# Electronics gurus, please help



## spyders03 (Jan 5, 2013)

So, this is not an amp, or even car audio related, but these are for my fathers business, and was wondering what your thoughts were on the components selected for use, and the care of the production methods. We do not assembly these in house, so you won't hurt my feelings at all by being honest, and we need a good but quick 3rd party evaluation. Any insight you guys can offer would be a tremendous help.


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## flecom (Mar 31, 2008)

are the PCBs custom? if so why not have an interlocking connector between the boards instead of those long interconnect cables?

there also looks like there might be enough space to move that radio that's all by itself on the top left there right to where the connector on the panel is, if you can try and find a panel mount adapter to avoid the insertion loss of the coax (guessing that's some kind of wifi/bt module? could also use a much shorter wire or maybe a little pcb with a connector on the bottom that mates with the mainboard)

its not terrible, i would say its pretty good... but not great

for reference the stuff I do I'm really anal about, I am my harshest critic heh


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## spyders03 (Jan 5, 2013)

flecom said:


> are the PCBs custom? if so why not have an interlocking connector between the boards instead of those long interconnect cables?
> 
> there also looks like there might be enough space to move that radio that's all by itself on the top left there right to where the connector on the panel is, if you can try and find a panel mount adapter to avoid the insertion loss of the coax (guessing that's some kind of wifi/bt module? could also use a much shorter wire or maybe a little pcb with a connector on the bottom that mates with the mainboard)
> 
> ...


Thanks for the reply Flecom, and by interconnect do you mean like a pci style slot on a computer? Obviously not exactly, but that style. Also, yes, we have them made for us, but there seems to be little consistency between batches, cables and modules will change, same design mostly, just little things change, like they are just going with the lowest bidder for each batch.


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## spyders03 (Jan 5, 2013)

And close, the module is for gps. 

Also, these three are returns from customers, so you are any reason why the hardware might have failed? I couldn't see / smell anything, but I'm no expert either.


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## flecom (Mar 31, 2008)

well whenever you have wires you have possibility of EMI, each one of those wires can turn into a little antenna and depending on what those are connected to it could cause a failure...

or it could be dumb luck?

for between the GPS module and the mainboard I would look at something like this










so you can just snap in the module to the mainboard... 

would be nice if you could find a way of doing that for the SD module too so you can get rid of that SATA cable

for between your two main boards there I would say either a similar connector at a 90 degree angle or something like these










so you can remove one board without having to take out the other

http://www.samtec.com/documents/webfiles/ebrochures/power.pdf

also check out this PDF a lot of great connectors designed specifically for automotive application

http://www.samtec.com/documents/webfiles/current_literature/SAMTEC-AutoSolutionsGuide.pdf

but ya, avoid cables

also avoid edge connectors (like PCI etc) they add to board size ($$$) and take up space inside your enclosure ($$$)


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## spyders03 (Jan 5, 2013)

Flecom, thanks a ton again, your information is invaluable. I will be reading up on those connectors on the links you have provided, and again, I can not thank you enough.

Also, did you see any hardware reason that these units would have failed? Some were losing power to parts, etc. Also, what it the black goo on the connectors, I assume it is some type of non-conductive epoxy to hold in the connectors?


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## flecom (Mar 31, 2008)

black goo is more than likely some kind of epoxy yes, which I would very much hope is non-conductive

as far as why they failed short of looking at them with test equipment and troubleshooting them properly there's nothing obviously wrong I can see from the pictures

also as far as the variation in GPS modules I would not be concerned, they probably all output regular NEMA serial data so pretty much any GPS module wired correctly should work fine


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