RobotWars101

You don't need to connect more than one power / gnd wire from the rx to the Dasmikro. So those extra wires can be cut off. Yes the soldering is a mess, and is likely to fail unless you tidy it up a bit. Check that you don't have any shorts. Maybe a bit of hot glue wouldn't go amiss, the Dasmikro pad...

http://vectrex.org.uk/mark/malenki-kicad.png http://vectrex.org.uk/mark/malenki-irl.jpg Parts are here, I have made a couple of the boards so far. It all seems to approximately work, the firmware at least drives my test robot around. If anyone wants one, please PM me, I can make up about 9ish board...

All the dead-band logic is inside the MCU, so good luck tuning it. These tiny little MCUs have their own free-running oscillator which goes at whatever speed it feels like. So the MCU might be nominally clocked at 1 Mhz, but in practice it's 1 Mhz +- 10% or maybe worse than that. So the firmware mig...

Good detective work. The AM1096 is a very interesting chip because it's a motor driver with built-in voltage regulator, so it saves them components on the board, the LDO voltage regulator presumably supplies the microcontroller, which makes it a "true" 2-chip solution which can handle a wi...

Ok, I didn't realise there were two chips. Probably one is a cheapo no-info Chinese Microcontroller, the other is a motor driver, similar to the MX612. Actually the MX612 has pins 5,8 connected to the motor. Don't run it off more than 10V, it's outside of its spec. I actually bought some MX612s, but...

That is very interesting.

Did you, by any chance, get a part number from the 8-pin chip on the blue ESC board above? The Dorman servo board? Is that the only active part on the board, or is there a small transistor too?

Mark

Don't most speed controllers have one built-in?

I know the Dasmikro has one, also some brushless esc.

Hi, Has anyone tried these motors? https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=AS_20190501071600&SearchText=gear+motor+6mm They are getting quite cheap and super, super tiny, maybe good for fleaweights or antweight? Would the (plastic) gearbox destroy itself instantly if we pu...

It's easy to preach after the fact... I usually test my electronics with a multimeter (for short circuit) bench supply (for functionality) before plugging a lipo in. The Lipos give enough current to pop the magic smoke out of any faulty electronics. That said, I've never had the lipo itself catch fi...

George- I will try enabling braking to see what happens. I didn't realise that braking was a useful feature, I didn't use braking on my previous robot (Betsie, which has a sort of fly-by-wire system anyway) and I've not implemented braking yet in the new speed controller (but the hardware is capable)