Hacker News Reader

Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

Idk about the commercial units, but my portable inverter generator has a bunch of schmoo (highly technical industry term) that covers the entire electronics board. If a component on that board fried, I'm not able to repair it without replacing the whole board.

The rest is fairly simple ICE like you say.

View on HN

Conformal coating? That used to be the norm way back in the day for all kinds of electronics. Kind of a dick move, now, unless there is an environmental reason.

Typically a generator is used outdoors, so it makes sense to protect the PCB and other electronics from conditions experienced there. I wouldn't know what those conditions are, being on Hacker News and all.

Normal on anything that has to work outside. Also, hardly an impediment to repair. I've done it myself on a car ECU: open case, scrape off conformal coating, desolder blown IGBT, replace with IGBT salvaged from junkyard unit, spray on new conformal coating, done - been working like that now for 5 years.

Parts pairing is also a/the reason you can't just swap in the junkyard unit even though it came from a car with the same engine. We tried it - did not work.

Potting within a brick of epoxy is the real dick move, but also not impossible to repair either.

That pairing is for theft reasons - chop shops will steal a car, take the parts off and sell them. However the expensive computers are paired and so they won't work when sold this way thus making the value of a car to a shop shop much less and so helping prevent that theft mode.

Though I think there should be a process to get the parts paired after verifying the car isn't stolen. I'm not sure what that would be though.

I'm going to guess that it's actually potted in epoxy, not just a conformal coating.

Probably epoxy potted, an order of magnitude more difficult to repair. Either way a coating is probably called for in the places a generator will be used so you probably wouldn't want to skip it just for repairability.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com