Be careful with orange receiver

[Ricci]

Hi mates,
I have more tha 19 orange DSMX receiver in use wirh my Spektrum TX and han no issues until now.
Some weeks ago i lost my mini corsair after a fast roll. It stalled and i was not able to rescue.
Well i thought it was a pilot error, but it eas not!
It was a receiver failure.
I want to use the receiver of the corsair in my twin sparrow snd during the settings i found a strange behavior.
After. Inding all was fine. Solid led and all servos works. During the RX settings which takes some time, the Led starts blinking some times. A sign that the connection to tx is lost. Now i was curious and installed the receiver outside to observe.
I move all sticks continuously observing the rx. Every time the rx starts blinking the controlls starts stops a few seconds. The frequency of solid light and blinking was not constant. Finaly after several minutes a stranger behavior. It switch es from solid led to complete cutt off power! I tried the second spare receiver i had never used before which i bought together wirh the faulty one. Same behavior! So 2 of 10 receiver are faulty! The problem is you will notice it some minutes after start using!
So be careful. I made a video of the last described behavior. Don't care about the short distance to the TX i tested also with 5 meter distance with same behavior.

 

[bazsound]

orange implentation of DSMX from what i can find is not exactly the same as spectrums.

Coming from Devation (walkera devo radios) there was a bug that caused errors but only under very rare cricuimstances based on transmitter ID and binding or something like that. Most people were ok but some came up against radio errors that could cause crashes. this was fixed in later firmware releases.

i had a dsm2 receiver that momenteraily lost signal and caused a crash because the reconnection time is large.

i dont trust orange receivers, not even in parkfliers ( the failsafe happened wellw tihin park flier range)

I much prefer lemon RX, had great results with there lemonrx satalites, used them on my 450 heli, which gets 40+paces on the range test exactly the same as my 600 nitro which has genuine spektrum dsmx sats.

 

[ViperTech]

I don't know what ESC you are using but it could be a voltage drop and/or amperage drop on the Rx. If the ESC for some reason is not providing sufficient voltage AND amperage the ESC can brown out or completely reset. Try disconnecting 1 of the servos and retest. if you have a different ESC try it or if you have a Rx battery try with that connected. 1 out of 10 bad could happen 2? highly unlikely.

 

[Ricci]

I don't know what ESC you are using but it could be a voltage drop and/or amperage drop on the Rx. If the ESC for some reason is not providing sufficient voltage AND amperage the ESC can brown out or completely reset. Try disconnecting 1 of the servos and retest. if you have a different ESC try it or if you have a Rx battery try with that connected. 1 out of 10 bad could happen 2? highly unlikely.

Hi,
Tried different ESCs, same bahaviour in both receivers. Then i tried with external powesuply with out ESCs, only servos,
Same behavior. In the video i use a external power supply, the cable coming over the wings to receiver

 

[Ricci]

I rebound both receiver, same behavior. They work fine for about 1 minute and then starts loosing connection.
This is the test setup. Voltage is 4.6 Volt.

 

[Bricks]

I see that a few of the servo plugs are not plugged in all the way and you are using the bind port for power did you try another in port for power it should not make a difference ...but. It is acting like the battery pack is not holding enough voltage for the demand are you sure the battery pack is up to snuff? Just out of curiosity did you try running 6 volts?

 

[Ricci]

Hi,
The servo conections are fine. The bind plug is exactly for the power supply, but on other inputs same behaviour. The 4.6 Volts are measured under load.
The specs goes from 3.7 volts, so should be enough.

 

[JimCR120]

Troubleshooting

I don't know what ESC you are using but it could be a voltage drop and/or amperage drop on the Rx. If the ESC for some reason is not providing sufficient voltage AND amperage the ESC can brown out or completely reset. Try disconnecting 1 of the servos and retest. if you have a different ESC try it or if you have a Rx battery try with that connected. 1 out of 10 bad could happen 2? highly unlikely.

I was thinking the same thing as ViperTech here because it seemed to occur just when there was stick movement. I do have some invested interest in this as I bought 3 Orange Rx's a few weeks ago just to have on hand. Perhaps I can duplicate some tests here to see how common the suspected fault is.

