Smoked my Receiver with external BEC

[Mgswe]

As 3d rc mentioned, better not connecting bec to Rx at all, hook it up to servo with an y harness, from servo to Rx you only plug signal and ground.

This way you can give servo all the power it can take w/o having to worry about Rx!

 

[monkfiche]

FYI, i actually had a good post on the traxxas forum... one guy posted this diagram, its exactly what i did wrong... Hopefully someone will find this post in the future and NOT fry their receiver (i connected the BEC to the battery as per the "NEVER DO THIS" on the bottom left and i can confirm that "you will boost the ground voltage in a disastrous way"):

Just found your post - by searching for key words linked to what I just did. New BEC, looking forward to tight turns on the truggy and… Receiver smoke? Spark sound? poop.

Everything done correctly except forgot to remove the middle wire from the ESC-rx cable.

 

[ChemEng]

Just found your post - by searching for key words linked to what I just did. New BEC, looking forward to tight turns on the truggy and… Receiver smoke? Spark sound? poop.

Everything done correctly except forgot to remove the middle wire from the ESC-rx cable.

Dang man, it definitely hurts I feel for ya. But at least receivers aren’t too spendy, chock it up to a lesson learned.

 

[monkfiche]

Dang man, it definitely hurts I feel for ya. But at least receivers aren’t too spendy, chock it up to a lesson learned.

And it seems I also wired up the BEC to the wrong battery connector too - so double whammy. Dumbo tx and rx on their way! Did you fry anything else at the time, or just the receiver? Battery etc from being discharged badly? BEC from bad discharge?

 

[ChemEng]

It turned out I also fried the MMX8s, but couldn’t tell until I changed out the receiver.

That hurt way more than the receiver…

Everything else was fine though.

 

[monkfiche]

Ouch! I might be taking a break for a month or two if I have any more damage…


I also read something that said if using a Y-cable / rx bypass cable, the middle wire from the ESC can be left in. I bet the smoking gun for us wasn’t that, and instead was the battery wiring…

 

[monkfiche]

Just fyi in case you are ever in a similar situation - when I got my new receiver, I tested it, and the ESC (and UBEC) still works fine.

I think the difference here is the rx bypass cable I made (I just copied the wiring from the main result when you google that) meant that the centre wire to the receiver came from the ESC rather than from the regular bypass wiring.

Pesky soldering wires to the wrong battery connectors!! Still, all good fun.