Support

If your Board gets Damaged

It is usually possible to fix any damage without the needs to send the board back to us. We will do our best to help you revive your board in the shortest time and with the minimum expenses possible. Please contact our customer support for more information. Please do not send the controller back to us without our specific approval and without an RMA.  

WARRANTY CONDITIONS, DISCLAIMER AND DESTINATION OF USE

X-toaster comes with a limited warranty of 12 months from the moment the board is shipped to the customer. The Producer (Breakdown Technology di Simone Turini) warrants that X-toaster will be free of defect in materials and workmanship. In case of a damaged or defective board, the Producer at its option may decide to replace or repair the board, or to refund the customer for the price paid excluding any shipping costs. If the product is to be repaired or if a new board has to be shipped to the customer, all the shipping cost shall be paid by the customer himself. The producer shall not be liable for any defects that are caused by neglect, misuse or mistreatment by the Customer, including improper installation or testing, or for any products that have been altered or modified in any way by a Customer. The Producer is not responsible to customer or any other person or third party for any damage caused by the use of the board, including but not limited to loss of profits, loss of data, revenues, sales, business. Any information contained in the manual, in the website or divulged directly via email shall be considered only informative and any use and installation of the product shall be tested and proved to be safe by the customer himself. X-toaster is not an end user product, it shall be considered as a component to build some other device. The operating conditions and safety of those devices are under the direct responsibility of the customer himself. The Producer may change the specifications and product descriptions at any time, without notice. The producer shall have no responsibility whatsoever for conflicts or incompatibilities arising from future changes to them. The product information on the Web Site or Materials is subject to change without notice. Do not finalize a design with this information: if you intend to mass produce a device based on X-toaster you should first contact us. Customer understand and agrees that X-toaster is not designed for use in safety-critical applications where a failure of the product would reasonably be expected to cause severe personal injury or death. X-toaster is neither designed to be used in military, aerospace, automotive and medical applications. Customer acknowledges and agrees that any use of X-toaster is solely at the customer's risk, and that customer is solely responsible for compliance with all legal and regulatory requirements in connection with such use. This board is intended for further engineering and/or development, it is not an end user product. As such it was not put into any testing and it may not comply with some or any technical or legal requirement that are applicable to finished products including, without limitation, directives regarding electromagnetic compatibility, recycling (WEEE), FCC, CE, or UL (except as may be otherwise noted). Breakdown Technology di Simone Turini supplied this development product AS IS, without any warranties, with all faults, at the buyer's and further users' sole risk. The user assumes all responsibility and liability for proper and safe handling of the goods. Further, the user indemnifies Breakdown Technology di Simone Turini from all claims arising from handling or using of the product. Due to the open construction of the product, it is the user's responsibility to take any and all appropriate precautions with regard to electrostatic discharge and any other technical or legal concerns. The product described in this document is subject to continuous development and improvements. All particulars of the product and its use contained in this document are given by Breakdown Technology di Simone Turini in good faith. However all warranties implied or expressed including but not limited to implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for particular purpose are excluded. All documents, manuals and informations on the website regarding X-toaster are intended only to assist the reader in the use of the product. Breakdown Technology di Simone Turini shall not be liable for any loss or damage arising from the use of any information or any error or omission in such information or any incorrect use of the product. Please note that while the board itself works with low voltages, mains power voltages may be involved when mounting and using it. High voltages can be lethal and in the worst case may lead to electrocution and death. It is assumed that you are a competent engineer and you know what you are doing. If not, please do not buy and/or use this product or search for a trained technician in your area that can help you. X-toaster is not an open source project, nor in its firmware neither in its hardware part. As such, you are not allowed to copy or imitate any part of X-toaster including but not limited to its exterior appearance, GUI, electrical connections and board layout, firmware funcionality and any other features exclusive to our product. Any attempt to copy, crack, distribute code or informations without any previous specific agreement from us will be persecuted by international laws.    

