@stevenbell teaches a course in Introductory Digital Engineering at Tufts University and has bought manyUPduino’s. He suggested that the ferrite bead be replaced with a PTC as he was seeing students shorting out their boards leading to burning out the ferrite bead.
If true, this is a pretty worrisome failure as the board is used by makers as well as students for introductory engineering courses, many of whom are novices and would likely end up with a similar failure.
We look into the details of this and the proposed solution in the rest of the blog.
A customer reported that the PLL on the UPduino low-cost Lattice iCE40 FPGA board was intermittent. The blog details the process I used to debug the issue.
This work in part motivated the development of the UPduino 3.0.
