Team Deltas

So far I have not heard of one going bad. I have 4 or 5 of them, and them are still working fine, knock on wood.

 

No issues with mine as well (over two years)

 

Do keep in mind that using a Team Delta as a "throttle" is a bit of a misnomer. It is a switch. Period. It gives you full on or full off. Far simpler to use a properly sized ESC (Electronic Speed Controller), which gives you both forward and reverse and is proportional (you can go slower than full throttle, and you can adjust your ship's speed at the radio).

If using an ESC for throttle:

DO read, understand and follow all the manufacturer's directions.
DO size it for the stall current of all the motors you will be attaching and or DO add fuses between the ESC and the motor(s).
DO read the article ESC's - Lessons Learned on the Visit this site How-To's
DO waterproof them if they are not already waterproof from the factory.
NEVER hook the feed power up backwards.
NEVER use both the ESC's BEC AND a RX battery at the same time (see the article on the NTXBG site.

That said, Team Delta switches are great for firing guns with solenoid valves. I personally use the Clippard "Mouse" valves, though I have a very nice dual solenoid valve manifold for a ship that is in the works.

Cheers,

 

I chose this Team Delta switch for a throttle. It is essentialy an r/c switch but handles a larger amp load. RCE225. It is the same switch used for the firing boards but with the capacity for 24amps not 4.5 or 9.

I have not heard of one of these burning out. I have heard of many ESC owners having one burn out on them. I prefer an ESC but with all the problems I felt it would be easier to just change the pinion gear to adjust rather than tune an ESC and risk replacing it constantly. I dont mind that so much as it seems that captains change the gears based on water conditions regardless of the type of throttle.

The Delta throttle is big and takes up half the room in my small radio box.

As far as on/off I like that. I havent run across a situation that I just want to cruise along at an imperceptable speed. I just bump the throttle and it will float along. I especially dont want proportional speed in reverse since I may want to try to come to a complete stop in a hurry.

 

You can waterproof that TD board, so that it does not need to go into the WT box. Mine is WP, and I have had no issues with it at all.

 

If you use Scotchkote, I don't think Team Delta will give you an issue. Dan and I talked for a while at the Austin Maker Faire last year at some length on "what is this brown crap on some of the boards coming back?". After the discussion on how easy it is to solder through it, I think he's ok with Scotchkoted stuff coming back for warranty now.

 

The RCE225 only handles 24A though. You can also use the smaller RCE200 boards to activate a bigger 40A relay. I do something similar for remote switching of main power. With 550 sized motors, I wouldn't trust the RCE225 to handle it without frying a relay. 24A isn't a lot when you consider 550's suck down 80A+ at stall.

Even using Team Delta boards for propulsion, you still need to follow most of the ESC Lessons learned article though as most of that is just good electrical common sense. Most of the issues are the same in order to prevent losing the magic blue smoke.

https://ntxbg.org/KnowledgeBase/?category_id=45&menuaction=phpbrain.uikb.view_article&art_id=12


For me, I cruise around all the time at slower than top speed, sometimes MUCH slower as needed, and use it to my tactical advantage, so that is a mission critical function. Once you get used to having more than just brute force flat out and stop, it's quite nearly impossible to go back. At this stage though, I haven't seen an ESC burnout in quite some time locally. The only ones I ever saw burnout (mine or others) were due to something listed out in the article above. Now the mTroniks Viper Marine series has several failsafes built in which it didn't used to, and it's only $50 for a 40A version that takes less space and has less complicated wiring than the alternative. Less complicated wiring means less to go wrong and try to diagnose later.

 

Personally, I use the 3-way Mouse valve, standard mount, wire leads, 6v. Part EV-3-6

Of course this in Big Gun, Small/Fast Gun can sometimes get by with the 2-way, though 3-way doesn't hurt anything (and, in fact, may be safer, as it depressurizes a jammed gun when not actually firing). In Big Gun, due to the way the guns work, a 3-way is absolutely mandatory, as you have to relieve the pressure from the actuator after firing.

This Clippard site has good explanations of what a 2-way versus 3-way versus other functions are.

The Clippard Part Builder is pretty easy to navigate, by the way.

Cheers,

 

One other point, on ESC's. I read a lot of the naysayers talking about fried ESC's and how unreliable, etc. they were, especially in the Small/Fast Gun community. I was bemused, as I had been using them without failure for some time. When told of "lots of failures" at a particular battle, I asked for details to see if a specific problem could be diagnosed. Turns out "lots of failures all around" turned out to be, like, 3, with many more performing flawlessly in other ships. Also, all but maybe one failure were easily ascribed to being hooked up backwards or some other obvious mistake or abuse.

Have I found some individual ESC's frustrating at times? Absolutely - I have played with at least a dozen brands/models. Do I plan to use anything but an ESC in any of my ships? Snot a chance. They are simple and reliable in general. IF you size them properly to the draws of your system and set them up properly.

An example of blaming the ESC for something not its fault - I have seen a captain immediately the ESC for being glitchy when it turned out to be a pot in his TX interfering with the throttle signal (oddly, not the throttle pot). Replaced the pot, ESC is fine, life is good.

Cheers,

 

I read mentioned that there is a 6 volt version did we get a part # and how are they compared to the 12 Volt

 

Never mind I decided to run on 12 volts any who 2 6v 12 MAH in series

 

any suggestions on the diodes to put on these boards

 

1N4001, need to be installed inline on the power lead, but you really need to run a regulator since the diode will drop around .4 to .7 volts per diode in series, and if you are running 12 volts now, you will need quite a few diodes.

