TRC 3 charger blinking yellow?

decoy

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Joined
Feb 9, 2010
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25
So, this wasn't in the manual. I haven't used this drill in a while, but now the charger doesn't seem to work.  When I plug the charger (no batteries inserted) it blinks yellow. That's all it does, even if I plug a battery. No charging appears to happen (batteries are not dead).


Any ideas? I've opened her up to see if anything very obvious is wrong, but it seems very pretty to me.  Pictures of the circuitry:https://imgur.com/a/tHujd09

Does anyone have any idea what this could be?
 
Blink red is general error according to manual.

I see it alternating (unevenly) between blinking yellow and (somewhat) red.

Possibly it tries to charge (giving a green led), detecting error (also giving a red one, resulting in it mixed to yellow), then switching into error mode (just blinking red, no green as of charging circuit disabled), then after some blinks retrying?

Maybe something in the contacts?

Apart from that: No clue, sorry. Board looks good visually, except maybe the area of upper-left pin of the bigger chip... hard to say from the photo, but at glance it looks like there's a short toward the bigger copper area above (could also just be dirt or a strange reflexion from the stuff the dipped it in).

Sadly the only existing spare part for a TLC3 is... a complete new TLC3.

Maybe give Festool a call and ask nicely for help?
 
Gregor said:
Maybe something in the contacts?

Thanks for looking! Tried powering it up with the contacts removed from the board to eliminate that, but it's the same.
No shorts that I can find. Looks like it's ebay-time :-/
 
This happened to me on old NiCad/Mh charger.  It just gave up the ghost one time it was plugged in.  Sent it to the mother ship ( out of warranty) and they made no comment , but sent a new charger.

YMMV
 
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