I hate Survival Lasers' battery contact boards.

[Marco Polo]

If you have shaky hands at all, AVOID these. There is far too much exposed metal and it is very easy to create a short. It's not impossible to break that short once it happens (I just did) but it's a PITA and I feel like using a blank driver board for a battery contact is just a cheesy corner to cut.

It would have been better to use a separate board that only has the outer ring and central contact pad; will be looking into getting some elsewhere, maybe OSH Park or similar.

Sorry for the cranky negative review, I really do like Survival Lasers otherwise, they ship fast and are great to deal with, but this battery contact board irritates me to no end. My hands shake constantly whenever I try to do delicate work and I have not succeeded in rectifying the problem. I strongly recommend the use of electrical tape or similar as a makeshift solder mask, that is what I ended up doing. I feel like it shouldn't have been necessary though.

 

[ChaosLord]

Yeah, I've had some that were wired wrong and i had to hunt for a place to solder the positive lead. Definitely had some fustration with them.

I think Flamingpyro sells contact boards that aren't recycled driver boards.

 

[Marco Polo]

You may notice I have - rep'd you again--- please stop making threads bashing, complaining about, or otherwise hurting the hard-earned reputation of sellers (SFL, survival lasers, etc). They have worked hard to get where they are today, and we as a forum don't want newcomers seeing things like that and deciding to buy from one of the myriad of chinese sites instead.

This was posted as a visitor message on my profile, not sure why it needed to be posted there but I will respond to it here as it is relevant.

If I think a product is bad I'm going to say it's bad, it's called "being honest" and sometimes being honest means posting negative reviews. Note that I made it clear that I like SL in general and the only thing I'm posting about is one specific product that they offer. I don't care if you have a problem with it; you aren't the one selling the things so what is it to you?

The battery contact boards have a lot of exposed metal. If you have shaky hands or suck at soldering small things in small places (I have no problem admitting to both), then it's a bad board to use. It's as simple as that. I'm not "bashing" anyone, I'm providing feedback and it's on SL to use that feedback, or to disregard it as they see fit.

By all means, neg rep me if want to, I don't care, I'm losing 82 points because you mistake feedback for "bashing". Forgive me if I don't find that to be all that scary.

 

[Garoq]

Hey guys, we did have a bad batch of boards quite a while back and IIRC we posted an advisory here and/or the Facebook page on how to correct them.

We will be releasing a new batch soon that will not have the trace around the outer edge on the component side and therefore should be easier to solder without shorting.

OTOH, unless I've overlooked something, this is the first time I have heard of anyone having a problem using these boards (other than the wiring problem quite some time ago).

 

[Rifter]

This was posted as a visitor message on my profile, not sure why it needed to be posted there but I will respond to it here as it is relevant.

If I think a product is bad I'm going to say it's bad, it's called "being honest" and sometimes being honest means posting negative reviews. Note that I made it clear that I like SL in general and the only thing I'm posting about is one specific product that they offer. I don't care if you have a problem with it; you aren't the one selling the things so what is it to you?

The battery contact boards have a lot of exposed metal. If you have shaky hands or suck at soldering small things in small places (I have no problem admitting to both), then it's a bad board to use. It's as simple as that. I'm not "bashing" anyone, I'm providing feedback and it's on SL to use that feedback, or to disregard it as they see fit.

By all means, neg rep me if want to, I don't care, I'm losing 82 points because you mistake feedback for "bashing". Forgive me if I don't find that to be all that scary.

That's just sad man, Hard to believe someone would neg rep you for that.

Especially since you are correct the contact boards DO suck, they are very hard to work with unless you take the utmost care while soldering them. And its not only that, because its hard for no good reason, there just doesn't need to be traces everywhere that are so easy to short.

Don't get me wrong, I love SL and garry is a great guy, ive posted many times before saying as much, but the contact boards can use some refinement that's for sure.

OP if you make a board and do source some from OSH Park let me know im interested as well.

 

[Garoq]

Are you soldering them from the battery side or the component side??

http://laserpointerforums.com/f51/installing-blank-battery-contact-board-c6-pill-86322.html

It's not that difficult!