Inconsistent, erratic behavior from sound board...feeing defeated

[thetang22]

At Christmas, I got my hands on one of those clearance CF9 boards, and I was ecstatic. I’ve done some basic saber wiring in the past, but this was my first rodeo with a real premium sound board. I read the manual (certain parts several times over) to ensure I was assembling things correctly. I got it all wired up and everything was working, with 1 very odd characteristic.

When I’d take out the kill key, I’d get the normal boot sound. Then, when I pressed the main activation switch....the lightsaber would ignite with the appropriate noise. And then, after about 1-2 seconds....it would just start going crazy: clashes galore, blaster deflects, etc... This was happening with both the sound and the LED matching that behavior, while the wiring kit was sitting untouched on the table.

Now here’s the even weirder part: I could reset the kill key, and there’s a chance the saber would boot up just fine, with 100% normal activation and behavior. Or it could still be acting crazy. It's like it was totally random.

I thought maybe there could be a solder bridge between my activation/aux switches on the board...but I removed all the wiring, cleaned up the pads with copper braid before reassembly, and am pretty confident that isn’t the issue. I even swapped out the switches and the recharge port for spares just to see if they were causing the issue, but the behavior continued exactly as before...with sometimes working, and other times not. Which leads me to the problem of not knowing what could possibly be the culprit.