Ion Boards - missing diode

[Sdawg]

I have come across several ion boards with what appear to be a missing diode as shown in the attached photo. Is this diode missing on purpose (I.e., not used in some iterations on the board) or is the board damaged?

[BrickHaus]

The pictured board is a Blackcell board. I'm not able to provide any further insight, but maybe you have a mixture of stock boards, and blackcells.

[Sdawg]

I have never heard of a “black cell” board. Do you mean blackheart? I assure you that this board is a stock ion board.

[BrickHaus]

Yeah, black heart.. now that I think of it, blackcell was the spec ops body kit for the ion. I just crossed the wires when replying.

[JeeperCreeper]

Weird, I'll have to check some of mine to see if that spot is empty.

I also have a Virtue board that is missing the main LED, and I've yet to find an RGB diode that I can put on it. The board still works, but its impossible to mess with settings, or even tell if its on without it.

[Sdawg]

I got an answer from Ryan Moorhead at GoG/DLX that the diode shouldn't be missing. These boards are damaged, the solenoid may not fully cycle (his best recollection). That information could explain why I have had some Ions shoot consistently over the Chrono and others have wide FPS as well as shoot-down over 5BPS.

[Trbo323]

As far as I've ever seen the stock boards and black hearts are the same exact board they just have different programming.

Sp even put epoxy over the connection you would need to use for reprogramming on the stock boards so nobody could simply re flash them

Back in the day Mike from tech PB had a whole video about it and he was pissed about it.

And then he would go shoot a sp1 at the next event so apparently he wasn't that mad about it

Sent from my motorola edge 2024 using Tapatalk

[Sdawg]

The ion blackheart and stock boards have very different circuitry.

[nerdcore]

The only way to really know the board differences are seeing their circuit diagrams. Surface-mount locations & orientations don't tell us much if you can't see all the traces, or know the values/specs of each part.

But anyway.

Would Ryan Moorhead happen to know the diode make & model? Hand-soldering surface-mount parts sucks but it can be done.

[Sdawg]

I actually touch with Ryan Moorhead who informed me that the diode should not be missing. He is also going to find out the spec on the diode. I have been able to repair boards by pulling diode from another board with the same damage, assuming/hoping that the adjacent diode is the same.

I have the schematic from zdspb.com -

[phy]

It looks like it's D1 missing on the board from the picture. If that matches to D1 in the schematic that it's just a reverse polarity protection diode. Probably a 1n5817, that's what I usually see in 9v powered stuff I mess around with. Pretty much any diode would do there but the low drop of a schottky let's you get a little more out of the battery.

[Sdawg]

it's just a reverse polarity protection diode. Probably a 1n5817, that's what I usually see in 9v powered stuff I mess around with. Pretty much any diode would do there but the low drop of a schottky let's you get a little more out of the battery.

I cannot find a 1n5817 surface mount. Do you think an SS14 like this one would work?

https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail...hoCzFoQAvD_BwE

[phy]

Yes, that looks like a good smd alternative. Make sure it's in the right package size, looks like those are sma. I'm not that familiar with smd parts, I hate working on that stuff, but there's a couple of different sizes. You should be able to measure the pads and find a chart with the right package size I'd you haven't already.