8th-Oct-24, 07:06 AM
Update.
A bit of insight into the day to day issues a developer has.
All transparent here at Scorpius. Sometimes everything falls into place. Sometimes you hit bumps. But even a bump is still one drop closer to the solution. That’s the challenge we enjoy.
MPD V4, the second prototype we have made turned up a month ago the same day engineer John went in holidays for a month! Bad timing huh? But we all deserve a holiday.
So work has recommenced. Last version caused the CU to beep sometimes. We thought we fixed it.
However the new prototype still does it. Gutted. However we swapped over a 100n capacitor on the input for a 1n cap and the beeping has stopped. We inky ordered 20 prototypes so John is able to replace these by hand. Lucky! The only loss is an hours soldering, a small design change (30 mins work) and a new solder mask for the production version. Around $300 USD. Otherwise it would cost for another 20 prototypes but more importantly we would lose 6 weeks. Phew!
It was intermittent before so we were able to complete all Carrera native firmware although still to be debugged. And yes we included ghost and safety car protocols.
Then another issue. When setting car ID the track power is cut for 0.5 seconds to put car into boot mode.
Last version had a 47uF capacitor to keep power to the micro whilst the car travels over dead spots, ie lane change crossover points. We upped it to 3 x 47uF SMD ceramic caps. Carrera uses a 100uF electrolytic type. So we covered ourselves by using three 47uF caps, total 241uF.
Should be ok right? Wrong. The 3 ceramic caps worked mostly but itv was borderline. We removed them manually and vampired a 100uF cap to the board and bingo after changing ID 100 times we got 100 successful ID changes!
So luckily we can modify these 20
prototypes do we can complete Carrera debugging. Once we complete debug we will have the two best systems in the world on one tiny board.
After that we will figure out the Carrera wireless controller protocols to create a new dongle that allows the Scorpius controller to talk to the Carrera CU via its RJ12 port.
It’s tempting to skip ahead to complete OLED screen, brushless motor driver, update telemetry and a heap of other exciting functions but we must remain disciplined and do the hard yards first. Technically I only need the lane change button for the Nitrous system
for Carrera users but we will complete all protocols in order to remain 100% compatible.
Huge project. Huge!
Rick
A bit of insight into the day to day issues a developer has.
All transparent here at Scorpius. Sometimes everything falls into place. Sometimes you hit bumps. But even a bump is still one drop closer to the solution. That’s the challenge we enjoy.
MPD V4, the second prototype we have made turned up a month ago the same day engineer John went in holidays for a month! Bad timing huh? But we all deserve a holiday.
So work has recommenced. Last version caused the CU to beep sometimes. We thought we fixed it.
However the new prototype still does it. Gutted. However we swapped over a 100n capacitor on the input for a 1n cap and the beeping has stopped. We inky ordered 20 prototypes so John is able to replace these by hand. Lucky! The only loss is an hours soldering, a small design change (30 mins work) and a new solder mask for the production version. Around $300 USD. Otherwise it would cost for another 20 prototypes but more importantly we would lose 6 weeks. Phew!
It was intermittent before so we were able to complete all Carrera native firmware although still to be debugged. And yes we included ghost and safety car protocols.
Then another issue. When setting car ID the track power is cut for 0.5 seconds to put car into boot mode.
Last version had a 47uF capacitor to keep power to the micro whilst the car travels over dead spots, ie lane change crossover points. We upped it to 3 x 47uF SMD ceramic caps. Carrera uses a 100uF electrolytic type. So we covered ourselves by using three 47uF caps, total 241uF.
Should be ok right? Wrong. The 3 ceramic caps worked mostly but itv was borderline. We removed them manually and vampired a 100uF cap to the board and bingo after changing ID 100 times we got 100 successful ID changes!
So luckily we can modify these 20
prototypes do we can complete Carrera debugging. Once we complete debug we will have the two best systems in the world on one tiny board.
After that we will figure out the Carrera wireless controller protocols to create a new dongle that allows the Scorpius controller to talk to the Carrera CU via its RJ12 port.
It’s tempting to skip ahead to complete OLED screen, brushless motor driver, update telemetry and a heap of other exciting functions but we must remain disciplined and do the hard yards first. Technically I only need the lane change button for the Nitrous system
for Carrera users but we will complete all protocols in order to remain 100% compatible.
Huge project. Huge!
Rick
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