MobiFlight Community Support

Hi guys, all new to mobiflight but tried to research and the most answers I found were based on bad soldering etc but I have now went through 9, 6 blue and 3 green and all seem to either not power up at all or power up for a brief second. One of the blue ones was powering up with a 0 on display furthest to the right but as soon I tried to run MF test it would not display anything. I am successfully running buttons, encoders and switches on the same pins. I am running the keystudio mega R3 2560 board.

My soldering is maybe not perfect on the blue ones but looking at it, it should do the work! I have then tried green ones with dupont connectors and soldering but it even seems worse as most of them have not even powered up. I got both blue and green ones from two different sources each time. I tried changing USB cables and ports in the PC and actually with one cable the greens at least powered up for a brief second in full so my conclusion is that there are issues with power supply. I am not great (yett!) with electronics but have measured the voltage and current using multimeter pinned to GND on the mega board and vcc on the 7 segment and the readings I got were 5.02v and 10.01ma which seem fine considering nothing is displayed.

As I mentioned I have tried both soldering and multitude of dupont cable. I have connected each one of them with mega disconnected from USB and only connected after everything was hooked up.

Anyone have any ideas?

Anyone have any ideas?

Hi it seems that you tried most tricks to get alive the Max.
What you've maybe already read is that the Max tubes are very sensitive for voltage instability and electrical noises.
If you get 8888888 after power up, it means there is no stable data connection, only power is there.
Then disconnect and connect again...blank state is better.

As a first try:
1) connect everything (only 1 Max first)
2) start MF, update firmware in modules menu and upload config in the same menu
This resets the Mega and the Max connection.
3) Now try testing in the Output menu - you should get some result at this stage. It may be not constant stabilty but something.

So if you proved the connection is working from the above try, then you can try to make it more stable.
- if there are lot of current need, then the Mega can not feed them and you can try separate 5V for the MAX tubes
- another thing is to use a capacitor for the tube,
You can find more details on this on Discord channel... every other day someone has the problem like yours.

Hi

Thank you for your response. I have tried your steps and it has actually solved the issue! I have now picked up the board and moved it about waving in the air too and the connection seems to be stable, no flickering or gibberish on displays! This is on dupont connections for prototyping but will be hard soldered in the future

Many Thanks!