Elmod - The answer!!! At long last!!

[Steenv]

very interesting. My Panther has the same symptons with a ca 3 sec dealy in starting. Will set the jumpers for 000 and give it a try

thanks for sharing

Steen

[wibblywobbly]

very interesting. My Panther has the same symptons with a ca 3 sec dealy in starting. Will set the jumpers for 000 and give it a try

thanks for sharing

Steen

There is also something else you can do to speed up the throttle response, but only if you have a programmable tx.

As a test I connected a servo to channel 2, and pushed the right stick forward. The servo moved 45 degrees, so I knew my tx was working ok.

When I ran the tank, I found that if I pushed the stick all the way forward and waited till the tank moved, and then let the right stick spring back to centre, there was a burst of power before it stopped. This told me that the esc's on the Elmod board were out of synch with the tx. Full power was not at full throttle, it was just before full stick up. Hmmm??

So, having a programmable tx I could leave the trims at 0, and change all of the right stick limits to 125%.
I then pushed the right stick forward and kept adjusting the exponential settings downwards until the max throttle matched the max power point. It was 88% on my tx. If it was 90% the surge occurred, if it was 88% it didn't. So now when I put the right stick forwards it hits the true full power point and the tank moves almost immediately, this is also helped if the sound is turned down..see next paragraph.

Another interesting thing. Tamiya and Creeping Death use seperate batteries for their amplifiers, this told me the the amplifiers suck a lot of juice. The Elmod Soundblaster runs off the same battery as the motors. I ran the tank with the sound turned up, and the sound turned down using fully charged batteries. The battery time doubled with the sound turned down (though not off).

A 3300mah battery was still going strong after 1 hour last night, which tells me that there are ways and means to make the batteries last a long while on Elmods if need be?

Did I say that I love tinkering with things??

[[ICE]monkey]

great one rob , seem to be having the same trouble as you had now, tiger comes in at just under ten pounds,, plus i have a 2.4 f7 futaba so i will give this a go , cheers , i wonder if its possible to isolate the power to the blaster in the ribbon cable and give it a seperate feed ?
all the best, ice

[wibblywobbly]

I was thinking much the same thing, it would probably be easier on the Thinktank II, than the latest Thinktank III, which has a plug in Soundblaster. I wouldn't touch it without trying to get some technical data out of Thomas though, as there may be onboard resistors that step the power down to the amplifer, a direct power source would blow the amp if this was the case.

It would be possible to isolate the power feed in the ribbon cable and check the plug for voltage though?

[Steenv]

Hi Rob,

I just watched your youtube video that you inserted in rc-panzerketten-forum.com. I like the custom sounds that you made. Could you maybe put them in the download section ( would be great to have a el-mod download section there, so that we all could upload our custom sounds  ) so that I can put it into my Tiger 

Cheers
Steen

[wibblywobbly]

I obtained the sounds from http://www.4shared.com/dir/13648382/bfc832dd/EM_Sound.html

You can download the whole file from there, including other tanks.

The only difference with mine is that I modified them to work on a Soundblaster III, and added the voices. I am loathe to make that publicly available as the voices are copyright of Lighthouse Productions..and I like my bank balance the way that it is.

For anyone who has the T34 vs Tiger PC game, and therefore arguably (but dubiously) has purchased the licence to use the software, simply copy the .wav file from the voices library and add them to the turret function sounds on the Elmod file. It's quite simple to do, there is plenty of sound editing software free on the web.

As a note to the Thinktank jumper settings. I have now been advised by Thomas that the only difference between '000' and '101' is that the '000' allows the motors to run faster, and you get faster turret rotation. This is a huge help in tank battles over the '101' setting for the Tiger, so I will keep mine the way it is now.

I also discovered today that the motor terminal block on the Thinktank board was loose and cutting power to the left motor intermittently, I was going to send it back for repair but decided to re-solder it in the end.

I just have an interference glitch to sort out now, I have no idea why that is suddenly happening??

Cheers

Rob G

[Steenv]

When you say that you changed the files to work on the blaster III, what did you do? I thought that the files would be the same as the ones for Blaster 1 and Blaster 2.

No problem with the T34 vs Tiger - I did buy the game when it was released, so I will take the files from here. Could you maybe post your Blaster.ini so that I can have the configuration file. That would not violate any copyrights.

cheers
Steen