Wire Nest

Post date: 23-May-2011 08:36:34

I spent the weekend soldering the Wire-Tree that will supply power to all the components to everything. As part of this I replaced the connectors on my battery with Deans Connectors.

I also created the cables for the I²C connections and soldered the cabling onto the ESC's for the other two motors. This means that for each motor ESC connection there are 7 wires of variable thickness running somewhere. Times by three, equals, 21 cables that all have to fit through 1 or both of the 10mm holes in the upper and/or bottom chassis plate and then somehow route past mounts and circuit boards etc. I think the main reason why most of these things are not built smaller is because of wire routing.

Anyway, enough with the rant. I guess I can't really be annoyed with my own design. but this might be a good time to reduce the chassis plate weight by cutting some sections out of it that are not required.

The next step is figuring out what the addresses of the other two ESC's are (still with no response from their support department or descent documentation).

Once I have all three motors spinning up nicely, I can start working on the flight software. To do that I need some way to control TriRot. The options at the moment are to buy an XBox350 Crossfire to use for the rest of the development phase or to just buy the Tx/RX kit that I will eventually fly with. With a TX/RX kit, I get one way communication but if I couple a pair of XBee modules into the equation I will be getting full duplex data between TriRot and the controls. The only downside (if you can count it as a downside) is that I would have to take a notebook with me to fly TriRot.

Any suggestions and/or comments welcome.