Hey, we were working on a custom overcurrent shutdown circuit and we were trying to use the ADC3.3V on the flight controller to measure a shunt voltage to get a current reading running through our custom PDB. Something went wrong which seems to have fried our ADC (ADS1115 afaik).
We want to to desolder the ADC IC and use the flight controller without it over heating. We have checked the schematic and we didn’t catch anything that could break if we just removed the ADC besides not being able to use it.
We have ordered a replacement which should come in soon but in the mean time we are looking to test with it off. Could this break anything else?
You may not have battery voltage and current consumption measurements without that ADC on the Navigator, but that shouldn’t affect your ability to drive the vehicle around! It does put you at risk for over-discharging your battery, so be aware of the duration and amount of power you’re using….
The Navigator itself is just a set of components, so shouldn’t meaningfully be impacted by one of the peripheral ICs being disconnected.
That said, if you’re trying to run an autopilot firmware on it using BlueOS then that will most likely fail, because BlueOS uses the connected chips to try to determine what kind of board it is connected to (so the autopilot manager won’t recognise it as a Navigator board, and won’t run Navigator firmware to try to operate with it).
Given you’re expecting this is a temporary problem, you could try removing the ADS1115 from the check and building a custom BlueOS image to use in the meantime (which can be auto-built using GitHub Actions). I’m unsure whether the autopilot firmware would fail to start, or complain about the missing peripheral that it’s been built to expect to be there, so worst case you may need to make a custom autopilot firmware build too (which would likely not be worth the effort).