Flight Controller with presoldered connectors?

[jack10525]

I built a versacopter several months ago. I at first tried to use a basic naze32 fc that required the pins to be soldered on. failed miserable and ruined the board. I was about to give up on my quad until I found the thin naze32 fc that comes with presoldered connectors. This worked very well until I crashed the quad one too many times and I guess killed the fc. Now I can't find a replacement. Anybody know where I can find one or something similar?

 

[CrashRecovery]

Some places offer the pre installed pins as an option. Do you remember where you bought your last one? I would try there first. Then maybe altitudehobbies, I think is one site. Its been a while since I have ordered any parts. Where do you live? Try looking in the facebook fan page and see if anyone is close to you that can help you solder them on if you can't find a set.

 

[PsyBorg]

I would highly suggest at this point you get away from any of the *Flight based controllers all together. Maybe look into the Sepukku boards Litterbug is testing and switch to Dronin or save money and go to KISS. Something wrong is going on with the *flights stuff recently and they are becoming more and more a problem.

 

[jack10525]

psyborg are saying clear flight? Are cf based boards bad? I looked at the boards you suggest but they still require soldering.

Crash
I tried to locate the place I bought the thin naze from but can't.

 

[PsyBorg]

Well sadly my friend you will be soldering on every build you do in some way or other. It is not hard at all with a little practice. The reason I recommend soldering all of your connections is that there is less chance of failures from things like loose connectors and such.

*flight boards are not bad as long as you are using F3 and F4 based ones. The F1's are too slow and support will be going away. I say get away from them altogether as lately every time I plug a *flight board in it screws up all my usb drivers. That's a nightmare to get looped into every time you plug a board in.

For instance I got a Gremlin kit and its has a femto controller running beta flight. It screwed up my drivers AGAIN the first time I plugged it in. Now after getting all my drivers straightened out it will not go into a mode where I can flash it to current firmware. They in my opinion have gotten to the point of being more trouble then good that I can get out of them. Most people want to flash software which should take 5 minutes tops and go fly.. I have spent over 30 hours on one controller and still am no further with it then when it came out of the box.

 

[William A]

MRM will install the pins if you wish.

http://www.multirotormania.com/12-flight-controllers

 

[Rotorblade]

I know of these horrible usb issues you guys speak of. However I have recently gotten this situation together now with the help of the Impulse RC USB driver fix utility. The Femto so far works as great as my SP F3 Racing boards and works great with the BLHeli Configurator. If you haven't tried the impulse RC USB driver fix then you haven't tried everything.

This just saved my hide: http://www.dronetrest.com/t/fix-any...flashing-betaflight-cleanflight-firmware/3603

 

[jack10525]

Thank you William A. I just ordered an acro board with presoldered pins.

 

[makattack]

Heh, I think all the driver issues people are referring to might be related to the stm32 based micro controllers and their uart implementation. I was just at a stm32 all day seminar (where I got to keep a l4 based discovery board) and loads of people were having driver issues with Windows 10 including a seasoned stm32 developer who had some weird driver auto install when he connected to the otg port for one of the exercises. My MacBook running Windows 10 in a vm didn't exhibit the same behavior. we chalked it up to strange windows karma.

Here is the seminar http://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/about/events/events.html/stm32l4-iot-seminars.html there might be one near you of you have any interest in development with these things and it's free.

What was notable for me was they asked everyone to bring windows laptops and supplied an install that took care of all the drivers in advance and supplied their own usb cables to prevent issues like these, but they occurred anyway. Also notable to me was that I didn't have to install any driver on my osx/macos native side of the computer and it recognized the device as soon as I plugged it in and was able to use a tty tool (I used screen) to connect directly and interact with the cli on the stlink side of the board.

 

[jack10525]

ok so the FC arrived. It has 4 sets of presoldered pins that I believe the motors connect to. It also comes with several different wire bundles with a "pc looking" connector that plugs into the board. Not sure how to connect the motors or receiver. Anybody know of a guide for setting up this board?

 

[PsyBorg]

If you google the specific flight controller you bought there should be a PDF manual for it that will have a diagram for connections and what they all do. If you can't find one tell us what the board is and where you got it and we can pull it up for you.

 

[Siv]

The EagleTree Vector and Micro Vector are plug and play flight controllers and OSDs. You pay for the convenience though...

 

[jack10525]

If you google the specific flight controller you bought there should be a PDF manual for it that will have a diagram for connections and what they all do. If you can't find one tell us what the board is and where you got it and we can pull it up for you.

I tried searching online for the setup video for my specific fc but couldn't find one. I bought it from multirotormania. What I did find did not look like my board. The pins and connectors were in a slightly different configuration.

It's a dragonfly32 compact with presoldered pins and connectors.

Here is a link

http://www.multirotormania.com/f1-processor/1061-dragonfly32-compact.html

 

[jack10525]

Anyone got any ideas on this board? Im about to give up on quads. Planes are so much easier. Or I'll just get an rtf something or other.

 

[makattack]

Anyone got any ideas on this board? Im about to give up on quads. Planes are so much easier. Or I'll just get an rtf something or other.

So, when you click on that link you posted for the FC, there's a "Setup" tab between the Reviews and Rotorbuilds tab, with a diagram of the board with all the pins labeled pretty clearly. Is not not representative of the board you got? You might have been shipped the wrong product, and it might be good to contact the vendor to see if they can tell you what was shipped to see if it'll work for you or if you'll need to return it for the right one.

 

[jack10525]

So, when you click on that link you posted for the FC, there's a "Setup" tab between the Reviews and Rotorbuilds tab, with a diagram of the board with all the pins labeled pretty clearly. Is not not representative of the board you got? You might have been shipped the wrong product, and it might be good to contact the vendor to see if they can tell you what was shipped to see if it'll work for you or if you'll need to return it for the right one.

Well I tried connecting it with a pin diagram I found on rc groups but still can't get it to work. Cant get the radio to control the board. Can't get motors to spin. Rx was bound to Tx.

 

[makattack]

There's a whole lot of variables that need to be sorted out before you can even arm and drive motors via your TX through the FC.

Questions:

* Is the FC and RX communicating on the same protocol (PWM, SBUS, PPM)?
* Is the TX programmed properly and in coordination with the FC to map the channels appropriately?
* Are the TX/RX end points calibrated to match the FC software requirements?

If the above reads like gibberish, then I would recommend looking through one of the many good websites or YouTube videos out there for setting up a similar class FC and software. Personally, I'm not a big fan of video setup guides for these things because there's just so much detail that gets glossed over.

http://www.propwashed.com/betaflight-configuration-guide/

Seems to be a pretty decent guide for betaflight. I'm sure there are similar ones for cleanflight (well, CF is similar enough to BF now that it might not matter)

 

[jack10525]

Makattack I really appreciate all of your help. Yes the above did look like giberish. I got lucky the first time around with a naze32. I followed the flite test videos and got it working. This board is more complex. I'll check out the site you linked to.