I use a 1 amp regulator for Radio Shack, costs around $2 or so. will take from like 18 volts to 5.5 volts, and give you 5 volts output. Sitting flat the left lead is the input voltage, center return, right output. Have the output feed the TD firing cards center power leed, ie red wire. Signal and return hooked to the receiver.

Now if you are just using a 4.8 battery pack for the receiver you do not need a regulator or diode.

 

Okay now that I am totally confused lets start over I am running 2 6volt 12mAh in series for motor & guns 1 7.2V 4500mAh NiMH for the pump the guns will be fired with team delta boards and Clippard part number # MME-2PDS-W012 solenoid so what will I need for this setup as far as those little diode do dads and such (did I mention I’m not much on electronics LOL[])

 

Whoa, Whoa, Whoa!!!

there are 2 sides electrically to the TDE boards: command and control. I think the confusion is that they can use diodes for different reasons.

Command takes signals from your receiver to tell it (the circuit) what to do. The IC chip TDE uses is very voltage sensitive and will fry if powered by more than 5.5 volts. So, while your standard 4 cell battery pack that runs the receiver and is usually what then powers the servos and, here, the circuit boards, is fine; using a higher voltage will ruin the board. The reason to bring this up is that is common practice to use a 5 cell pack to power receiver and servos to give them more power and speed - which servos today are OK with. Receivers can tolerate even higher voltage but this varies with manufacturer. Some of mine are rated up to 9 volts. To Keep It Simple, some will use only one battery to run the entire ship - usually a 6 volt sealed lead acid battery. This gives more power to servos, the rcvr has no problem and can run many typical pump and drive motors used in our hobby. I used this in our Invincible and VDT 8 years ago and it made it very easy for son and I starting out to keep track of gear. Like I said the KISS principle. Charge one battery for the ship and one for the transmitter and you are done.

This higher voltage must be reduced when fed to the command side of a TDE board.

All diodes have 2 basic properties:
1. they only allow current to flow in one direction.
2. when current flows in the prescribed direction, the voltage drops 0.7 volts crossing the device.

Therefore, two of these can be placed in the power feed from the receiver to the boards to keep the command chip happy. Use more if you are running a 6 cell NiMH pack, they have a start voltage of around 8 volts. Alternatively, some receivers have a built in circuit that does this for you. This is called a BEC for battery eliminator circuit.

A fourth, and increasingly common way to handle these issues, is to use the BEC function in an electronic speed control (esc). If you apply battery power to the esc, it uses high current to power its output and uses a voltage regulator to send 5 volts to your radio which in turn sends this out to the servos and TDE boards. Every device is happy and you have , once again, only 1 battery to charge. The typical ESC in our hobby - the Mtronicks - handles 4.8 - 12 volts for main power.

Now for CONTROL. The actual solenoid control is an optoisolated silicon controlled rectifier - what the heck does that mean? Think of it as a switch or relay but one that only works one way - like a standard diode but with control. Encased in its little plastic package, it is controlled by light not voltage. This completely isolates or separates the 2 sides of the device electrically. They can have different voltages and voltage supplies. The control side sends its signal in the form of a voltage to a little LED that lights up telling the switch or one way relay to close to run its current. This circuit handles 20 volts at 4.5 amps for the RCE200a and 9 amps for the 200c. So it likes 12 volts to fire solenoids with the best reliability.

Here is the kicker and the reason for the confusion: when a device with a coil powers up and down, it resists this change of state and sends a spike back against the circuit. This pulsing back and forth is the useful property that allows us to create radio frequency signals for transmission, but it also can destroy the delicate semiconductor junction that makes the device tick. The answer is to stop this pulse from getting back to the device. This is done by placing a diode backwards across the leads as close to the coil as possible - our solenoids are an electromagnetically controlled air switch with a significant coil generating the electromagnetic field that pulls the valve open, in our case, firing the cannons. When the current is applied, the diode does not conduct and the voltage is used by the solenoid to activate it. When the voltage shuts off, the charge of the EM field that has built up fires backwards, but the diode now conducts since it is in the circuit BACKWARDS, and the voltage/current spike is dissipated without the control device seeing it.

This is where the 1N4001 , or similar, diode comes in. on the control side.

Thoughts- first apologies to those with electronics theory background. you know this stuff. I went into, what I think is a fair amount of detail so those starting out in wiring can hopefully better understand the basics of this system. Unfortunately, I don't know how to use any drawing programs well enough to show circuit diagrams to illustrate my points but there are books and websites with this info. I hope that if you read over this a few times, it will make sense. It is a lot if you haven't looked into the devices we blithely hook together.

Second, if you take this another step and look into the efficiency of higher voltages on the physics and limitations of motor development, you can see why I prefer all 12 volt systems.

Have fun with it.
Nate

 

Wow thanks Nate but I will be needing some Advil and a nap before I read this again I will print it out and put it on my pile of electronic gadgets so when I'm ready to blow up my system I will have this handy

Powder(electronically challenged )Monkey

 

I just took a 3 inch servo extension and soldered two diodes inline on the red wire then sealed with heat shrink. I plug the reciever battery into the extension then plug it into the reciever. It was way easier than adding two diodes to each board.

I made a similar rig for being powered off the main battery so that I can switch between the types as needed.

 

Ok, so what is powering your receiver, the 7.2 volt pack. or the 12 volts, you need to be more specific please?

 

me oh okay , the only thing that the 7.2 is powering is the pump every thing ells is off the 12V