tomtom 510 wont work at all

[jolenebb]

Hi all

this is my first post hope someone can help?. I have a 510 had it for about 3 years been fine just the odd reset until about 2 weeks ago switched it on and NOTHING completely dead tried to reset it NOTHING charged it up for about 3 hours NOTHING except for the green light when charging but when i take it off charge the green light goes out. I have tied resetting it But can it be reset with no power to it ?. and dont know if it is posible to reset whilst in the in house charger ? . could it be that the battery is dead. coincidently my brother-in-law has exactly the same problem . spooky in it...lol

please help

 

[jolenebb]

510 dead

sorry..Ialso tried pluging it in to my pc tomtom home and got NO DIVICE CONNECTED

thanks..

 

[dhn]

You can reset while it is 'off', yes.

 

[jolenebb]

do i need a battery

Can anyone tell me do I need a good working battery in my go 510 for it to switch on ? what I am trying to say is if the battery is dead will the sat nav work whilst in the charger. I dont want to buy a new battery and find that thats not the problem. also the replacement battery is 3.7 volts. the tomtom battery is( I think
5 volts) am I correct ? and if so won't this make a differance.

please help

 

[dhn]

The unit should work on the car charger, yes.

 

[jolenebb]

battery TT 510

hi
sorry to be a pain but . if the battery is completely dead is it still posible to start the unit . bering in mind that if it needs reseting the reset button is under the charger witch would make it very dificut to get to

thanks

 

[dhn]

But try it after the unit has been connected to the car charger for some time.

 

[jolenebb]

green light of death

can this problem be what is known as the green light of death ( blown chips on the motherboard )
and if so can anyone suply me with a diagram of the motherboard for the TT 510

thanks

 

[jolenebb]

thank you

I cannot believe no one on here has not come across this problem? I have searched the net for answers to this and thought I know I?ll go on tomtomforum.com they?ll know. I thought they should know about the fault on the incar charger that blows the TPS62000 and LTS3411 chips on the motherboard and maybe give me some help in how to replace them so I can get my ?300+ satnav working again without paying some rip off merchant loads of money to fix it . But what did I get ? Not a sausage

Thank you

 

[mikealder]

The best course of action is to bin the device and purchase a new one. even if you have the soldering skills to replace SMT components where will you get them from as they are not available, the device is obscolete and if it its suffered an over volt from the charger its time to move on - Mike

 

[jolenebb]

these chips are easy to obtain from rs. Also if the charger is faulty and tomtom knows this dont you think that they should do the decent thing and repair it free of charge.

The CLA has been the cause of some TomTom GOs burning out. The reason for this is simple. 1 there are not two, but three wires coming out of the CLA. The third (white) wire is a so-called sense wire. The sense wire "tells" the CLA that the voltage on the DC input to the GO is different from the nominal 5V.

What happens in the faulty CLAs is that this wire gets disconnected at the DC connector (the one which you plug in the base or in the GO itself) in the course of daily use. When the sense wire is loose and is not making a good connection the CLA thinks that the voltage at the GO is too low and tries to compensate by increasing its output voltage. In the extreme case the sense wire gets disconnected completely and the voltage on the output of the CLA and consequently at the input to the GO goes to (say) 12V at which point the GO goes and doesn't come back.

There are many remedies to this problem, one is to connect the white (sense) and the red (positive, nominal 5V) together at the CLA . Now you don't care if the sense wire is disconnected at the DC jack end of the cable.

 

[jolenebb]

I?m not an electronics expert but I bet I can fix the green light of death for less than ?7

 

[mikealder]

Cable head sensing is the most reliable way to ensure accurate votage stability at the point of connection across a wide range of current draw by the device, but as you have found it does involve an extra wire that if broken can go to maximum which will be around 13,8V with a car engine running. This tends to fry the electronics in a very short period of time.

I use cable head sensing in my day to day job with mobile power sets connected to aircraft and the same broken wire problem exists where the power set can go to maximum voltage, its a known and calculated risk, but we have other protection circuits involved to detect this before it does any damage, I am talking about 180KA+ AC gen sets that car fry cables as thick as your finger when it goes wrong!

I would try a call to TT CS as the charger fault is a well known problem, but due to the age of the device I doubt they will be too interested, if you not used to soldering SMT components I would consign it to the bin unless you can appeal to TT to fix the device - Mike

 

[jolenebb]

Thanks for the reply I?ll have a go at fixing it and let you know how I did

 

[lec510]

Try program ClearFlash from TomTom first.
Yes even if it's dead the program might still work. Just hold the power button when the program tell you to click . You might have to try repeatedly though. Good luck.

 

[jolenebb]

I have done this already without success. I know the chips have blown. I'm going to send it back to tomtom before I do anything else and see if they will repair it free of charge if not I'll have a go at fixing it myself
wish me luck lol

 

[jemmarsh]

Mine is dead too

I'm suffering the same problem... the green light is on, but the charging doesn't start.

I've just taken it apart (its out of warranty anyway) but I can see nothing to tinker with.


It seems totally dead now, but previously, if you had enough patience, the charging could be coaxed into live by squeezing the left side of the connector (either in-car or USB cradle).

I *think* that when you leave the battery to die too much, it takes a while for the charging to kick-in - and this makes it harder to recognise when you have hit the sweet-spot whilst compressing the connection.

Of course, maybe I should be asking for a replacement now I know that it is a common problems!