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Messages - LukeZ
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661
« on: August 01, 2018, 04:34:18 PM »
Hi Rad, was away for several days but finally getting caught up again on the posts here. Your sound experiments are interesting to follow and I thought your JP sounds were quite nice.
You mentioned the difference between using multiple sound bites for throttle speed compared to a baseline engine sound dynamically adjusted for playback speed and pitch. As you know the Open Panzer sound card is using the individual sound bites approach, because it is difficult for a microprocessor to stream digital sound data from the relatively slow SD card, manipulate the data and then convert it to analog at the necessary speed. Computers can do this easily but computers are running their CPUs at much higher frequencies. Benedini seems to have managed it but his firmware is closed so I don't know what his specific approach is, but there are two things we do know - he stores sound clips essentially in RAM, which while very fast is also very limited in space; so this requires his clips to be very short and of low quality. Although I am impressed at his technical achievements I am not always a fan of the sound that can be generated.
But I agree with you the individual sound bite approach can sound even worse, especially when the sound clips are very brief. This causes the broken-record effect which always makes me want to commit suicide, I'd rather have a completely silent model than hear that.
The best RC models are a combination of technical and artistic elements. Trying to literally re-create the precise sound of a real life engine through an electrical device that is not an engine will be a less effective approach than emulating the "spirit" of the sound creatively. In my view using long samples create a far more believable effect even if there is not much pitch change with engine speed, because the artificiality of the pitch changes we are able to generate with the limitations we have are more likely to break the sense of immersion than something more seamless even if less precisely "realistic." The best modelers create the illusion of reality through more simple means, rather than trying to literally copy reality.
I think your JP sound set, with the addition of a single relatively long running sample (to avoid the broken record effect) would sound one million times better than most anything else on the market today even though in effect it would only have a single throttle speed (apart from idle). Good accel/decel sounds and smooth transitions are more important to realism in my view.
Anyway those are some of my thoughts but I think model sounds are highly subjective and what sounds good to one person may not to another.
662
« on: August 01, 2018, 01:32:58 PM »
I'm also going to test a few cheap blue tooth modules and I'll get back to you on those.
Our friend Sergey has some information about using a cheap Chinese bluetooth module in his thread here. At this moment the recommended Bluetooth module from Adafruit is discontinued while they create a new version. When they release the updated product I will update the Wiki, in the meantime you can always use the cheap Chinese ones but they are more difficult to setup and will not support flashing new firmware. Anyway I don't want to derail this thread so if more discussion of bluetooth is desired go ahead and start a new one and we can keep this one focused on the Banggood motor controllers.
663
« on: July 24, 2018, 07:29:55 PM »
I'm glad we finally solved the mystery and that it turned out to be an easy fix. This may also explain similar behavior that if I recall you experience on your StugIII.
PWM to PPM is not a trivial conversion due to timing constraints, I remember when the ArduPilot team developed the first converter which I suspect Hobby King has copied. Who knows how good a job they did. Having multiple motors running inside a metal box (such as the inside of your tank) is basically the worst possible RF environment imaginable for any kind of receiver but at least the digital ones can tell if the signal is valid or not, whereas the analog receiver just passes on whatever garbage makes it to the antenna.
664
« on: July 24, 2018, 07:23:49 PM »
Nice work on a complex three-servo mechanism! I think the result looks good.
665
« on: July 24, 2018, 07:21:35 PM »
Hi Neil, this is indeed a good idea and one which I have thought of myself, but it didn't occur to me until a few years into the project (this has been in development since 2011). Unfortunately the way the TCB firmware was organized from the beginning makes this essentially impossible at the present moment without a major overhaul, or as you suggest some kind of custom firmware to be used only during testing, which however poses its own set of problems and complexities. Accomplishing something like this for the Scout or sound card would not be as bad since they are by design expecting to receive commands from the serial port anyway. However since neither of those products is even available the benefit/cost ratio of that time investment is not presently very high. Anyway I'm agreeing with you about the desirability of this feature, especially for the TCB. No one has spent more time testing this thing than myself and I often wished I had thought ahead to incorporate this ability! I've added your suggestion to the public To-Do list but to be honest that list is more a wish-list of things which are not likely to ever get done unless the project attracts further developers. Relatively straightforward features and bugs never make it to that list, I work on them right away and they get included in routine firmware updates. The To-Do list is stuff that would be nice to have but would take more time than I have available to me.
666
« on: July 23, 2018, 01:18:34 PM »
Radio failsafe means it has lost connection with the receiver. Whenever that happens the TCB automatically shuts down the engine for your safety, to prevent a runaway tank that you can't control.
