[RachelD9]

After I disconnected the IC chip entirely, I used my multimeter to compare the between-lead measurements to a brand-new chip in the replacement menorah kit I just bought…turns out I had actually damaged the first chip. (I was rather out-of-practice at soldering on the first one and I’m pretty sure I did something that caused one of the pins to short out internally to its neighbor.) Now I’ve got the second kit assembled and working beautifully!

Do you happen to sell individual replacement components for this kit? I’m curious to see if I could get my first menorah working again if I can buy a replacement for the controller IC that I broke.

[RachelD9]

Great debugging suggestions! The connectivity behavior of both buttons is exactly like you described, so now I’m convinced that those switches are both fine. The multimeter shows continuity between a couple of adjacent pairs on the IC, so that must be my problem! There are no solder bridges that I can see, so I’m betting that there must be a bridge or two hiding under the chip on the top side of the board…I do tend to feed the solder so that the blobs go through the top side, so there’s probably a short hiding up there somewhere. :)

I also measured the resistor values for the heck of it (they were all correct when I started the kit, but I wanted to see if any of them changed when the circuit overheated), and R6 is only around 10 ohms or so… definitely nowhere near 1.5k. I have a few spare 1.5k resistors lying around from a past project, so I’ll try swapping one in for R6 when I go in to fix the joints on the IC. I hope to report back with good news when I’m done with those fixes!

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