Dr Jim's Limitless Build

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drjim

Old And In The Way!
Premium Member
Build Thread Contributor
Messages
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Location
Fort Collins, CO
Arrma RC's
  1. Limitless
  2. Senton 6s
Huh.....Gonna Need A Bigger Bench!

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Still waiting for parts to come in, but I thought I'd plop her down on the bench and take a look-see at the internals.

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I have the Futaba receiver that came with the radio, and I might mount that tonight. I also have one of the red 25Kg "Digital Servos" we all like so much, so I'll fumble around with that tonight, too.

Man.....this sucker is HUGE compared to my other cars. I'll have to clean off the left end of the bench, and find someplace else to set up my Commodore 128! :droid:
 
Yeah.....I have no idea at this time where I'm going to run it. I can do some mild testing in the neighborhood here, and there's a high-school with several huge parking lots about a mile away, but to really wind one of these out and then slow it back down takes several hundred feet, at least.

I agree about being a shelf queen, though. For me, the building is as much fun as the driving.
 
Servo mounted and receiver being fitted up.

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Next up, this stuff.

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All the electronics mounted in.

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And the motor pinion installed, motor installed and mesh set, and connections made to ESC. I like these bullet connectors!

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Tomorrow I'll charge my 2S batteries up, install them, and do the initial power-up and settings. Then I'll connect the servo.

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And if all goes well, run it in the street a bit.......
 
D'OH! The batteries I was going to use have EC3 connectors, and the BLX motor/ESC has EC5. :banghead:

Sooooooo.....I used some clip leads off a 2S pack just to power it up and check the servo center position. I'd already bound the radio to this receiver, so that came right up. I did a "Factory Rest" to the speed controller, and then went in and set it for "Max" (50%?!?) braking effort.

My new 3S batteries should be here Thursday, so after I charge them and recheck everything on the car, I'll take a couple of easy passes up and down the street.
 
OK, she's ALIIIIIVE!!!

Got my 3S batteries, charged them, and put them in the car and powered it uip. Reset the ESC to "Factory", and went through the neutral point/max throttle/max brake setting, and cranked up the barking force to 50%, as that's all it does.

Geez Louise, this thing wants to jump off the test stand when you nail the throttle!

Only one battery shown.....

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Steering servo zeroed and connected.....

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It might rain tomorrow, but if it doesn't, I'll drive it up and down the street to see how it goes, steers, and brakes.
 
WELL.....won't be doing any testing tomorrow because it looks like the ESC and motor I bought from the breaker on eBay are toast. Well, they "kinda sorta" work, but I can't get it to program for things it's supposed to do.

The ESC and motor are a BLX185 from a Talion/Typhon per the breaker.

It has NO reverse, and the motor direction is backwards. I've spent several hours trying to program it per the Arrma instructions with no joy, and the two different Hobbywing ESC program cards I have either can't communicate with the controller, or won't allow me to change the settings in the ESC. I'm plugging the program cards into the fan port. Perhaps I should try plugging them into the ESC directly.

I was able to get the brake force up from 37.5% to 50%, but all I have is Forward/Brake. I can't get it to go forward/brake/reverse.

It will not allow me into menu 5, which changes motor direction. Switching the motor direction in the transmitter just reverses how the trigger responds, not the motor direction.

Calling it a night. Maybe I'll have some luck screwing around with it tomorrow after I go through some of the threads discussing this.

Other wise I'm poop-canning the ESC and installing the MM2 I bought, but that's gonna take some major rewiring. The reason I bought the BLX185 was that it should have been plug-and-play.

Oh, well....screwed again.....
 
RED FACE TIME :banghead:

I just realized all I have to do to reverse the motor is swap two of the leads from the ESC.

D'OH!

I'm too used to sensored motors like in my VTA car where that's a no-no.....
 
FIRST RUN!

Annnnd....I forgot to hit "Record" on the GPS speedometer.

But Lordy, is this thing stupid fast! It really starts to accelerate after the first 10 feet, kinda like when an engine gets "on the cam", and pulls like crazy.

The breaking force appears to be at 50%, but still, this thing takes a lot of room to slow down. I can't hold full throttle for more than a couple of seconds before I have to shut down.

Batteries and motor are cooling down, and I'll hit the "Record" button when we go back out.
 
Usually the record is only if you want to export the data later. It will still show you peak speed even if not recording.
 
