of the board? It might help with diagnosis/repair.

"And remember, this fix is only temporary, unless it works." -Red Green

Reply 2 of 4, by GabrielKnight123

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I did some handy work in paint shop to show what I have you can see them below from my google drive as Photobucket has water marks, the resistors are on the positive side and not the negative side. I have looked on the board and luckily there is no other damage it was just the one track but it looks worse than it was I removed the rest of the track so it wouldn't cause problems later, I was measuring voltage when one of the probes touched two pins at once I dont know which two it was but I had them together for a while when I was looking at the readout of the multimeter I knew something was wrong when I smelt burning electronics. Where I made the trace wire going from the negative of the turbo LED it goes to one of the pins to the turbo switch that then has a track that goes to a ceramic cap (C18 on component side of motherboard) which is just above R25 I dont know if this is important when choosing a new negative bridge or not but from what you said I will stay away from using the same negative as the power LED, Do you think using the ground between the trubo LED and turbo switch is ok as it seems to have nothing going to it.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1oN1ZdkA8zA3 … f2Bc2PYDYQdZITN

Reply 3 of 4, by GabrielKnight123

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I checked with my multimeter to see if the points between all the marked "E's" (negative points) returned 0 ohms, well they do but my multimeter has an "auto" mode if im correct and a range button to change the setting for when using the ohm setting on the dial so I can change the ohm setting to K or M for kilo ohm and mega ohm both K and M return a value of 0.000 but on auto mode I get 000.4

Auto_zpsdwralg11.jpg

Kilo%20Ohms_zps7dmhwcbn.jpg

Mega%20Ohms_zpsclphjmqj.jpg

If those negative points are good to go because of 0 ohms across them, from the picture below is it ok to solder a link from pin number 2 to the next pin on its right indicated with the hollow arrow? I ask because it would then be that pin 1 has to go to pin 2 to get ground or does this not make a difference?

New%20Negative%20EDIT_zps5rloadjx.jpg

Reply 4 of 4, by GabrielKnight123

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Does anyone know if I can use a link from "2" to the next negative on 2's right im itching to put this back together