OK, here we go. I am building a new flat 8 that will be my test copter for test projects. Among the projects I plan on testing include the emergency landing and fail safe crtieria, more on that later. Right now I have a brand new MK dual Quadro 2XL board with the redundant features that I will be testing out. Here's some pictures of the project so far. Here's the board and as you can see they are starting to use dual lipo cables now so you don't have to create a splitter cable. When I get a new board I double check to see how well the heat sinks are glued on. I have had a few that were glued really solid but some have come off with a simple tug using needle nose pliers. This board came with a set that was not glued too solid so I just removed them all. I use Castle 4mm bullets on all my MK builds. They are super solid and have never had one come loose or had a wire come off mid flight. I mask the entire area around the pads so that I can't get any solder or flux splash. I heat shrink the lipo cables so that I don't create any RF interference. Here's the master FCB and the slave FCB. The slave is on the right and you can see the custom UCART connector. Here's both boards on the hub. Close up of both boards. Here's the entire stack.
Should I have heatsinks on this board? I have the same one from QC, but no heatsinks, and only 1 set of cables for LIPO's. I added on a second set myself, but not heatsinks. It's my first MK setup, so I didn't realize that they may be missing.
Mike When you are referring to heat sinks are you talking about the heat sinks that are glued on top of the mosfets or are you talking about the heat sink fins in between the boards? The heat sink fins between the boards is the cool version. I don't believe the non cool versions came with the heat sinks that go on the mosfets either. I don't believe Quadrocopter is selling the redundancy boards yet. Are you sure its a redundant board? You can tell if its a redundant board if you have version 3.5. Most boards, including some redundancy boards have only one pair of lipo cables. I was just able to score one board that had 2 sets.
Hooked up DC voltage, everything looked good. Hooked up a lipo, smoke test passed Updated both flight control firmware's to the redundant versions and everything looks good. I will be wiring up the motors tomorrow.
Hmm, I have this board from QC http://www.quadrocopter.com/Double-Quadro-V3--Cool-v35_p_1238.html which definitely has the heatsinks on the mosfets in the photo. I'll have to investigate with them.
No reason, just haven't gotten around to it. I have a shield on my main rig. I have tested it with and without and don't notice any difference to be honest.
Hi Mike QC might have found the same issues I did with the heat sinks not sure though. I can tell you that the heat sinks that go on the mosfets make absolutely no difference. The main key is to have the cool version where the cooling plate/fins are between the boards. BTW: That is not a redundant board you have.
New frame Andy, just haven't had a chance to put the motors on yet. Going to use my old U5 motors to start out with. I might upgrade my Wookong rig with bigger motors and move the KDE 4012's over to this rig after I get some test time on both of these rigs.
I should point out that in the picture below, the slave FCB is on the bottom. The molex connector that goes to the slave FCB is not using the 3 middle wires, only using the end wires for power. They suggest cutting the 3 wires. Not sure if you can make it out in the picture below but the 3 middle wires are cut. Lots of stuff to super glue here! Going to wait until I verify it all works before I do that. I can't test anything until I get the motors wired up. When the motors are wired up and running I will see a R pop up in the main menu of MK tools as well as in the telemetry on the radio. That verifies the system is ready to go. I then will assign a switch to one of the user inputs in MK tools which simulates a I2C fault and switches to the back up FCB.
A couple people asked me how to determine if their board is redundant or not so I thought I would share that info. In the picture below you will see below in small print where it says Quadro-BL-CTRL and then a number. That number has to be 3.5 or it doesn't have the redundant features. Updating the firmware will not make it a redundant board because the board has to have certain components on it to make the features work.
Update: Wired up the motors, and did some tests with the copter on the ground and the props off. The redundancy works! I see the R on the radio and in MK tools when the motors turn on. I set a switch to user parameter 7 and it switches between the flight control boards. There is a very small change in motor speed and then everything stabilizes. I also started the motors and unplugged the Molex connector to the master flight control board and it switched immediately to the slave FCB. Hopefully I will be able to do some flights this weekend. I still have to set the CG of the copter, align the motors, calibrate the ACC with the flight control board level etc.
Well success sorta. New copter flies great. It's nice and stable. I didn't have a chance to test the redundant features though because one of my U5 motors went bad and stopped spinning about 2 minutes when I started testing yaw. Got her down and the motor was all hot and started to have a good burnt smell to it. Good news is that everything is working, no breakage, and the BL's are all good. The copter responded very well when the motor started failing. You can see the motor not spinning very clearly in the video.