I let the magic smoke out on a nice new HS-5645MG! I was playing around with RoboRealm and suddenly my bot stopped working and then I noticed magic smoke coming from the foot. Somehow, RoboRealm was sending current to the foot channel #0 when I had it UNCECKED, however, in the variable list box it had the “servo_position†variable selected, but it was grayed out. I guess it might be a bug that if you select a channel to use a variable and then disable that channel, it does something weird like send to much current or something. I still need to investigate to make sure the SSC-32 is ok on channel 0 because I would hate to replace this servo and have it happen again.
I can’t be 100% sure It’s RoboRealm’s fault. When I first hooked up the bot, I had it turned on and then started RoboRealm. When the RR app started with the VBScript running and the SSC-32 module running, all servos on all banks were checked (enabled). My brats joints jumped to all kinds of positions and the ankle servo (Channel #0) I think crashed but it happened so fast that my reaction was to pull the plug so I am not sure if this was what caused the initial damage.
What I should have done was run RR and open the SSC-32 module and make all my changes first before powering on the brat.
After the channel #0 servo smoked, I looked at the settings on every servo bank trying to figure out how this happened and that is when I noticed the variable was set for channel #0 as well as #15 but channel #0 was supposed to be disabled. The .robo file that I was using was created a while back and I had used channel #0 for the pan test, but connecting the brat up, #0 was now the right ankle servo. I should have paid more attention to this.
The digital servos are always on and can’t be disabled (turned off) so I wonder if possibly that is where the problem lies.
Anyway, one must be careful when setting up RR, and I think for pan tilt applications, stick with standard servos so they can be fully disabled when needed.
Don’t let it scare ya Andrew. Just be careful!