Since it happens with stick movement, maybe more can be done ot isolate the gripe.
1. Have you tried different servo's or a different number of servo's?
2. Is there something else you can control instead of a servo like a motor or an LED?
3. Can the gripe be attributed to a particular rx channel?
4. Is there anything else you can do that seems to either provoke this or prevent it?

I do appreciate you bringing this to light. I have not previously had any problems with Orange Rx and if this is as you say many including Orange Rx will be interested.

 

[Ricci]

Hi Jim i had until now also no issues with orange receiver, i will try tomorrow with different power supply . Today my mate and me continue with his drone and we used this Battery to setup one of his planes with a new FrSky receiver. The receiver does the same than the orsnge receiver! So i will try tomorrow again with new battery.

 

[Ricci]

Hi,
I have tested more an make a video.
2 bad rx and one good. I used new batteries and also a ESC.
I used several different servos and the Battery input as well as a normal input for power supply.
The Two RX are definitely bugged.
I have spoken a bit on the relevant parts of the video.

 

[Bricks]

Ricci thanks for doing this it seems you still have control but acts like it lost signal. I would contact Hobby King if they will not help you I would pull the case apart and check the solder joints on the antenna`s but not before seeing what HK will do. Are these the new Gen 2`s I could not read the label I do know the Gen 1`s had issues and that is why I quit using them. The Gen 2`s have been rock solid for the guy`s I fly with so I did pick up 3 10 channel Gen 2`s with telemetry when they were on sale for $13 and so far knock on wood they have been solid. I usually use Lemon receivers and never an issue with them I probably have 25 of the Lemon`s.

 

[Ricci]

Don't know which they are. Will compare. I bought the two bad ones last month.
I removed the case and all seems to be nice.

 

[Ricci]

Hi mates,
well i did it again and buy 3 new orange receiver and one Spektrum.
The orange Receivers works fine without the problems explained before. Now the original Spektrum Receiver shows the behaviour explained before. Crazy. So always check before flight all receivers. What sucks is that the Spektrum cost as much as 5 orange Receivers

 

[makattack]

That seems really unusual to have so many bad RX's... granted, you can recreate the issue on the same ones, which points to them being at fault, but having RX's from different manufacturers do the same. Odd indeed. If I were to try to isolate the problem, I would probably try to isolate whether it's a power issue or a RF issue. I think power testing should be fairly easy / straight-forward if you have a voltmeter -- just keep it powered up and monitor the power off the power rail for changes. Might indicate a bad solder connection or component that fails as it heats up.

It would be hard to test for RF issues unless you had more equipment like and oscilloscope but if you did, you could check the signal coming out of the PWM pins.

Just keeping the RX powered along with the TX (no servos) and seeing if the lights go in and out might also be useful.

 

[Ricci]

Its definetely a hardware issue of the receivers. I have 20 Orange receiver and 5 Spektrum. All work fine with the same powersuply and transmittter. One Spektrum Fails and 3 orange. To find out exactlz the problem you will definitely need an oscilloscope and more equipment. I checked visually and all solderings seem to be fine. I think that it must be a wrong soldering somewhere that loose contact when it heats up.

 

[JimCR120]

I'm not into spending those big bucks either. One good thing about Spektrum is the customer support. You should be able to swap out that receiver with the store or the company for a good one.

 

[Bricks]

After all this I am beginning to think you have an RF problem, I had a DX6 Gen 2 the RF deck went out Horizon fixed it for free great service but a pain to send in.

Is there someone that has another Spektrum transmitter to double check the RF deck bind that transmitter to your receivers and run your tests again.

 

[Ricci]

After all this I am beginning to think you have an RF problem, I had a DX6 Gen 2 the RF deck went out Horizon fixed it for free great service but a pain to send in.

Is there someone that has another Spektrum transmitter to double check the RF deck bind that transmitter to your receivers and run your tests again.

No I haven’t

 

[Bricks]

Dumb question in your video are you changing models for each receiver you tested?

 

[sprzout]

Odd...I've only had ONE issue where I lost signal using an Orange receiver, and it turns out it wasn't anything to do with the receiver - I didn't put enough heat shrink on my motor to ESC connectors, and so there was bare metal exposed. The wires were touching each other in flight and I lost signal from the short. Fortunately, it wasn't an expensive model (first of 3 MiG-3's that I've made), and the electronics were still good; it just shorted out and caused loss of signal. Learned my lesson on that one...