Thinking how our BBB will operate remotely – I bought a “Turnigy 1800mAh 2S 20C Lipo Pack“.
It arrived in a week time.
As per instructions – battery came 30% charged and … needed a proper charging! How lucky that Simon gave me few years back a LiPo battery charger – “iMAX B6AC 80W RC Battery Balance Charger”. Thank you Simon!
Attempting to solve the problem with traditional trial and error approach – to my surprise I unfortunately couldn’t find any of these charger connectors matching the battery one! Quick pop up to Jaycar solved it and I ended up with a pair of XT60 connectors.
Sebi soldered the female-one on nicely (red end).
Next stage was connecting that all together – and wait!
Initial voltage was 7.4V, while bit of googling revealed that we should see 8.4V when fully charged.
Waiting for a battery to get charged I did some reading and found an awesome blog about batteries – AmpOW. Particularly their page “Lipo Voltage Chart: Show the Relationship of Voltage and Capacity” – contains following table which I find super-handy for our project.
Also Sebi prepared another cable extension to actually connect to the BBB.
.. and our battery charging meanwhile finished. It took 92 minutes to feed it with 1189mAh.
Putting it together was than easy and the first test revealed that all is good! (See the blue LED shining.)
Eagerly we moved to the next stage and Sebi connected ESC + motor.
It took another 10 minutes of tinkering with BBB + checking the cable orientation to figure out proper testing command:
debian@beaglebone:~/git/librobotcontrol/examples/bin$ sudo ./rc_test_escs -c 8 -s 1
waking ESC up from idle for 3 seconds
done with wakeup period
<motor started here>And it is a complete success for today!
That is a great report! We are looking forward to launch day.
Sent from iPhone by “either” Robin or Serge
>