Hi, I encapsulated my three TReX Jr’s with wax. Everything was working perfectly yesterday, but today, one of the chips isn’t working. I am getting one motor going in one direction from it, but nothing else. I have also noticed that I get some LED feedback that I can see through the wax. It flashes red 5 times and then holds blue for about .5 seconds. It repeats this over and over. I have them in serial mode, and, like I said, everything was working yesterday when it was encapsulated in wax.
Any suggestions?
Well, it would seem as if power is doing something rather strange. Can you take a closer look at the power connections? Can you use a multimeter (or, even better, an oscilloscope) to look at the battery voltage and regulated voltage as this is happening?
I’m very sorry to hear that the problems interfered with your competition. If you are interested in troubleshooting them in the future, please let us know and we’ll be happy to offer what help we can.
Hey Ben, so I melted the wax from around mt TReX Jr.'s, and I tested them with the configuration utility one at a time. The one that was giving us problems still is - and this is what the LED’s are doing. When I hook up the power, I get solid blue. After that, no red flashes, no green flashes, no nothing. When I try to connect with the utility, it fails. The only light that ever comes on at all is the blue one. Do you have any idea what’s wrong? I’m not bent on fixing it, but it would be interesting to find out what went wrong.
Thanks, Jacy
So the behavior changed after you melted the wax? The blue LED is tied directly to power, so it’s not surprising that it would be on while power is applied (it was surprising when you earlier described the blue LED turning off while the red LED was still doing things). Lack of activity from the other LEDs indicates that the microcontroller isn’t running, which could be a sign that it’s damaged, or that it isn’t getting adequate power. I think you should be looking for signs of physical damage on the board, both visually (can you see any signs of burning or melted traces/components?) and with a multimeter (are there shorts where there shouldn’t be?). Can you see how much current the board pulls when you connect power? Can you see what the voltage is on the other side of the voltage regulator?
