Apollo/Nice gate opener

[JDuke]

I have an Apollo or nice gate opener with the 636 control board. Recently something happened and some of the components on the control board burned up, so I bought a replacement board and popped it in, the wiring is exactly the same from the old board to the new board.

I also had a limit screw on the slave gate opener that got bent at some point. I changed it as well.

I am not sure if the initial incident was a lightning strike, or the limit screw got bent, and that caused the component on the control board to burn up.

As it is now, the gate isn’t working.

I can use the emergency open circuit to open the gates, and then if I plug them back in, they close normally.

They will not open with the carsense, or the remote, even though I can verify that the signal is getting to the board.
There’s also a toggle switch designed to hold the gates in the open position, it will keep them open, if they have been opened with the emergency bypass but it won’t open them from the closed position.

I am thinking there has to be some sort of sensor thats sending a fault to the board.

The board has indicator lights on it that are lit correctly when both the gates are either open or closed.

Anybody have one of these gate openers, or know of a forum that focuses on problems with them?

Duke

[daddo]

I don't have the apollo, but when mine did this, I adjusted the potentiometer that controls the open overload limit. You may also check that your getting proper voltage everywhere.

[JDuke]

Thanks for the suggestion, I checked the overload potentiometer and have tried multiple different settings just to get it going, so far nothing has worked.

I have been using my volt meter to check all the voltages, that’s where my confusion starts, as it seems everything is getting correct voltage, and there is some setting somewhere either on the control board, or an attached switch that is causing a fault.

I’m going to try a couple different dip switch configurations and see if maybe I didn’t get them all set the way the original one was set.

Thank you for the suggestions.

Duke

[daddo]

Sometimes you just get a bad new board.

[JDuke]

Spent an hour on hold this afternoon, and talked to Eddy with Tech support, he asked me to try several of the things that I had already tried, and he came to the same conclusion that you came to, that its a bad board fresh out of the box.

Now I have to wait until Monday for the company I bought it from the honor the return and send a new board...

Duke

[JDuke]

Got authorization for a return almost a month ago, then sent the old board back.

Apparently they had several boards bad, as this particular board was on backorder.

Finally came in today, just a few minutes popping the board in and the gate is up and running.

It’s quite a relief to finally get the gate working, buying a new board and having it faulty right out of the box is rather demoralizing when your trouble shooting something new to you.

I would like to believe that there is a better option than a $300 board, perhaps someone has programmed one of the open source raspberry pi or similar boards to replace one of these when they go bad.

Duke