OK, wasn't sure of that. Guess I didn't push the buttons right to try and read it out the first time.

We only have about 200' of road in front of the house, and probably 175' of it is usable for this. It seems like it takes about 30 or 40 feet to really get moving, and then it starts covering ground so fast I have to back off.

So far, the fastest speed we got up to was 56MPH.

Saturday we're going to the big parking lot that has a 500' long stretch we can use. I'm taking my long measuring tape, and some little orange traffic cones, and we're going to mark out 100' segments, and work up to the max speed I can safely get. The good thing about this lot is the end of the lot I'll be driving towards has a couple pf hundred feet of grassy area, so if the brakes fail, at least I'll have something kinda soft for a run off area.
 
OK, wasn't sure of that. Guess I didn't push the buttons right to try and read it out the first time.

We only have about 200' of road in front of the house, and probably 175' of it is usable for this. It seems like it takes about 30 or 40 feet to really get moving, and then it starts covering ground so fast I have to back off.

So far, the fastest speed we got up to was 56MPH.

Saturday we're going to the big parking lot that has a 500' long stretch we can use. I'm taking my long measuring tape, and some little orange traffic cones, and we're going to mark out 100' segments, and work up to the max speed I can safely get. The good thing about this lot is the end of the lot I'll be driving towards has a couple pf hundred feet of grassy area, so if the brakes fail, at least I'll have something kinda soft for a run off area.
Yep I used a lot like that at a local park but it’s just too busy there for me to safely get up to speed. I now use a rural road that I can see for a mile each way. Also only a few driveways.
 
This lot has little-to-no traffic this time of year during the week. It's across from a church, and we didn't see a single "No Trespassing" sign.

The gigantic parking lot where the CSU stadium used to be would have been prefect (1000 feet!), but when they tore the stadium down they nuked the parking lot and access roads.

There's an old airstrip the CNG uses once in a while, so we'll go check for signage there as well.
 
This lot has little-to-no traffic this time of year during the week. It's across from a church, and we didn't see a single "No Trespassing" sign.

The gigantic parking lot where the CSU stadium used to be would have been prefect (1000 feet!), but when they tore the stadium down they nuked the parking lot and access roads.

There's an old airstrip the CNG uses once in a while, so we'll go check for signage there as well.
Great part about living in the Midwest is everything is flat. ????
 
Same as Florida ?
Except for the fire ant mounds ? I hit one on a go cart when I was a kid and got covered in ants (some may have been uncles, didn’t check) ???
 
Except for the fire ant mounds ? I hit one on a go cart when I was a kid and got covered in ants (some may have been uncles, didn’t check) ???
That’s too funny. ?
 
Great part about living in the Midwest is everything is flat. ????


Once you get about 3 miles East of here, it's pretty flat, and all downhill to Chicago!

We're at 5100' ASL here, and since the air is about 12% less dense than sea level, I wonder how much effect it will have on the speed.

My son and I just took a drive through the parking lot I've been eyeing, and it's nice and flat, and about as smooth as the blacktop in front of the house.

We have a nice clear run of 300', with an additional 190' of runoff area. We'll take my tape measure and little traffic cones and set up some marker points so I don't run out of room!
 
Well, Google Maps does not have current photos of the parking lot. The run off area we were planning on using has posts blocking it off from the rest of the lot.

So we got the tape out, and set up cones at 50', 100', 150', and 200'. The GPS receiver flew off the first run, again!, so I cable tied it to the red support strut.

One run said we went 9279.54 MPH, obviously corrupted data. No JATO packs here, and no SpaceX decals on the car.....

Best run we recorded was 62something MPH. I expected better, but we don't have as much room as I thought, and the surface is dirty, resulting in wheelspin any time I gave it full throttle.

I'll run it there a few more times, but now that I have the car running and I can (pretty much) control it, I need a bigger area.

 
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Went and scouted one of the locations I have in mind, the local Community College. Since it was during the week, and school is in session, the lot had quite a few cars in it. I didn't see any forbidding signs, so I'll cruise back through there on a weekend to check it out closer.

And I rounded up everything I need to fabricate the power leads for the Mamba Monster ESC I bought a while back. I really don't like the brakes on the BLX ESC in there now. Max braking is 50%, and that just don't cut it. I'm not comfortable with it, and it borders on "unsafe" to me to not have good brakes on a 10 pound, 100MPH cruise missile!
 
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