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Statistics: Posted by Admin — Tue Nov 26, 2013 3:58 pm
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In my opinion wit all the buzz around fancy bells and whistles some very important but somewhat mundane things get overlooked. In particular power supply and battery management. We want to put all these goodies into our tanks but do they have enough of a clean, smooth power supply to run them?? Hence I've taken some time out to go back to first base and develop a power supply/management system.
This power supply unit has the provisional name of 'Cobra' . The idea is to connect your battery to a Cobra board on which the power will be "regulated" and smooth filtered supplies made available for control boards or cctv cameras and the like. Cobra will have an onboard "Remora" (wireless link) that will send updates of Battery voltage, Maximum current draw, motor temperature as well as IR battle info back to a display LCD. It all comes together like this
Above is the LCD display that you would connect onto your radio for easy viewing
The info is as follows:
Tank ID: Med Tank + 315
Medium Tank, German, Number 315
Battle Stat: ===== Rp0 Sh26
Graphical representation of lives left, Number of repairs (Rp) and shots fired (Sh)
Motor Info: Tp 25 C MI 5
Motor Temperature 25 degrees Celcius, Maximum current (I) draw 5 amps
Battery Info1: C1 3.3 C2 3.3
Cell 1 voltage 3.3 volts, cell 2 voltage 3.3 volts
Battery Info2: C3 3.3 TV 9.9
Cell 3 voltage 3.3 volts, Total voltage 9.9 volts
Also on the way from China as I type this are the first Piranha Battle Units which are set to replace the old Hammerhead system.
Statistics: Posted by Phyrephish — Tue Nov 26, 2013 1:36 pm
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Next up are a few boards that have had some improvements made to their design.
Viper aka PotHead
For those interested an Inductor has been added to the circuit to deal with the extreme current draw of the RX18 when the main gun is fired.
Pantherturm
A few 'improvements' have been made to the original design. Most notable is support for connection to an external audio amplifier...
As you can see above the usual JST connection for a speaker has been added below which is a 6 pin interface. The left 2 pins marked Jumper require surprisingly a jumper to be placed across them to allow for the external amp. The middle two pins marked power also surprisingly can be used to supply power to the external map (top pin is V+). Finally the right most pins are the audio output with the top pin carrying the signal and the bottom pin is Ground.
MANTA Another board to get a SMD makeover is MANTA (for the Diagnostic LCD)
For mostly practical purposes MANTA has been redesigned to use SMD components which now lie between the board and LCD. This is a big improvement leaving the back side of MANTA free for connection to a mounting plate.
Statistics: Posted by Phyrephish — Tue Nov 26, 2013 1:08 pm
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Things may of seemed a bit quiet lately but that doesn't mean that things have not been slowly ticking along. Unfortunately due to the change of the MBRCTC club day I won't be able to debut these new items in person and live so it has to be a web debut. So here we go......
First up is Panzerfaust
Panzerfaust is best thought of as an automatic Panzerfaust soldier for IR battle. Connect Panzerfaust to a battle unit (IR emitter and receiver) and speaker then and power up with 6 - 12 v battery. At quasi random intervals Panzerfaust will fire either a burst of machine gun fire, or either a Panzerfaust round or Panzerschrek round. The Machine gun fires the RCTA machine gun IR signal which will affect only RCTA specific products. The Panzerfaust round is a standard IR signal that will affect a normal hit on Tamiya, Heng Long or Taigen Tanks. The Panzerschrek round is a 2 shot kill round that will affect Tamiya or RCTA MAKO equipped units ONLY.
Panzerfaust features an onboard sound module which can be user programmed with different sounds.
Next it's Geko
The inspiration for Geko came from the great work posted on this forum by Edwin. Geko is a simple twin motor controller specifically designed to control the turret rotation and gun elevation motors of Heng Long tanks. Allows for smooth proportional control of turret rotation and has a custom program that will allow proportional control of the gun elevation leaving the extents of the elevation channel free to operate the cannon and machine guns.
MAKO TE As if there weren't enough MAKO variants
The TE stands for Taigen Edition. This MAKO was developed from a request by a Taigen Tank distributor for a cheap mass produced units that will allow Taigen tanks to battle with Tamiya and Heng Long. MAKO TE is an ultra simple plug and play unit whose ONLY job is to convert IR signals. There are no options and no programming ability. Just plug, play and forget.
Sirvoe The smallest board so far but the biggest in terms of creative potential.
I suspect many of you may find Sirvoe a non-event but if you want to use servos in your tank then check it out... Designed specifically for allowing the use of a servo for gun elevation. If you have tried this you will know that it sucks because as your elevation stick returns to neutral so does your servo. Sirvoe fixes this and wil leave the gun in position as the stick returns to centre. Modification of sirvoe is also possible and a unit here has been modified to control the recoil action of a twin barrel Flakpanzer.
Statistics: Posted by Phyrephish — Tue Nov 26, 2013 12:45 pm
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