How do you tell If your imp is powered

i have the April imp board and the imp card. i am using a 9v battery and the imp is getting hot. Is that red light supposed to power up

if the red light doen’t turn into green flashing, you have a problem.
if your imp gets hot, the problem is serious.

I hooked a 7.4V Li-po battery to my imp when I first got it. Burnt up! Took case off looked like internal regulator or something burnt up. Wasn’t the april board, I put my other imp in it and it was fine. I thought I read the April board could handle that…maybe it was the inrush current…

@zaco510

April, Hannah, smARtMAKER’s Break&Shield all share the same regulator and circuit design for the generation of the 3.3V.

The TPS62172 from TI (datasheet) is a step down DC-DC converter that can accept up to 17V as input and offers 500mA of output current.

As any regulator, higher is the voltage received as input and the current drain on output and harder will be the job he has to do. 9V in input for a 3.3V on output means that your regulator need to put somewhere almost 6V. If you will drain all the capacity of output, then you got 3W to dissipate. Less than a cheaper LDO but you will still get heat.

The fact is that those kind of regulators, as well as LDO’s with good quality (some cheap Chinese that you can find on fake Arduino will not) when get too hot they simply cut thee output.

It’s pretty much unlikely that for some reason you got the 9V go directly to the imp. And I think the April boards are tested before ship (I’m sure 100% about the Hannah and Break&Shield because I manufacture those).

What you should try at first is to give power to your April WITHOUT the imp plugged and check the exact voltage with a tester. Your reference point is the PIN4 of the SD card socket. Please note that on the SD card socket the PIN4 is not the 4th but the 6th ccounting from left!

You should read 3.3V there and this is the most important thing.

After you are sure you got the correct voltage, then you can go ahead to plug the imp001 and this must at least start to flash slowly orange (I assume you havent commisioned).

Dimitri

If you are hooking power up to an april board, hook it to GND/VIN terminals. These supply the voltage regulator on the april, which supplies 3.3v to the imp.

No voltage >3.3v should EVER be connected to any of the I/O pins. That means no 5v peripherals (without level translation or input clamping), no loads >3.3v that you want to do low-side switching of, etc.

The imp should never be getting hot - if it is, it has been fried.

@Hugo is there a warranty i put 9v not the gnd and vin i think it was a factory problem and i also fisrt hooked it up to my computer and it did not turn on. i had the jumper the right way it must be the imp

which is fried the white chip or the april board

Well, every imp is 100% tested at the factory, as is every electricimp branded April - is yours a sparkfun april or an imp one?

We have never seen an imp DOA, but have some that died from overvoltage or reverse-voltage (GND/VIN is not reverse voltage protected, only the P+/P- pads).

If you return the april and imp (assuming it’s an imp april) then we will analyze the failure and send out a replacement. If it’s not one of our Aprils, you’ll need to verify that it isn’t a faulty april, otherwise the next imp will also get fried.

how would I tell if it the april board or the imp chip (the white piece).
I am a high school student working in a tight time frame so I don’t think I can walk to the post office to ship the pieces. Is there a warranty that would allow me to get a new one in a couple weeks?
@Hugo

To check april: Power the april up with USB, then check with a voltmeter that you see 3.3v between the 3.3v and GND pins.

I’m afraid you have to return the faulty parts to get replacements from us. You could try asking the vendor where you bought them if they have a different policy, but we have so few HW failures we want to analyze any that we see to ensure that there are no production issues.

the 3.3v out put
pin is putting out 4.31v

Ok, so the April is bad, and has fried the imp. Where did you get it from?

both parts from adafruit

I got both parts from adafruit @Hugo