FF Steering Wheel Lights/Mannetino Flash on Startup - Lithium Battery

Same thing happens to me after installing new battery. But that also coincided with onset of cold weather. The electrical warning and flashing stops if I let the car idle for 15 mins or driving for a few miles. Once I drive for awhile this doesn’t happen again during day — only next day an am when cold. Leaving car on battery tender doesn’t help.

The tech says the battery lead wasn’t in good shape and we’ll replace that and see if it helps.

there are several past threads on this issue.

someone posited a theory that it might be related to a fuel line sensor which might trigger when it’s cold out — maybe due to condensation?

 

Let me know what happens and Ill do same.

 

My AG Lithium has been flawless. Albeit in warmer weather.

I doubt this is the battery. But perhaps a full power reset will help. Remove ground cable then reinstall.

SV

 

shld probably try a regular battery and see if the issue goes away

 

That's odd -- the Antigravity I had in the FF was flawless. Did you get the 80ah?

 

Dang, man. I wonder if you’ve got a bad one. Could be worth a call to antigravity.

 

Are all the steering wheel lights flashing on and off? and after a while it stops? I just fixed this issue myself it had nothing to do with the battery (I replaced mine thinking it was). the link you sent is dead.

Mine turned out the be the steering wheel control module, NVO. I fixed it by doing PCB repair. Cost me 5 quid

 

Here some photos of the thing that went wrong.
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‘Nice. What about the board was bad? How did you find it and fix it?

SV

 

https://youtube.com/shorts/in-GBjdNp5A?feature=share

Here a video showing what happen to mine. In the video I just cleaned it to see if it would work. That didn't. I then used a thermal camera to have a look at it to see if there were any shorts on the PCB.

See video


So established that about 6 compentents could be shorted. The voltage regulator and some darlington transistors pairs.

I ordered those parts for bascialy nothing swapped out the smds on my hot air reflow machine. I then probed around the pcb to see if the short was gone and still found a short and after about 2 hours of probing I found a shorted capacitor aswell. Luckily I had a spare smd cap with a similer value so I swaped that aswell.

Here are the bad components
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And the new ones I ordered after identifying them
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This whole ordeal took about a month to sort out. Ferrari won't sell you just the pcb. You have to buy a whole new button panel. Scudria car parts sells them for about 1750 pounds. My dealer wanted 2500 pounds to fix the issue.

I fixed it for about 5 pounds. Not including the tools obviously....

I skipped over some finer details like part no because in each case a different component will fail and it's only with proper smd repair tools and skills you can garentee a fix. But essentially you could litrally buy every single tool I used to fix this problem and still come out quite ahead if you had got the dealer to fix it.

 

I also should mention they way I figured out that it was the NVO was with my launch x431 Diagun V.
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You can ignore the transmission error
This was caused by the infamous speed sensor which I just had done at the dealership.

 

Looked like each of the transistors were the LED drivers?? A bad transistor should result in a bad LED location. Wouldn’t expect that based on the symptoms.

Vreg if it were firing up then down (overcurrent sense?) might cause the symptoms tho. Ceramic caps don’t often go bad unless they over voltage. Any idea if these are just filter caps or some kind of compensation caps?

SV

 

Im not sure what the transistors were doing tbh, all I know is that they are a prebiased n-p-n transistor with a prebiased p-n-p one. I think that is just a Darlington pair but I could be wrong. It could be possible they were completely fine. they measured correctly in terms of resistance to the gate, but I replace them regardless.

What I think was actually wrong was probably with the voltage regulator and the shorted cap. The cap wasn't a complete short it was a around 150Ohms to ground. It was on the 5V line for the led power. I'm pretty sure it was just a filtering cap. It could have been that solely causing the issue.

The voltage regulator has a reset pin, I read in the documentation that if not enough filtering capacitance was on the output line it can cause instability. And will cause it to reset constantly. I think this was exactly what was happening. Again no idea if i was right since I just replaced everything all at once.

Transistors replaced:
PDTB123ET
MMUN2211L
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Voltage Regulator replaced:
L4949ED
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I don't remember the capacitance of the cap, sorry. its obviously rated for above 5V. I think it was 10nf 0805. Its just a filtering cap so just stay below 10uf.

Again if anyone is reading this and has this issue replacing these components may not work. That's not how SMD repair works.

 

Hey Sid,
Awesome job of troubleshooting and repairing! You said "it had nothing to do with the battery (I replaced mine thinking it was)"....Were you using an AG battery too and swapped to a AGM or SLA and still had the same problem? Could you just clarify this pls?

 

I used the exact same battery for replacement. It was a varta agm battery replaced with the same varta agm battery. Like I said before I checked the old battery with a battery tester and it tested healthy.

Battery model:
VARTA 595-901-085 Silver Dynamic AGM G14 (95Ah)

 

Thanks for the clarification.

 

______________________
Folks -- just wanted to let you know the issue has been resolved. I had the electrical warning on cold mornings and then eventually began to get an engine warning light. The problem was a faulty Canister Purge Valve, which is electrically operated.