Hello,
I have been troubleshooting our numerous Cortex modules, and I have been finding out that some of the power connectors don’t always make a good connection. Ex: If you wiggle the battery leads or connector, it will reset. It isn’t the battery because I have 3 Cortex’s that are faulty, and 11 that work great, and a bunch untested. Does anyone know if I can get the power connector replaced, or find one online I can use as a replacement? I see that it is soldered into the board.
Thanks,
Andrew K.
Hi Andrew,
We’ve had the same problem on one of our Cortexes as well. What we found was that either one of the pins got pushed in, or was bent thinner. You should be able to push the pin back the way it belongs, and if needed glue it on the inside so it doesn’t move.
Hopefully this will happen less with the new extensions, so you can just leave the extension plugged into the cortex.
You could email Eli at VEX customer support ([email protected]) and see if they’ll RMA it for you. VEX has been really good about this in our experience.
It sounds like the pins in the batteries are too narrow or the female pins in the cortex have been pushed too wide making for flaky connections.
You could try and expand/squeeze the connector down a bit too but that can be dicey without the proper crimp tools and could involve some soldering for the Cortex side that looked like it was originally placed with a wave solder machine (how good of a connection you can get by hand if you replace it may be dodgy).
Anyone else try replacing the female battery connector in the Cortex?
One of the vex employees switched female connectors for me at worlds for free on a 3 year old cortex.
I’ve never managed to find a replacement for the power connector housing, it may have been custom made for VEX. The battery connector was originally made by molex as a wire to wire connector, it’s now obsolete, but as it was used for RC toys is still easy to find as a Tamiya connector. You could replace just the pins inside the connector in the cortex but getting all the hot glue (or whatever it is) removed is going to be more difficult than desoldering/soldering the wires.