Last night I was running my final tests on my show. I noticed close to half of my mega-tree was out. I opened up the controller and pressed the reset to get it going. As it reset it flashed 50Hz. Another reset gave the same result. Lucky me, I got to swap out my controller for a spare on Thanksgiving in temps hovering around 5 degrees.
I brought the controller indoors and plugged it in again. Again I got 50Hz. I reloaded the firmware. No change. In searching the forums I found out it could be a problem with the H11A chip. I decided I would fire up the soldering iron and touch up the joints in that area. All of this took a bit of time. Just before I was going to take the soldering iron to the board I plugged it in again. It registered 60Hz!! Since it was acting flaky I decided I should touch it up anyway. I decided to remove the chip before soldering and discovered two of the pins were neatly folded in underneath the chip. From the sides all looked just fine. They were folded in such a way they would make some contact with the socket.
My guess is the cold temps ( teens Farenheit) created enough resistance to prevent it from working properly. The cold fingers should serve as a reminder to me to be very careful inserting chips next time.
