Saturday, February 16, 2013

ESC Not a Problem - HK Control Board

Earlier I had written that I thought that the Turnigy Trust ESCs were a problem because they couldn't be manually throttle calibrated.  Turns out that I was wrong.  It was actually the HobbyKing control board that was causing my headache.
Here is the info that could save you that headache too!

HobbyKing Control Board v3.0 Atmel 328PA:
Unfortunately as is the case with many HK products they have absolute crap for support and rely on other users to do it for them, and often have outdated or just wrong user manuals.  In this case, it was the latter.  You see, HK rips off designs that others come up with and have their Chinese supplier build them for 1/10th the price, and then sells them on the cheap - and price matters with this stuff, so that is why I shop there.  Anyhow, that isn't the point.
The point is that they had a user manual for this item that tells you to put everything as Atmel 48PA, which is what the KK board version uses, but the Atmel 328PA is distinctly different in that it has a different memory size!  And unfortunately, the chip itself doesn't know what is up, so it will just do what you tell it to do.  What you really need to do is:

  1. Use the new Atmel Studio 6.0 software
  2. Plug your HK Control Board into the USB programmer and plug the battery into the control board!
  3. Open up the dialogue for programming in Atmel Studio
  4. Tell the software that it is the Atmel 328PA and click Apply
  5. Click Read and then see what it says.  It should tell you that it is the Atmel 328PA chip.
  6. Go to the Fuses tab and set "SPIEN" as checked; BODLEVEL = 1v8; SUT_CKSEL = 8Mhz 6CK/14CK +65ms (Default)
  7. Go to memories, select the .hex file you want to load, and then click on program.
That fixed my problems of the motors not being synced up.  Now it appears to be working just fine.

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