Industrial Electronics Repair: What Businesses Should Know

Controller and drive boards, operator panels, power supplies and interface modules are commonly repairable at the component level when the fault is confined to a few parts and the parts can be sourced. Boards with extensive damage or locked, programmed devices may not be.

Send the board or module with its labels intact, and say what the machine was doing, whether it is stopped, and whether there was a surge, an overload or a wiring change beforehand. Photographs of the board and the cabinet help the assessment.

A repaired board should be tested for rails and signals, exercised with a representative load where practical, and run warm. A board that merely powers up has not been shown to be repaired.

Repair restores the electronics. It does not provide functional-safety re-certification, so safety-rated equipment must go through the owner's own re-certification before being returned to a safety function.

Compare the repair estimate and its testing with the replacement price plus delivery, configuration and the cost of the machine being down. An assessment gives you the repair side of that comparison before you commit.