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Date:         Thu, 16 Mar 2000 21:29:56 -0600
Reply-To:     Darrell Boehler <midwesty@MIDWEST.NET>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Darrell Boehler <midwesty@MIDWEST.NET>
Subject:      Re: ECU Lifespan?
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"


Hi Darrell Johnson,
    Most defective digifant ecus I repair have bad solder connections. These
seem to happen because of the heat. The vanagon digifant has the coil driver
transistor  inside the ecu. It generates much heat.  Being under the rear
seat the ecu can be crowded and not have room to circulate air and solder
starts melting around the driver components. This mostly develops into the
bad solder connections but sometimes solder can migrate and cause nasty
problems.
     When the ecu gets hot the micro processor chip can run pretty hot also.
Hot enough to develop bad solder connections where its pins are soldered to
the daughter board. This latter problem happens on the triumph adler ecus
and seldom on the bosch ecus.
    Bad alternator voltage regulators can take out a whole string of
components when the voltage gets above 16 volts.
    This may seem unprofessional but the best way to test solder connections
inside  an ecu is to give the ecu a good  sharp tap while the engine is
running. If the engine  stumbles, you have an ecu problem.   An experienced
eye helps some but many bad solder connections are very hard to see even
with an experienced eye, high intensity light and a big magnifying glass.
    During ecu repairs I feel it is best to remove all the bad solder and
resolder bad connections.  One could however just add some fresh solder to
the bad connections and get many more years out of an bad /dead ecu.  To
anyone who is still reading   I would also suggest to keep in mind the
digifant ecu is not a good place to perform your first circuit board repair.


your other brother,
Darrell Boehler


----- Original Message -----
From: "Darrell Johnson" <vanagon_carat@YAHOO.COM>
To: <vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM>
Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2000 6:14 PM
Subject: ECU Lifespan?




> With Ken's tale of Digifant ECU failure, and many
> others ECU failures I've heard about, it makes me
> wonder why these things fail.  Is there input voltage
> fluctuations in older vans that would stress the
> compenents?  Is it from physical shock?  Is the ECU a
> part that should be changed after, say, 10 years?  It
> sounds like a spare would be good to have on hand for
> longer trips.
>
> =====
> Darrell Johnson
> '90 Vanagon Carat
> Mission Viejo, CA
>
> __________________________________________________
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