I’ve put together the A4WD1 kit and hooked up the Hi-Tec radio controller to the Sabertooth per the instructions. I have NOT removed the center wire yet since I dont know what I will hook on it yet. Right now its the basic remote control rover.
When running it however, there are three common issues that I run into with the motors:
The motors occasionally jump/stutter.
When turning, sometimes the front and rear wheels will go opposite each other. (i.e. front wheel on one side going in reverse, rear wheel same side going forward instead of both on the same side moving in unison.)
Uneven balance of signal to the rover. Sometimes it ends up that full forward on the stick ends up with 0 movement, and neutral on the stick is 1/2 back speed, and all back is full speed back. Power cycling the Hi-Tec seems to generally resolve this until the next time its turned on and may have a random axis be skewed.
The 12V battery is fully charged and as far as I can see, there arent any loose connections to the sabertooth terminals. The transmitter battery is also freshly charged.
I’ve seen this, it’s the radio. I think the only way to eliminate it is to have the transmitter antenna up full and the receiving antenna completely upright, (not rolled up or laying in a bundle).
If you wired the motors as in our assembly guide this would be impossible.
This can be caused by the Sabertooth if it’s set up to autocalibrate, and the Sabertooth browns out. It would cause the Sabertooth to recalibrate to where ever the stick as when the brownout happened.
To eliminate this on my rover, I coiled the antenna around a wooden sqewer (sorry if thats mispelled). The twisted wire will help eliminate any inteferance and extending the wire fully along the wooden scewer (or dowel) is much better than leaving the wired coiled up.
Also, if you are to do this, make sure the dowel or sqewer is a wooden or plastic rod. Metal will not work good and may make it worse. Im not sure if that is entirely correct however it was stated by someone hear on the forums so don’t quote me on that.
That seems to have fixed it. (and #2 which was just incorrect diagnosis.)
This still happens. Even toggling switch 5 on the sabertooth doesnt seem to make a difference.
On a related note, what sort of run times should I expect from the 12V 1600mA battery on the rover? I get about 2-3 minutes of driving it around on my short carpet floor before its spent. I was expecting a bit more than that. Could I have some faulty wiring causing it to drain the battery to fast?
