Fix an Ionics Plug Computer Power Supply

We’ve done a lot of testing of ago control on Ionics Plug computers. We were not happy with the quality as most of our units were dying and the Z-Wave chips on them were either delivered with wrong frequency or had issues talking to other devices. A bunch of the plugs were just dead. No lamps lit. The reason are the 10V 1000μF capacitors. They are faulty. Looks like they got a bad batch. While this can happen to any manufacturer, we were quite unhappy how this was handled by the manufacturer. They refused to repair the units for free as the warranty period of 90days was already over. While this would be understandable for single defects, refusing to clean up this mess is not acceptable. Our plugs were dropping like flies..

If you happen to own one of the units from this batch, there is a simple fix to get the power supply working again: replace the capacitors C1, C4, C6 and C10:

If you don’t manage to get 10V ones, the 16V still fit underneath the shielding. Morale of the story: Even a well-engineered piece of hardware can cause unhappy-ness if the support people don’t perform. We had to chose another primary development platform.