Dagu Trex Controller Issue [SOLVED]

deltabravo · July 4, 2014, 3:35am

Hi!

I create a new forum to talk about a trex controller issue I encountered after one hour of use of this controller. I mounted the dagu trex controller on the dagu wild thumper chassis with the 30+6mm given spacers . For testing purposes, I connected the trex controller in LV and no external switch mode (2 jumpers on) with Zippy LIPO 2S batteries and a D8RII FrSky receiver. The batteries are in series on the batteries input. The channel 1 and 2 of the receiver (which I programmed to be throttle and direction on the 9XR TX) are connected on the TX/RX pins of the controller.

I powered the TX and then the trex controller... 3 bips (what means that the RC mode described in the arduino sketch had been recognized)... And let's go! The wild thumper worked great... left, right, forward, rear... oops a restart, 3 bips and let's go again. A restart again... OK, that was coming from the accelerometer code : to be able to drive the wild thumper in real off-road condition, I modified the acceleromater code... No more restart, all fine...; Good! Very good... for one hour... After that : BIG FAIL! When I tried to connect the battery to power the trex controller, no boot, no bips, no light... Trex controller seemed to be dead. The battery delivered the right voltage to the trex but the output voltage at V+/Gnd, Srv/Gnd and 5V/Gnd (blue connectors) are jamming at 0.0V...

All that seems to indicate that there's a complete trex failure... But there was no short, no fumes (as explained in other forums), nothing particular happened... Maybe a component failure. I think about a switch mode regulator failure... And as I have no other idea, I post here to have your point of view on the issue and to know if it's possible to repair or only to send it back and go on another controller.

Some pictures attached or to be attached..

Thanks for your time.

deltabravo · July 5, 2014, 8:24am

Tried it…

… I tried to remove the switch bypass jumper and I connected a wire instead of the external switch (tell me if I’m wrong for the test because I did not have an available switch)… No change.

I removed the controller board from the wild thumper and put back the switch bypass jumper to make some voltage measures for you to try to debug that issue if you have some time (the measures pictures are in the initial message). Tell me if these measures are usefull or if you need others. Each measure gave me between 7.9 and 8.3V so indeed the battery voltage.

Thanks for your help,

Delta.

workerchimp · February 20, 2018, 2:24pm

TREX Controller - no fail safe in RC mode

I have the TREX controller set up for RC mode using the original sketch and a Quantum i8 RC controller. No other modifications to the program and the receiver is plugged in to the correct pins on the board. The robot moves fine but the problem is that whenever the power to the transmitter is turned off, the motors turn back on (forward) after a brief pause. If I turn the transmitter back on, the motors go back to a stanby state until the joysticks are moved again. I looked through the sketch and experimented with the RCdeadband time( in line 43 of the main TREX_controller tab) to no avail. I read in the notes in lines 82 and 83( that mentioned a weak pullup resistor on the inputs to prevent false triggering). Does this mean I may have to install resistors between the receiver line outs and the TREX? Thanks!