We have been finished with our drone assembly for a while, and have been working on our game mechanism and flying practice. During one of our practices, a team member was connecting the servo tilt section to the pan, and the servos instantly started turning. One of our servos being used in our game mechanism began smoking, and we powered off the drone.
We then plugged the drone in again, and all servos instantly activated, and the game mech servo began smoking again. We unplugged the drone again.
Lastly, we decided to test a servo alone on port 2, where our servo was smoking. The servo began smoking again.
None of our servos will turn now, but the LED does work.
We have checked the continuity of nearly of our connections leading into the PCC, and there are no positives and negatives touching.
Our team is really devastated, so far things had been going well, but now we have no idea how to fix this problem, and we compete in 2 days.
Our team has made some calls to Shelli Brasher and we have learned that we will be able to attend the Nov. 3 scrimmage for some technical assistance.
We would appreciate any ideas on how to fix our problem.
We got some assistance at the scrimmage, and our problem is that we are receiving too much voltage (the entire 15V of the battery) to the PCC. It is obviously a bump connector issue, so we will update when we have fixed it.
Side note, the guy who helped us out was great, we didn’t get his name but will be sure to ask tomorrow.
The problem was due to a bad buck converter. We checked the voltage through it, and it was not converting to 5V. We received a new buck converter (Thank you so much Team Horsepower!) and it worked properly.
(On the last reply, I mixed up bump connector with buck converter.)
So, the voltage problem did not only affect our servos and PCC. For the servos, 3 of them were taken out of commission, but we received new ones at the competition. For our PCC, the Servo Featherwing had ports 1-4 shot, receiving no voltage. The voltage issue also caused our FPV camera to short out. Our laser was also extremely dim compared to what we saw from the other teams, so the voltage issue may have also caused this.
Overall, we were able to get replacement parts and fix all of our issues during the competition. Thank you so much to those at the Tech Support station!
