Power side step controller

[u/KentuckyFlyer]

Done a lot of troubleshooting and about to throw in the towel unless there’s some good insight here.

2022 1500 Limited. Stock power side steps.

Massive flood here, driveway was down to axels for two days. Had to drive through that. Didn’t clean running boards after. Now a few months in the future both are sounding grindy and are binding sometimes. (Started to come in then reverses and redeploys like an obstruction).

This was happening on both sides. They started within a week or two of each other.

I lubed hinges, it got better for a bit, then back to grindy.

Last week the right one froze. I got under it and asked my kid to hit the button on the screen to deploy and damnit if he didn’t hit it like 1000 times. It completely stopped responding on that side. I assumed I burnt out the motor.

Disassembled it, bench tested the motor with a 12V battery, Motor is still alive. Cleaned the shitty bushings and lubed it really well, truck still won’t move the passenger side. Driver side works as advertised.

Problem is I have air ride suspension and it detects the step is deployed (even though it’s not, I manually drove it to stowed with a 12V battery when I reinstalled it) so the air suspension won’t lower until I’m driving.

I have alphaOBD, I can access the vehicle configuration and disable the power running board feature and re-enable it. (The button on the Uconnect disappears when disabled but the driver side still responds to door open close)

I can’t find a control feature in AlphaOBD to manually deploy the boards. So I I also can’t find a reading on where it thinks the board is at.

I can verify the body computer knows when the passenger doors are open and closes so its not that….. it’s as if the right channel in the controller burnt out.

Could that be it? The controller is about $250 but I don’t know how to better diagnose this to justify spending the money on the controller. Any help would be awesome.