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Problem with our products?

Check out our warranty policy first to see what you can do

BUILT

We personally test each unit that leaves our lab, but, sometimes, mistakes happen 🙁
Please check our Warranty Policy and contact us, we’ll do our best to either repair your unit or provide you a new one!

DIY Kits

We think you did your best with that DIY kit, but when mistakes happen, debugging can sometimes be hard and time-consuming.

For this reason, we’re dedicating the next section to help DIYers solve their problems with their kits. Here you’ll find the most common problems experienced by our customers (hoping your lies within one of these) together with tips and tricks on how to solve them. Of course, you can always contact us and we’ll try to debug you device with you!

Once the problem is found, you can of course ask for our repair service, otherwise, if you’re confident with repairing it by your own, contact us reporting your problem and we’ll be happy to give you the components’ codes so that you can proceed with your own repair, but please remember that we’re not responsible for any damage that you could bring to the product by choosing to repair it by your own.

Regardless of the problem you’re experiencing, before going into details, please try to:

• remove any flux residue with some isopropyl alcohol: flux is likely to cause shorts;
• reflow any solder joint that seems suspicious;
• double check switches, LEDs and ICs orientations;
• look for solder bridges;

Please also remember:

• pop-out the two ATMega chips before attempting any kind of soldering/desoldering job;
• flux, solder sucker (yeah, that’s a funny name), solder wick and Kapton tape are your best friends;

MOST COMMON DIYERS PROBLEMS

Where can I find the DIY Guide and the Interactive BOMs?

DIY Guide and Interactive BOMs are in the product description: go back on our product page and click on the download link!

The CV output LED of my Garden Listener is constantly on and I can’t enter the calibration mode; the encoder on the back of the module seems not to work.

Some shorts within the DAC circuitry is probably happening. DAC circuitry is located under the vertical ATMega 28-dip socket. This part of the PCB is highly crowded and you may have touched some SMD component while trying to solder components such as SW2, RV2, D3, D9 and D21.
Please have a look at their solder joints, reflow them and keep an eye on the surrounding SMD parts looking for bridges and tombstones and try to reflow the following resistances and capacitors: R12, R19, R20, R21, C19. Please keep in mind that if an SMD problem has been found as mentioned above, the SMD LED (D7) it’s likely burnt because of that issue and a replacement is needed. That’s actually a minor problem since the calibration mode perfectly works even without that LED, which just acts as a visual reference for you (you can check if you are in calibration mode by looking at the CV LED: it’s constantly on when calibrating and off when in operational mode with unconnected probes). If you feel confident about desoldering it and replacing it by your own, you can easily take any SMD 0805 LED and use it: please remember that it’s cathode (negative terminal) must be oriented pointing to the lower part of the PCB, it must be close to the anchoring pins of the RV1 potentiometer. If you chose to replace the LED by your own, please keep in mind that we’re not responsible for any damage that you could bring to the PCB and/or components.

My Garden Listener is possessed and catches signals even without probes or with nothing connected to them.

No need for exorcism here, some bad connection is happening within the probes circuitry, it’s located in the upper part of the main PCB. Please try to reflow the jack (J2) pins; those are pretty close to the U1 IC, please have a look on its pins, you may have touched them with your iron causing unwanted bridges.If you cleaned your PCB with a generous amount of isopropyl alcohol (that’s actually a good thing), please let the PCB rest to let the alcohol dry, it may have flown within the probes jack causing a short inside the Thonkiconn J2.

I messed up the ATMegas placement/orientation and nothing happened on the power on. I switched them back in the right position/orientation but still nothing happens when I power up my system.

Those chips are actually programmed to reset their self when something bad happens, like shorts and overvoltages, to prevent major issues. Your chips have probably reversed to their virgin status and they need to be boothloaded again and programmed. If you know how to boothload an ATMega and how to upload an hex file, please email us and we’ll be happy to send you all the files via email, otherwise you’ll be given a couple of freshly programmed chips.

RETURN POLICY

Here is our Return Policy.