Water Rocket Forum

Water Rocket Expert wrote:From the readings I get on my meter, I see that the board limits the out put current to 5v no matter how much you put in as long as it is less than 10v and more than 4v. Even when using a 9v battery, the board puts out 5v to the motor. I have done some testing before using that battery so I am confident I know what I am talking about.

Are you using the wiring diagram as published on our website in the documentation, or have you added any customizations or protection circuits?

I am doing exactly what I read on the diagrams. As of now, I don't have that much electronics wiring knowledge but some circuit wiring knowledge.

Water Rocket Expert wrote: From the readings I get on my meter, I see that the board limits the out put current to 5v no matter how much you put in as long as it is less than 10v and more than 4v. Even when using a 9v battery, the board puts out 5v to the motor. I have done some testing before using that battery so I am confident I know what I am talking about.

I am doing exactly what I read on the diagrams. As of now, I don't have that much electronics wiring knowledge but some circuit wiring knowledge.

Your meter must be calibrated in metric volts or something, because that is not a proper voltage with the 9V battery connected.

The LaunchPad will convert about 3.7V to 9V down to 3.6V for internal use on the LaunchPad board itself. The schematic diagram shows that the servo is connected across the battery connector, and it will consume power directly from the battery at the level the battery is outputting.

The control signal that goes from the LaunchPad to the Servo (Orange Wire on HXT-900) is powered by the ServoChron, and it is a pulsed output that ranges from about 0V to 3.4V-3.6V. A meter will not be able to read this signal because it is changing levels rapidly over time. You need some type of scope to see what the control sigal looks like:
The only way you would see 5V on the servo with a 9V battery is if the servo were pulling tremendous current from the battery to the point it dragged the battery down to 5V. The battery in this case would get very warm.

Of course, if you connected a 9V battery that only had 5V of juice left in it, you could read 5V too.

The most likely situation was that you measured the voltage with the ServoChron plugged into a computer over the USB link. That would power the servo from the 5V USB power coming on the cable. DO NOT leave the battery connected when plugged into USB. That would be very bad!

We're not going to recommend using a servo rated fro 5V with a 9V battery. If someone has servos that are confirmed to work at that voltage, then they can by all means use them. We just can't recommend that because they are operating 50% over the maximum voltage specification. (6V)

Okay a little apology. I sorta forgot, I was using the 9v and it worked, but now I am using three triple A's in a battery holder. Woops I forgot.

That's the real situation.

"DO NOT leave the battery connected when plugged into USB. That would be very bad!"[quote]

I had some fun with that too. The board doesn't work to well when the USB solder connection melt off like they did on my first board. It wasn't defect, It was just forgetting.

Water Rocket Expert wrote:Okay a little apology. I sorta forgot, I was using the 9v and it worked, but now I am using three triple A's in a battery holder. Woops I forgot.

That's the real situation.

"DO NOT leave the battery connected when plugged into USB. That would be very bad!"

I had some fun with that too. The board doesn't work to well when the USB solder connection melt off like they did on my first board. It wasn't defect, It was just forgetting.

There's not enough voltage differential between the USB power and a 9V battery to melt lead free solder. It sounds like you wired it with reverse polarity.

Is there a launch pad board hat is mac compatable?

pecanguy wrote:Is there a launch pad board hat is mac compatable?

The Launchpad board is computer agnostic. The software that you download to the LaunchPad is how the Launchpad turns into a ServoChron or a Launchpad AlTImeter. The issue for a mac user is that there has to be a way to run the FET Pro Lite software (which is used to send the software from your disk drive) into the Launchpad. There must be someone out there who uses Macs who can explain if it is possible to run a Windows program like FET Pro Lite on a Mac using an emulator or something. We don't have any significant experience with Macs, so we don't know the process for running Windows software.

pecanguy wrote:Is there a launch pad board hat is mac compatable?

A quick google search indicates that it's possible to run the FET Pro Lite software under iOS using something called "Bootcamp" to boot Windows. Apparently this does not work with OSX however.

U.S. Water Rockets wrote:

pecanguy wrote:Is there a launch pad board hat is mac compatable?

A quick google search indicates that it's possible to run the FET Pro Lite software under iOS using something called "Bootcamp" to boot Windows. Apparently this does not work with OSX however.

There are a couple of things that could be tried. I do not know whether either solution I offer will work, as they tend to be hit or miss with the compatibility.

The first thing I would do is install a program called WINE. This is a compatibility layer that allows Mac or linux users to install windows programs on their machines and run them. It is a bit finicky, and I am guessing that the FETPRO 430 software is too obscure to have been officially tested by either the wine team or an individual who uploaded their results to the wine website. Fun fact, WINE is a recursive acronym that means wine is not an emulator, but this is irrelevant.

The second option would be to try and install virtual box or some other virtual machine software, and then use this to install windows on a virtual drive. This lets you run windows programs natively in their intended OS. This is a messy solution, and it does not allow the user direct hardware access like gpu acceleration without some insane workarounds. If FETPRO requires hardware acceleration, this may not work.

The third option is to partition your hard drive and install boot camp. Bootcamp actually does work on osx. This program allows the user to boot multiples oses on the same hard drive, like osx and windows, or linux, or whatever. You could is bootcamp to install windows and boot from the windows partition. This gives you a fully functional windows os, meaning you don't have to worry about compatibility layers or virtual machines. From there you could install the FETPRO software as you would normally. When finished, you just reboot into osx.

Hope my limited experience with Unix like oses was helpful here.

If you have any questions feel free to ask