With the wedding done (and the ring done), Russ and I can put more attention on building our drones. The weather may stop us from flying for a bit, but building is a lot of fun! (and occasionally frustrating)
My PDB came in, which was conveniently timed for when I had more time. And it fit, unlike the last one. Here’s a photo of the correct PDB, and coincidentally the incorrect one is that white board below it.
This is also a photo of the Magic Blue Smoke not being inside anymore. If you look carefully at the board, there are 2 black chips in the middle of it. The left chip has a hole in it. Why does it have a hole in it Craig? If you look at the right of the board, at the top is a section labelled “5V” and below that still on the edge is a section labelled “12V”. That “12V” is not for 12V of input. It is for 12V of output. Output. It turns out that if you put 12V into the output, that chip on the left sparks, and the Magic Blue Smoke escapes through a hole that’s just been created. No bueno.
There’s still lots to do, so while it’s silly that I have to order yet another board, it’s fine. The board will arrive in a couple weeks, and in the meantime I’ve soldering all of my parts to the wrong board (the white one), because it still works as a PDB, it’s just the wrong size. Russ, who has a working and correctly sized PDB, has screwed all of his parts onto his copter frame and has something that resembles a copter.
However, functionality wise they’re in the same place. We plugged the receiver in, plugged the battery in, bound the transmitter to the receiver and…nothing. We thought the little motors would spin up.
We assumed that something needed configuring in the flight controller (FC), so we plugged that in and started poking around. No luck. And in the meantime, Russ snapped the USB port off his FC, so now we needed to figure out how to use the bluetooth module with it. We have bluetooth modules, but I’d been waiting to figure them out. No longer…
We had some pizza and mucked about until it was time to put it all done.
I’m surprised that I’m not frustrated by my PDB exploding. I guess I’m just taking it in stride that electronics take time and patience, but it’s very unlike me. 😛 I remember building a computer with my Dad in the early 1990s for the first time, and the weeks of trying new things and playing until it finally turned on without beeping endlessly at us. This is no different, except that now we have the internet (we had internet then, but it wasn’t nearly as populated!).
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