ive been doing some work on one of my 150g bots ahead of BBB’s ant event this saturday. When i last touched this robot, everything seemed to work fine, the robot drove and the weapon spun up just fine.
However, ive just done some resoldering on the weapon ESC due to the fact that the wires weren’t soldered on too well, and now the robot just isn’t switching on, the ESC makes sounds when the battery plugs in (and the weapon has also twitched, which caused me to put a clamp on it to stop it turning again) but theres no light at all on the receiver… i was briefly hearing clicking sounds at first when i turned the robot on but those sounds are now gone.
i did also make the (very stupid and foolish mistake) of plugging the battery directly into the reciever for a second, which i did quite stupidly without even thinking, and i do worry so if thats caused something too, however i don’t really have any way of knowing, ive seen no smoke and nothing appears to be burnt out, even trying a new reciever brought no new results so that.
here is a photo of the new soldering i have done, its pretty ugly ill admit, im unfortunately not that good at soldering up the weapon ESC’s, so maybe it needs a resolder…
any idea where i could go from here? im in a bit of a rush at the moment to get the robot ready for Saturday and i’m not really sure what to do from here… Thanks for any of your help
I think you will probably need to get another receiver, they aren’t always rated for 8V or full lipo voltage.
The sounds from the brushless motor probably mean that the ESC is ok though (they are much tougher).
The soldering job looks a bit rough, but put a few bits of insulating tape and it will probably be ok, be sure to visually check for shorts (ideally with a multimeter too)
If you arrive at the event early, I imagine someone will help.
I’ve tried using another reciever but it doesn’t seem to want to work with that one either, i unfortunately do not have a multimeter which does make it a little hard to check, but nothing visually appears burnt out (esc’s i mean). ill have to give it another poke around
If you haven’t read my soldering guide yet I highly recommend it, there’s a lot of tips and tricks in there which will make your life a lot easier when soldering and wiring!
What beeps does the ESC make? There’s a handy chart in the BLHeli documentation to illustrate what the beeps mean, I’ve pasted it below. That should tell you if the ESC is getting the right signals from the receiver or not. Do the drive motors run ok? Do you have a servo that you can swap in place of the ESC to check the functionality of that channel?
(note that if the ESC is in bidirectional mode it will play both the arming sequence start and end tones as soon as it detects a signal in the middle of its input range).
i have read bits of your guide yes! is there a section on brushless ESC’s? i don’t think i remember seeing one but if there is id love to give it another read! as it is definitely the area i struggle with most.
Its usually just the power up beeps, nothing else after that unfortunately. nothing moves at all but the other week everything worked just fine. I have some spares that i was saving for other robots so i think im just going to quickly solder another set up and tinker with this set after the event, something tells me that something on it is probably dead anyways haha.
Yes, I covered ESCs but not explicitly, it’s under the “solder pads” section.
Sounds like the receiver/battery incident did some damage, if it still doesn’t work with a new receiver then unfortunately it might have sent battery voltage down the signal wires, but if you want me to take a look at it at the event I’m more than happy, I’ve always got a soldering iron in my toolkit!
i found the section, thank you! if you’d like to take a look i would appreciate it! ill bring the guts along and see if at least something is salvagable/fixable from all of it.
failing that ill just try resolder a new set for tomorrow, i have plentiful spares thankfully for other robots ive been meaning to build haha
