From The Ground Up (Advice Thread)

[Roland]

Hello! I am Roland, I'm new to the forum and thought I should introduce myself before I start rambling.

Here goes.

I'm 14 years old, and I'm a total newbie to building robots.
I'm wanting to have building Robots as my active hobby, I no longer see sitting and playing Xbox all day as a sufficient and productive way to spend my life, I enjoy engineering and electronics from what experience I have. I also want to make my Grandpa proud before he passes away.
I'd like to say that I've looked into building robots for a couple of months now seriously, and have considered it for more than a few year - my grandpa was an offshore BP engineer, and whenever I visit we spend a lot of time in his garage making things (Which has given me a small amount of experience in using clamps, angle grinders, saws, drills and the spinney thing which makes stair banisters of which name surpasses me!) which gave me the idea to start. So I have come to the conclusion that my best bet was to get advice from real professionals rather than spending endless hours on Google. So I'm starting from right at the bottom. What I want to know is, can YOU help me with getting started?

Specifically, I would like to know,
What tools do I need?
Where and for what price can I get tools?
Where and for what price can I get internals?
What internals do I need?
How much space will I need to build featherweights?
Where can I learn the electronics and engineering to build one?
What method of transport other than trailer/boot (Which I would still have access to) would you suggest?
If I were to get into a bit of a bother, would anyone be able to give me advice on what to do?
How exactly do YOU deal with the risks of building robots?

So, those are my questions, I know it's a long list, and I thank anyone in advance for helping out.
Oh, and money isn't a problem, I earn round £60 a month from pocket money and helping my dad and I am looking for a part time job + whatever I earn from items I sell using amazon/ebay, I'm certain my Parents will support me when I have understood enough of it to be trusted to not do anything too awful and I can show myself as willing to act mature about it and to prove I can handle the responsibility.

-Roland (Sorry for the awful grammar)

Edit: I'm not expecting to have a robot in two months time, I understand this possibly and most likely will take a long time possibly more than a year, more than two!

[Roland]

So I took a look around the net for more extensive manuals or aircraft forums for help, there's really not an awful lot. I'm so confused by the instructions, I've removed a servo plug to use as a binding plug but I don't know where that's supposed to go as the instructions say for it to go in the 'bat' slot, which I don't have on an AR6000x. I'm guessing the wires still connected to the sabretooth take the place of the battery wires so I just put that in a random slot, but the amber lights don't flash...

I took a peek at the sabretooth and only status 1 LED is lit, does that mean I have a wiring problem? I'm so confused and the instructions for these things are too basic to follow.

[razerdave]

With a sabretooth only 1 LED should be lit in normal operations (the blue one). Red one only comes on if there is a problem.

As for the binding issue, here is how you should do it:

1: Put bind plug in the Batt/bind slot on your RX
2: plug a receiver pack (or some other 4.8-6v power source) into any other socket. Make sure the polarity matches the little symbols on the RX's case. It should be flashing its amber LED.
3: On the TX, pull the switch marked 'Trainer' towards you and hold it there. Turn on the TX; all the power lights should light up and flash.
4: The amber light on the receiver should blink slowly, go out, then go solidly on. Release the trainer switch. Job done.

If it does not work, then your receiver is probably knackerd.

[Roland]

So I guess the issue is the binding plug if not the receiver, what I read is to create a binding plug you connect the two outer wires on a servo plug and then plug it in to the bind slot, is that correct? If so I've done that fine. Then I connected the other servo wire which was pulling 5V via the sabertooth to the receiver, this gave me a red and amber light, but no flashing.

The AR6000x was never used before this so it'd be a shame for it to already be broken.

[razerdave]

Ah I see where you're going wrong. Leave the sabretooth to one side. You've connected a positive to the RX but no negative for it to connect with. Use just a normal RC battery pack and leave the middle wire in your home made bind plug alone. You can use the sabretooth if you want, just plug one of the channel leads into another socket (the positive and negative are parallel so it doesn't matter where you plug it for this bit).

[Roland]

I'm still lost, I think I need a wiring diagram or something along those lines. So I connect the two outer wires of the plug to either end of a battery pack, then connect the plug to the Bind. Then I connect up my other plug which is connected to the sabretooth in another slot? I don't understand why the bind plug needs to be connected to a battery?

I'm guessing the bind is just a loop so the positive side comes from the sabretooth into the rx and then loops back round (through the bind plug?) and back into the sabretooth as the negative?

I'm sorry I'm being so pedantic about this but I don't want to end up destroying the receiver because I'm so stupid and confused.

[plargen]

all you need to do in order is

plug in the bind plug (connecting top and bottom pin)

plug in the battery or power to the rx eg something like this http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Miniature-...item35c8343811 or an esc with built in bec

then pull the long toggle switch on the left of the transmitter and turn it on cant quite remember how long for tho

and it should bind

[plargen]

have you watched this

[Roland]

I had another go and for some reason it worked this time, still not sure why but thanks for the help!

I had the motors running briefly but all of a sudden they started juddering and stalling, all the warning lights on the RX and Servo went off and it just ground to halt, while the motors make an odd popping sound, I tried restarting it and whatnot but it's doing the same, just clicking away and the motors barely rotating.