Open Panzer Tank Control Board from TORRO

[jhamm]

The Open Panzer Tank Control Board is now sold by TORRO:

https://www.torro-shop.de/OPEN-PANZER-T ... ol-Board_1

[Aljones34]

Excellent news, i have an original one in my 1/6 Stuart. I will probably order one as an upgrade.

[Rad_Schuhart]

As I pointed in the german forun, it is important to point you need an external speed controller and a soundcard.

I am glad to see this project flourish again, but the torro ad is misleading.

I'd rather get Kim Olsen's MTCU, which is based in Open Panzer but comes in all in one package, and much better priced.

[Kaczor]

I sold my OP and exchanged it for Beier, which has many advantages. Open Panzer is good for those who like tinkering with electronics and e.g. large tanks that require external speed controllers and/or have three-phase motors.

[tankme]

I still have 3 or 4 TCB boards. They are going to used in my 1/6th scale builds as adding all the ESCs and sound card stuff tends to take up a lot of space. The board itself isn't small either. There is a box that is free to print to mount it in: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2666669

[tomhugill]

I liked the open panzer boards I had but at that price it puts it above el mod x prices by the time.youve added esc and sound cards. Maybe more useful for the 1/6 folks?

[50koruny]

Excellent news, i have an original one in my 1/6 Stuart. I will probably order one as an upgrade.

If you have OpenPanzer in Stuart, this will not be an upgrade.
It will be exactly the same board.

[tankme]

Excellent news, i have an original one in my 1/6 Stuart. I will probably order one as an upgrade.

If you have OpenPanzer in Stuart, this will not be an upgrade.
It will be exactly the same board.

I agree...unless you have one of the Hobby King boards with the bad components on them.

[ColemanCollector]

Excellent news, i have an original one in my 1/6 Stuart. I will probably order one as an upgrade.

If you have OpenPanzer in Stuart, this will not be an upgrade.
It will be exactly the same board.

I agree...unless you have one of the Hobby King boards with the bad components on them.

Oh ohhhh! I have two of those boards. Any giveaways--ther than flames--as to which are the bad ones ie. batch number, identifiable bad component marking?

Mike.

[tankme]

There were no flames, just stuff that didn't work on the board due to the wrong component being installed. Apparently Hobby King gave them the specs and the company in China that produced the boards either used the wrong component or intentionally tried to save some money with the wrong component.

The problem as explained from RC Universe:

"User jhamm has discovered what appears to be some incorrect components placed on the board. It would be helpful if anyone else with a board can confirm whether they can get the functionality of the Aux Output, Light 1, Light 2, MG or Brake lights to work as expected. On jhamm's board the lights merely remain on all the time. Here is a thread further discussing the issue and whether your lights work or don't work it would still be helpful if you could post your results there."

And this was from Luke:

"What we know so far:
At least some but perhaps all boards manufactured by Hobby King were built with an incorrect component. Specifically MOSFETs Q1 - Q8 were replaced with non-functional versions. These control all the light outputs as well as the airsoft motor.
User jhamm has confirmed that when these components are replaced with the correct MOSFETs, the board works as expected. Thank you jhamm for your help!
Hobby King made several prototypes before production, two of which I tested personally: one in October 2016 and the second in January 2017. Both worked flawlessly. That is not to count the many boards I built myself, several of which have been sent to other users including Erik at Taigen, none of which have shown any hardware issues to date.
In short, there is nothing wrong with the Open Panzer TCB design.
I provided Hobby King a bill of materials identical to the one posted publicly on the Open Panzer website. The version I gave them also had an extra bit of information - which components they were free to substitute with equivalent parts in order to save money, and which component must not be substituted. MOSFETs Q1 - Q8 were on the do not substitute list.
Nevertheless, for reasons unknown, Hobby King did substitute those parts, and the board is therefore lacking several functions.
I specifically requested a board from the production line before they went on sale and was told repeatedly it was being sent, but to this day I have never received it and as of yesterday they admitted it still hadn't even been shipped.
HobbyKing was notified of this issue last Saturday when jhamm notified me. Monday in HK has now come and gone and all they've managed to accomplish is pull the product listing and tell me they are looking into it and will let me know the results when they have completed their tests. I told them we already know the results, and what we need is a statement from HobbyKing indicating what they plan to do about it.
So that's where we're at. We know what happened, but not how or why. Maybe it was a cost-saving measure, although these MOSFETs cost roughly 10 cents a piece in the quantities they would have needed. No doubt there are substitutes that would have worked equally as well, so if they were going to deviate from the specification at least you'd think they'd choose a functional replacement. For that reason I wonder if maybe it was a simple mistake, maybe a tech loaded the wrong thing into the pick-and-place machine. Hopefully they will let us know. If they deliberately used a non-functional part then we can assume 100% of the boards are defective. If they just made an accident at one point in the production run, potentially some boards may have turned out ok. Without a clear answer from them I can only speculate at this point.

Obviously this is incredibly frustrating to those who ordered boards as well as everyone who has waited so long to see this project gain some legs. It is definitely a disappointment and a setback.

I will keep you updated as I get more information from Hobby King.

Luke"

And of course the thread on the Open Panzer page:

https://openpanzer.org/forum/index.php? ... 366#msg366