It would appear that for whatever reason, drive motor movement is causing a radio glitch and the TCB turns off the engine in response. Once the motors stop the TCB regains the radio signal and resumes normal operation, though of course you have to start the engine again. This tells us you are not experiencing a voltage issue, and the TCB is not "rebooting", but simply turning off the engine as a safety precaution. The issue would appear to reside in your receiver or PWM-PPM converter, possibly they are picking up interference from the Sabertooth. Can you try to mount them farther away? And make sure you route your receiver antenna away from any power and motor wires.
Honestly I think it's time you ditch that janky PWM-PPM converter and invest in a quality module for your 9X, along with SBus or iBus receivers. Your models will thank you for it and you will save yourself all this headache!
667
« on: July 22, 2018, 09:44:57 PM »
Hi Jerry, maybe I'm imagining things but this sounds similar to an issue you had before possibly on a different model.
There clearly is an issue, but the only thing I can troubleshoot on my end is a problem that can be replicated, and this one I can not. The key to resolving it is to narrow down to the smallest possible list those things which could be the cause. You have the right idea putting the Sabertooth in another model, but if it works in the other model then that is inconclusive so keep experimenting until you have a consistent and replicable diagnosis.
The first thing I will say, is that the TCB's 5 volt supply is limited in current capacity. It can power the Benedini but I would not recommend using it to power the Benedini + external amplifier. Now a 2.5 watt amp isn't much and this may not have anything to do with your problem, but it's one thing to try eliminating and see if it helps.
It's possible you have a defective TCB, but if so, that TCB should continue to fail if moved to another model, so you should be able to determine that conclusively. If the TCB works in another model but not the KV2, there is something different about the setups between those models that you need to examine and pinpoint.
The odds of a Sabertooth being defective are very small, and it seems that you have ruled that out.
To answer your question about the serial protocol, yes it is only one-way. There is no means for the Sabertooth to tell the TCB to shut down. It is also normal for the blue serial light on the TCB to flash even when you aren't commanding anything and the model is stopped (because the communication is only one way, the TCB sends the "stop" command routinely whenever you are sitting still, in case the Sabertooth didn't get the message the first time, this is for safety). While driving the blue LED will only blink when a new command is sent, which if you are holding a steady speed may not be very often. In other words, what you describe about the blue LED sounds normal to me.
You describe this issue somewhat imprecisely. At some times you say the TCB "shuts down" by which I take it to mean it has literally lost power and rebooted involuntarily. In other cases you say the engine sound dies slowly and it's not clear to me whether you mean the TCB has shut down or else it incorrectly sent the engine stop command to the Benedini. There is no command from any source that can be sent to the TCB to cause it to "shut down," but obviously you can give it to the command to "turn off the engine." Try your experiments with the TCB hooked up to the computer in Snoop mode and figure out exactly which is happening. If your TCB is literally losing power and rebooting then you have a voltage drop issue or a short somewhere.
If I had to guess this does sound a lot like a low voltage issue but I take your word that your battery is good. Maybe check your wiring and ensure that all components share a common ground. Check your Sabertooth connections (the MOTOR SERIAL connector on the TCB should go GND to 0V, and TX-O to S1 on the Sabertooth), and make sure the dipswitch settings on your Sabertooth are correct.
Keep us posted.
668
« on: July 20, 2018, 04:48:24 PM »
That should be possible, I will add it to the To-Do list. Hopefully you will not be playing 12 sound files simultaneously, that would sound really awful. But I don't think it will be hard to add this feature so I will do it anyway. I'll let you know when it is completed.
669
« on: July 20, 2018, 04:45:17 PM »
Hi Deny, your 152 looks great. About the "Inline attachments" mod I agree it could be useful, however there are several mods already used on this forum and some of them conflict with that one. It might be possible to reconcile all the differences but that is a lot of work and every time the forum changes to a new version, or the mods are updated, they are likely to break again and it becomes a maintenance nightmare. Someday when Open Panzer is a multi-billion dollar global enterprise and we have a large full-time staff in the IT department I will consider it again! 
670
« on: July 17, 2018, 03:55:27 PM »
I see, yes you're right the hole spacing is not the same. Drilling is still a bad idea because while you can probably get a good solder joint on the bottom of the board, you will be unable to solder the top of the board (because the screw terminal will be in the way), and the drill will destroy the copper inside the holes that carry current from the bottom to the top of the board.
So whatever you decide, I would leave the holes as they are.
