So I have had the saber tooth 2X5 for a while now and have been really happy with it. it has preformed excellent and I haven’t had a problem until now, as i was hooking up my now revised robot the wire running to the battery for the Sabertooth accidentally must have momentarily touched the motor output terminal on one side. Now i only have half a working Sabertooth Is there anything i can do to fix this? They are expensive and in a students budget it is hard to find money to replace such parts. Do they not have any “accident protection” stuff built into the device? they seem even more fragile then i thought and i have read (and followed) all of the safety precautions so it suchs that that one wire messed up or at the very least delayed my project.
Hi,
Anyone have a similar problem? When I apply power to the Sabertooth 2x5 rc One channel has about 1vdc and the other doesn’t so when motors are connected, one motor spins very slowly. This occurred also after programming the Atom Pro with the various test programs in the tracked vehicle tutorials. Should I just try compensating for the discrepancy in the code? Is that even possible or is this a hardware issue with Sabertooth that I need to address? Otherwise, I’m loving the BBII and Basic Atom Pro!
I think it is not unusual that if you are sending a servo pulse of 1500 that like servos, some of motors connected to a sabertooth may be sligthly off. That is why for example the Rover with Arm centering program includes cycling through the the left and right wheels, so you can find the proper zero point for each motor.
The clock on the Sabertooth is not as accurate as the one used on the Atom chips. Therefore the Sabertooth can be off a little when provided with an accurate 1500uS pulse train. However this normally effects both sides equally. Try fine tuning the pulses to get the motor to stop and see how the bot works.
Please forgive my ignorance but where would I tweak theses pulses? In the IDE settings or in the program for the Atom? (ie: if I’m using the ps2 code for J5/ tracked vehicle would this be the section?)
In the code. You see those 1500s in the code. One or both of them may need to be tweeked. You can do it by trial and error. (Change 1 to 1495), did it change for the good or the bad, if bad try 1505. If it helped but still not stopped. Increase more in that direction…
Or if you look at some of the Rover tutorials, such as the Rover and Arm with PS2 tutorial lynxmotion.com/images/html/build148.htm, you will see reference to a program (at the top) that talks about Arm offset finder. This also includes finding the reference offsets for the two channels used to control the sabertooth. You can use this program and keep clicking until you get to the right channels and then find the proper adjustments.
Is there anything i can do to fix this? They are expensive and in a students budget it is hard to find money to replace such parts. Do they not have any “accident protection” stuff built into the device? they seem even more fragile then i thought and i have read (and followed) all of the safety precautions so it suchs that that one wire messed up or at the very least delayed my project.
Just contact DE and they will happily replace the controller.