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SOZBOTS SOZDSC-M failsafing issues

Posted: Sun Mar 14, 2010 7:30 am
by joeychevron
Posting this here in case someone can help with this:

In one of my antweights (yes, Joey builds antweights, although that's a story for another time) I'm using a Sozbots board with a Futaba R114F rx on 40mhz that, to get straight to the point, doesn't seem to failsafe at all, basically going a bit insane if the transmitter is turned off. I can't find any mention of failsafing in the documentation for the controller, so I thought I'd check here and see if anyone could clarify if it's spposed to do it or not? I haven't really got the weight to add extra failsafes (besides, the person I bought it off second hand soldered the wires directly to the reciever pins, so it'd be an absolute bugger to fit any or use a different reciever)

If it's of any relevance it's driving Inertia Labs 50:1 motors with LiPos of various capacities but all 7.4v being used to test the setup.

SOZBOTS SOZDSC-M failsafing issues

Posted: Sun Mar 14, 2010 12:47 pm
by StarlessSoldier
The SOZDSC does not failsafe on its own. If it is working normally when the transmitter is turned on, then you don't actually have a problem. Now one thing you can do is go with a better radio system. I'm not familiar with 40mhz (british specific maybe?) but U.S. competitions require 75mhz for smaller bots and 2.4ghz for larger ones. Most good 75mhz radios have a failsafe in the reciever which kills the signal if the TX signal is lost. The market place at Robotcombat.com has a good 4 or 6 channel HiTec for relatively cheap.

I use a Scorpion ESC and was having problems with R7 going insane if I turned the TX off. Turns out when I turned off the TX on my cheap ass radio system, the RX just started spitting out random signals. Got the HiTec now and the bot goes totally still when I kill the TX.

SOZBOTS SOZDSC-M failsafing issues

Posted: Sun Mar 14, 2010 2:06 pm
by joeychevron
40mhz is our equivalent to 75mhz I think.

Thanks for the clarification, I am technically allowed to have no failsafe on the drive under AWS rules (weapons only, apparently) and with the aerial properly mounted the reception seems to be fairly good so I'll stick with it for now. I've not had a great deal of interference from this setup in other robots, one of them has a brushless spinner which seems to hardly affect it. (I do use Spektrum in my main antweight though and that owns)

SOZBOTS SOZDSC-M failsafing issues

Posted: Thu Jun 10, 2010 8:26 am
by joeychevron
Is it possible to turn off the mixing built into the Sozbots?

I've got the robot working under radio control at last (before it was in the habit of randomly wandering off to explore the arena on its own, so I ended up putting a Spektrum Rx in) and as I have mixing in the DX7 transmitter it's interfering with the onboard mixing so the controls aren't really intuitive (both forwards and left make it turn, for example, and the throttle appears to have gone backwards). I'd like to keep the mixing in the transmitter as it's set up to control my other ants well, and I'd imagine at least one of the jumpers on the board turns the mixing off - although the manual's less than helpful in that regard...