Every X-toaster board is extensively tested so you shouldn’t have problems with your board. For many smaller problems there are simple solutions:  

The Board is not powering

Please check your power supply, it should be rated 5V@500mA. The board itself is usually drawing a maximum of 300mA so you should also be ok even with slightly smaller adapter. If the power supply is ok you may have a damages fuse or rectifying diode. If that’s the case you can substitute them (D3, F1) with a low drop schottky  diode in the DO214AA package and with a 375mA fast fuse in the 0805 package. After substituting them we suggest you to check what damaged those components and, eventually, to change your 5V power supply.

The Controller is not working properly, it keeps resetting

This may be a power supply issue as well. Make sure to use a good quality, stable power supply. Another reason may be some kind of EMI interference or coupling. Try repositioning your oven, make sure to have all metal part connected to earth and consider using a shielded external housing for your board. A metal enclosure connected to ground should be enough. Depending on the SSR you are using this may also be a source of interference: try mounting the SSR in a different case or inside the oven itself. Also try repositioning your power supply.

Parameters and Profiles can't be saved or contain garbage

A power supply problem while eeprom is written may result in corrupted eeprom and data. Try restoring everything to default in the “System Settings” screen. If it doesn’t solve the problem you may have to erase completely the device eeprom. For that pourpose you can use an Atmel programmer and, within Atmel Studio, make a complete erase of ONLY the eeprom content. During next power up of the board, firmware will detect the empty eeprom and will rewrite all needed data.

The board is ok, but the heaters are not turning on

Firstly check again every single connection. Disconnect everything from main power and use a multimeter to check them. If your wiring is ok try connecting the heaters directly to main power bypassing the SSR: if they are powered the problem may be the SSR itself. Please note that some chineese producers often derate the minimum voltage needed to turn them on so, a 3V~32V SSR may probably need at least 5V to work properly. If you find that this is your case you can get another SSR (maybe from another producer) or you can bypass the rectifying diode D3, which provide a 250mV dropout from 5V power supply, with a short thick wire. In our test this is usually enough to be able to use every SSR on the market. As an alternative, if you know how to build one, you can assemble an external non inverting circuit with a BJT or a MOSFET to amplify the on/off signal from the board. In this way you can also use another higher voltage source (12V usually) dedicated to your SSR.

My reflowed boards are coming out burnt and damaged but the profile seems to be ok

Maybe you are leaving your thermocouple in free air. If you do not use a testing board of sizes and layout similar to the one you are reflowing, your thermocouple may read temperatures very different from the one you have on the reflowed board. There may be overshoots of 20/30°C thus leading to burnt boards. Make sure to use a proper test board and to secure the tip of the thermocouple to a via or a plated hole possibly connected (and near) to the GND plane. Use a small quantity of thermal compound to ensure a good thermal transfer between the probe and the board and secure the thermocouple to the testing board with a couple of strips of kepton tape. Also make sure that, when you open the oven’s door, temperature is dropping fast enough to remain into the JEDEC maximum time limit above liquidus. If not, you should use some fan or other ways to let your board cool faster.

Temperature read from the thermocouple oscillates and gives false results

If you have a fixed and stable error on your reading this is something that can simply be resolved by compensating for it in the “System Settings” screen. If the errors comes out in an unpredictable way with very small or very large values this is definitely an EMI issue. MAX31855 is very sensitive to EMI and, though we made our best with the layout and the filtering components within the board, you will probably have to take more measures to improve shielding. In our test we have seen that while most of the spectrum is affecting the chip readings, most of the interferences come from the microwave zone (cell phones). Mount the controller into a grounded metal chassis, shorten thermocople wire as much as possible and avoid any coupling from the thermocouple itself and other source of interference (for example high voltage wires) by keeping them as far as possible.   If your problem is still present, please send us an email describing your specific issue, we will make our best to make your board live again or, if not possible, to repair it at the lower possible cost. Also check the "Warranty" section.