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DOA due to very bad soldering and electronics Quality Assurance problems
Yet another Tylt Product DOA due to soldering and electronics assembly problems. This time, it was the car adapter portion of the Tylt VU Wireless Qi Car Charger that was DOA. Sure, I could have sent it back for exchange, but I'd rather know why it failed in the first place, even if I have to learn why it failed at my own expense.
As a Hardware Design Engineer, I have an eye for electronics QA - so when my friend asked me to look into why his Tylt charger wouldn't work fresh out of the box, I traded chargers with him and investigated the problem.
The symptoms were that his wireless charger wouldn't work, but the 5V USB jack located on the cigarette lighter adapter DID work. Again, this was fresh out of the box.
When I put the charger on my bench power supply, I limited the current to 500mA just to be safe. Unloaded, the charger immediately pulled all 500mA, and sagged the voltage down to 7V. Clearly something was wrong with the charger electronics. My friend told me that he had plugged it into his car for about 10 minutes trying to troubleshoot the problem, so I knew that the electronics had already been exposed to well more than 500mA. So, I adjusted my supply for 2A and checked again. This time the voltage only sagged to 9V, meaning we were getting close to the max current the defect was going to pull from the power supply. After some more tests, I arrived at 3.2A to maintain a 12V source voltage. Unloaded, this DC-to-DC supply shouldn't need more than 20mA max to turn on.
Time to go inside. The plastic case on this charger, like most of Tylt's other car chargers, is glued-shut with CA (cyanoacrylate adhesive). They went bananas on this unit, however, as I actually TORE THE PLASTIC instead of being able to just crack it open along the seam where the glue was applied. The square top cap came out first, but is obviously designed to only come out when the plastic halves of the adapter are separated. This unit is NOT designed to be serviced or opened EVER, once glued shut. Getting inside of this thing SUCKED, and I did have to make a small blood sacrifice to proceed.
Once inside, I saw the same kind of thing I saw in the last Tylt charger that came across my desk: Dirty electronics, crooked parts, solder balls, cold soldering joints, bad assembly, and TERRIBLE (or simply non-existent) QA. I've attached pictures of what I found inside, and those pictures speak for themselves. Do you like what you see?
After repairing a crooked MOSFET that had bent the side of an electrolytic cap during assembly (see picture), I fired-up the charger and let it "cook away" for a few seconds while I spied on it through my Fluke Ti32 Thermal Imager. The imager revealed that a small toroid coil on the back side of the PCB was getting hot, so I started my investigation there (it's the picture attached to this review with all the white goop holding the coil down). I used Novec to soften the white goop holding the coil down, and discovered that one of the coil's copper wires was pushed onto the sharp leads to another crooked component. The sharp edge of that lead had cut through the red lacquer on the cooper wire causing a resistive short (turning the whole coil into a 3 Amp resistor, essentially). After fixing the lead, I re-tested the charger and it worked. I then decided to clean up the rest of the electronics while I was in there, did a final test, and stuffed the electronics back into the deformed plastic. After some heat gun treatment and some UV-cure CA, I have a working Tylt Vu Car Charger Adapter that pulls 6mA when unloaded - LIKE IT SHOULD.
The question you need to ask yourself before making this purchase is:
Why do I have to fix my own electronics when they're brand new out of the box?
Seems that Tylt doesn't occasionally take apart their own stuff to verify quality. Keep that in mind when you shell out $70 for this charger. If you aren't equipped to troubleshoot and repair electronics, you might consider taking your money elsewhere.
I'm sure I'll get asked "Why didn't you just send it back?" The answer is two fold: (1) I am equipped to both troubleshoot and repair electronics, and I was willing to do so, knowing the warranty would be invalid as a result, and (2) I knew that if I could fix this, It would be functionally more secure, work better and be fully and properly "checked-out", whereas anything I received as a warranty replacement would not -- It would still have bad soldering and assembly problems. I would much rather have an ugly plastic case with known good soldering and QA than a pretty case with questionable-quality electronics hiding inside, just waiting to blow my car's fuses, and possibly cause a fire in the process.
Caveat emptor.
July 2015 · Unknown