last time i used my minn kota 55pd trolling motor i could hear the motor bog down and smoke poured out from the control board. One of the wires from the power supply was burned at the connection to the control board. Do I need a new control board or just a tighter connection between the current control board and power supply?

 

It depends if the magical smoke came from a circuit board component or from a smoking wire caused by a loose connection.

The simple solution is, replace the wires (and possibly the connectors) then try it again. If the circuit board is bad, testing new wires cannot make the circuit board worse.

If that does not work, time for a new control board. The concern here is, do you know what caused the circuit board to smoke? They don't normally do that on their own. You will want to find out before you invest in a new board and expect it to work out on the lake. The motor could be siezed and drawing more current that it should. A switch could be shorted. A multi-cell battery back could be connected in series instead of parallel. Or, the motor could have been caught in weeds when you made the smoke and the root cause of the problem was resolved when you took the boat out of the lake. This is up to you to troubleshoot unless you give us more detail.

 

You need to do voltage tests on the pcb, can you post some pictures of it?