Hey guys ive got a Neato XV-21. After a good few years of use it started acting strange (bumping into walls and getting lost) then got the infamous dim green LED. I thought it was the end of it and boxed it for about 1 year. After coming across this forum a week ago i saw a few people had the same issue so after inspecting the caps on the board i found C10 and C70 to be partially closed circuit so i decided to replace all of the caps with a higher quality electrolytic caps but with the same values just in case capacitor charge/discharge time was crucial to the operation of the board.
Anyway replaced them and the Neato booted back to life, i stuck it on the recharge station and it began its charge cycle. About 4hrs later the light was a solid green so i gave it a test run. It started to clean the first section of my house and stopped after 40mins (It has 4400amph batts @ 7.2v bought in 2015), went back to the charge station and charged for about ~1hr and came back out to clean the next section it had marked. Run time was about 35mins and returned to its station. Great i thought its fixed. I set a scheduled and it started up again two days later, however it left the station and stopped displaying a low battery message.
I sat it back on the charger and it started charging again. After about 5mins it was telling me the battery was full so i pushed clean again, and again it stopped after leaving the station with a low battery message.
Plugging it into a usb for diagnostics showed me that battery sensor was at about 16.69v and about 19% full (Assuming it takes both batteries into account). I put it on the charging station and the Charger_mAH sensor wasn’t detecting any current.
ChargingEnabled = 1
ChargingActive = 0
Directly pluging the DC jack into the Neato does not charge it but it will detect the DC jack been plugged in from the SNSR_DC_CONNECT sensor.
So could this be an issue with the batteries as they did sit still for about 1 year or could this bee a deeper problem?
Im an Electrician by trade but i rarely deal in electronics or DC circuits so i should be able to repair most parts of this board if its feasible.
Just at the top of my head could the voltage regulator been damaged? How can i test for this do i need to remove the components from the board or is there pins that i can use my testing tools.
Thanks
sensor dump.txt (1 KB)