bizarre shipping damage

[JR.]

PastedGraphic-2.tiff (153.28 KiB) Viewed 7155 times

You can just see the edge of mic peeking out from the hole it is supposed to be poking through. The small hole to the left is for an index tab on the PCB that references the mic height precisely.
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I recently has a new drum tuner customer complain that he was getting inconsistent results, and he even sent me a video of it acting stupid. I was not familiar with soft faults. With microprocessor based products in my experience either they work 100% or not al all.

I ASSumed that I must have sped up my capture routines in software to the point that they were no longer 100% accurate. In my design work there is a constant tension between making resonance captures faster which can trade off a little accuracy (due to settling time and physical constants involved).

I slowed down the software making it harder to misread a drum and sent him another unit to try out thinking that maybe he had an unusually difficult drum (they're all different). Immediately upon looking at the second unit he noticed that the microphone in the first unit was completely pushed up inside the hole it is supposed to stick down through and blocked almost completely by the bottom metal.

It is remarkable that it read anything at all with the mic compromised that way...

JR

PS: Note: the mic is mounted to daughter PCB sticking straight down from the top PCB. The top PCB is captured by edge slots on all 4 sides in the injection molded clamshell package. I did extensive drop testing on this unit to secure the batteries into the battery holder that are challenged by normal handling during shipping. I can't imagine how hard this was dropped to do this. It clearly took a serious hit.

[emrr]

Wow. If there's a way....

[JR.]

I decided to make my test platform the same, to see if i could identify a response pattern to identify and ignore this fault, but another interesting tidbit, I could not force the mic into the position (behind the bottom metal) just by pushing on it. I literally had to take it apart and re-assemble it wrong to get it that way.

It must have been well dropped to flex the package enough to allow the incorrect location.

I can probably add a catch on the indexing tab that sticks through the small hole next to the mic hole... but I'm not sure even that would survive a mega drop.

JR