Tuesday, August 29, 2006

T-Rex - Install receiver/gyro and dressing up the wires

After I was done soldering my charger and batteries, I had time to add wire loom to the wires and plug things into the receiver, the receiver is mounted inside the frame. I also connected the gyro, but I need to figure out how to best manage the wires. The gyro attaches to an aftermarket mount the fits beneath the boom. If you mount the gyro above the boom like the manual states you run the risk of destroying your gyro in a crash as the flybar or blades can come in contact woth it. As you can see from the pictures there is a lot of extra wire on the gyro that I will have to loom and manage, some people shorten the servo lead but I am going to leave the extra wire on it in the event that I want to use it on anothe Heli in the future. I am eagerly awaiting my transmitter so that I can trim the servos and get the head set up and leveled.

T-Rex - Charger modifications

Ok some new developments, I got the parts I ordered in the mail, woohoo.



The DN Power charger I bought is a field charger, that’s fine but I may want to have the ability to charge in an outlet. Well being the geek that I am I have a smalex 13.8V 23A power supply that I used to use to power my peltier device when I was water-cooling and overclocking my PC. I posted the question to the HeliFreak forum "will this PSU work?" and sure enough someone is using that PSU to power their charger…Sweet! actually he is powering 4 chargers with it.
It was also suggested that I get rid of the banana clips on the field charger and use something else as they are dangerous. Well the PSU terminals take stripped wires, so I attached the stripped ends of a molex connector to the PSU. I then snipped off the banana clips and added a molex to the bare leads. Now I can make any kind of cable work with my battery charger, by adding a molex connector. At some point I may change to a more robust connector like the powerpoles suggested by z11355 on the freak forum. http://www.powerwerx.com/category.asp?CtgID=1001



I also soldered my Deans connectors on my Lipo batteries while I had the iron hot.