671
« on: July 17, 2018, 02:08:18 PM »
The thing is, I am also reducing the wiring to a minimum, and definitely I love those plugs with bolts. Is it possible to replace the battery connectors in the TCB and in the soundcard with those ones? I noticed the chinesse jst connectors have the legs closer than the bolt plugs... But I dont know, maybe a bit of drilling might fix it? Thanks in advance! I am not familiar with the "plugs with bolts," maybe something is being lost in translation. Do you mean screw terminals such as are used on the Motor A/B outputs? Whatever you do I would not drill the PCB, but if you have the equipment you can de-solder the existing connectors. The least amount of space could be used by soldering wires directly to the TCB, although this is obviously somewhat permanent.
672
« on: July 17, 2018, 02:05:57 PM »
Yes, let us know. Obviously we want a speed controller without brake. The documentation says nothing about the ability to disable it, but maybe that is what the switch is for. At 2kHz frequency these are likely to be bit noisy, but they're definitely cheap!
673
« on: July 09, 2018, 10:34:38 PM »
Wow, lots of stuff there. Not sure I followed all of it, but a few random comments: the 7805 is a voltage regulator, it takes an input voltage and spits out 5 volts. It usually requires a minimum of 7 volts to work, if you feed it 5 volts that won't be enough for it to turn on (or turn on fully). Presumably the fan is a 5 volt unit and they are using the 7805 to step down the higher voltage that would normally be taken from the motors in the original design. The diodes of course are to convert the forward/reverse movements of the two motors to a constant positive voltage for the smoker, that is the same system that Heng Long uses. But you don't need any of that diode stuff since you aren't driving this from the motors.
One thing you could have done is attach the heating coil to the smoker output, and the fan to the Aux output. The smoker output is full battery voltage, which you'd want for the heating element. The Aux output is 5 volts, which would match the fan. The heating element would be controlled automatically by the smoker function (or if you always wanted it full hot you could just assign the same trigger as you use to turn on/off the engine to the "Smoker - Manual On/Off" functions). For the fan you would then assign the "Engine Speed" trigger to the "Aux Output - Set Level" function, so the fan speed would automatically match the engine speed. No transistors or external circuitry required, and no extra transmitter switch either, the effect would be automatic.
But there are probably a dozen ways to skin the cat, and what you have is fine too.
674
« on: July 08, 2018, 04:37:37 PM »
Ok, let me know if you have any problems with the Taigen sound card in the future. I'm sure it's not an issue with LiPo power since the TCB provides the Taigen with 5 volts regardless of what voltage you plug into the TCB. If Radio Setup can read all 8 channels then you can definitely use all 8 channels for functions. But note that analog channels, which I'm assuming is how you've defined your Channel 7 pot, can only control analog functions; and digital (switch) channels can only control discrete functions. If you are unsure whether a function is analog or digital, check out the Function List and note that each function has a (D) or an (A) next to its name. For example if you select the function "Engine - Turn On" then no, you will not see the Channel 7 pot in the trigger source list, because that function requires a switch and you have defined channel 7 as a pot. If on the other hand you selected the function "Set Deceleration Level" then you will see your Channel 7 pot in the trigger source list, because that function requires a variable input. Note that you don't have to define a pot as a pot in OP Config. It could be a pot on your transmitter but you are free to tell OP Config that is a switch, and vice-versa. By doing so you could actually turn the engine on or off with a physical pot to use our example above, though that doesn't make a lot of sense. There are some unusual situations where this kind of thing can be advantageous for advanced users, but most of the time it's not needed and I'm not recommending it to you now. In your case I think the issue you encountered is that you didn't see that aux channel in the trigger list and assumed it wasn't working, but actually it was just hidden because it didn't make sense for the function you were assigning triggers to, and you will find that it automatically re-appears if you select an analog function.
675
« on: July 08, 2018, 04:23:51 PM »
Good news, sounds like you've gotten it all straightened out. It seems to me the fact that one ESC was in F-R mode and the other in F-B-R explains entirely the issue you had with the vehicle not driving straight forward and back. For reference, it is better to put them both in F-R mode, otherwise known as crawler mode. Let the TCB handle the braking, which it can do much better than the speed controllers because there are two of them and they don't know what the other is thinking. If you still prefer double-tap reverse you can accomplish that with the TCB as well by setting a "Change Direction Delay" on the Motors tab of OP Config.
The message about not loading all the settings (319 instead of 320 for example) is completely normal. One of the reasons for a firmware update is to add new variables that didn't exist before. Obviously if you import an OPZ file that was saved prior to the update, that OPZ file isn't going to know anything about the new variable that was just added. OP Config will still import all the existing variables from the OPZ file and any that are missing (because they are new) will just be set to default values.
As for whatever other issues you had, since they are gone now there is no point in worrying about them unless they return. You tried a whole bunch of different things so it's kind of hard to identify what was related to what, if it's working then it's working and whatever the issue was has been resolved.
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