Many Tamiya kits available on sale today still come with the TEU-104BK ESC. This ESC is perfectly fine for running brushed motors, but does not contain a BEC and its low voltage cut-off is too low for LiPo batteries.
The missing BEC is easily dealt with: either use "high voltage" compatible servo and receiver, or a cheap external BEC.
Fortunately it is also easy to modify the ESC to have a LiPo compatible voltage cut-off -- assuming you are able to solder a tiny surface-mount resistor.
It took a while as other projects were interrupting, but now our Tamiya M1025 Hummer is finished and ready for the trail.
With the body in good shape it was time to rebuild the chassis of our Tamiya M1025 Hummer. Like all Tamiya kits one begins with the differentials.
With all parts stripped and cleaned, it is now time to build the vehicle up again. First we were dealing with the body.
Having finished our XR311, it is now time to get its brother, the Tamiya M1025 Hummer, back on the trail.
Our Tamiya XR311 is getting close to being finished. One of the last remaining jobs is painting the driver figure that comes with the kit.
Since I made the steering wheel in the XR311 movable I need the arms of the driver to follow the steering wheel. I first thought of adding hinges to the plastic, but abandoned the idea. I made hinges before for our Dingo and I am not pleased with how it turned out.
Studying how others solved the issue I found that real cloth provides the flexibility to keep the hands on the steering wheel. So I needed to make a suit for my driver.
In part 5 we look at the electric power consumption of a 1/10 scale 4WD drift car.
The test subject is our Tamiya TT01D. We obtained the car second hand quite a while ago. It was originally an Expert Built set but has been substantially modified by the previous owner. It has the obligatory aluminium propeller shaft, a carbon fiber upper deck, a front one-way differential, sway bars, and a HobbyWing EZRun 60A brushless system with a 5.5T motor. The tires are well-worn HPI T-Drift. A 4600mAh 2S 30C LiPo provided energy for the car.
The LANE Boys residence currently hosts a very special scale truck for light installation: a custom built full metal Land Rover Series 2 SWB. A good opportunity to see how much energy is needed to run such a RC car.
In this blog post we look at the power consumption of the Tamiya CC01 Unimog.
The popular four-button-chargers support charging of different battery types. This article examines the different charging strategies applied for NiMH and LiPo batteries.
When it comes to RC electronics there is not a lot of technical information available. Not many RC enthusiasts are experts in electronics and the manufacturers only provide very few data-points for their products.
Recently I got the opportunity to acquire a second-hand Eagle Tree Systems eLogger. This device can measure battery voltage, current draw, motor RPM, temperature and throttle input while you are driving your vehicle.
My first target was our 1/10 scale buggy. A Tamiya DB01 Durga: belt driven 4WD, running a sensored 10.5T Turnigy TrackStar motor with a 60A Hobbyking X-Car ESC. The buggy is geared with a 23T pinion on the 97T spur, giving a final drive ratio (FDR) of 8.13. Power was supplied by a LPR 2S LiPo rated 4600mAh 30C.
Notice something missing?
Yes, the antenna has been cleanly ripped out of this poor receiver. Time to get out the soldering iron...
Can you spot the problem with the throttle trigger in the following picture?
If you look carefully, you can see that the throttle trigger on the right transmitter is slightly depressed towards the grip. This is due to a fault in the mechanism that returns the throttle trigger to the centre when you release it.
Fortunately it is not difficult to fix this issue.
This blog post is a follow-up on "Pre-processor for the DIY RC Light controller"
It did not take long until it became necessary to shrink down the pre-processor for my DIY light controller.
The HobbyKing HK-GT2R receiver is significantly smaller than the HKR3000 the LANE Boys are using, especially in height. No way an old-fashioned micro-controller in a DIP (Dual Inline Plastic) package can fit in there!
We need to solve this...
For my Tamiya XR311 I needed one of my DIY RC Light Controllers. If you are not familiar with it, please refer to my blog post: DIY car light controller for 3-channel RC
The XR311 is a small car and does not have any lights attached to the chassis, only to the body. So there was no need to have a full blown light controller on the chassis like in our Dingo, but I still wanted the convenience of having only a single servo extension wire between the chassis and body.
The HobbyKing HK-310 radio system I am using does unfortunately not have a PPM output on the signal pin of the battery connector as some receivers do, so this route was out of the question.
So I came up with the following solution: use a stripped down light controller in the chassis, serving as kind of pre-processor for the steering, throttle and Channel 3 signals. Since only one chip is needed for this function, why not add it directly into the receiver?
Over time all CC-01 suffer from this: the steering rod that goes through the chassis wears out, adding a lot of play to the steering. This makes the handling of the car very unpredictable, even at modest silver-can speeds.
To fix this one can either do a DIY repair job as described in https://www.tamiyausa.com/articles/feature.php?article-id=499. or use a simple to install repair kit from GPM Racing Products. For us the GPM kit was the better route as we would otherwise have to buy parts for the DIY solution.
Recently we acquired a Tamiya M1025 Hummer. It came RTR (ready-to-run) with an old Acoms 27 MHz radio, a rather new NiMH battery, a charger and this vintage car that was first released in 1995.
Light systems for RC cars are available for relatively little money. But for our Dingo I wanted something custom, something special. So I made my own.
The goal was to be able to control the lights from a simple 3-channel RC car radio controller, such as the HobbyKing HK-310 or the FlySky GT3B -- both of which we own.
The following functions have been implemented:
This video shows the functionality of the light controller:
Since we joined the SG Crawlers on their trails the small Tiger Crawler didn't cut it anymore. So we bought an Axial SCX10 Dingo.
One thing that turned us off when we first saw the Dingo was the front area. The stickers of the grill and lights just looked wrong. That was definitely an area we needed to improve on ours.
Our Tiger Crawler from Thunder Tiger has seen a lot of use lately. And it developed a few problems on the rear axle. With a bit of DIY, some scrap material and a fresh set of gears we got it running again in no time.
