Interesting Note

While we are waiting for a lot of parts to come in I figured it would be a good time to discuss some of the problems we've been running into / how to avoid them in the future.

First is the motor's, for some reason we can not fully identify one of the motors is locking up and making a really terrible noise. Another motors is running a similar issue and so we sent a request as said in the last post, we now have a video of the problem on youtube below is the link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRqT9uuUpeY




Next are the Xbee headers linked below.
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/8272
I have a post warning people about these products I'll just copy that here.
Warning: These headers are very susceptible to damage. Do not put any wires into these headers for debugging purposes just the XBee modules. After a few weeks of debugging I have destroyed all of the headers I was working with meaning I now need to replace them. Basically it seems like the socket spreads out and the connection becomes very lose and basically worthless.
So again waiting to replace those nothing else we can do about it. Just don't debug with these next time instead use the pins on the breakout that are available.

Lastly this one I've been noticing a lot lately and is quite frustrating. It seems almost random but different ESC output different Voltages between power and ground on the PWM cables. Some of them output as little as 4V which is no where near enough voltage, it is not an issue with the batteries different batteries do not change this. On record I've recorded a 4V output, 6V output, 7V output, and at one point a 12V output. This in most cases is not an issue but at 4V the Stellaris does not have the power nor does the 3V3 regulator have enough to effectively maintain the sensors and Xbee communication. I really can not find what is causing this and because these ESC are so poorly documented it is almost impossible to identify the cause. We could possibly look at the broken one and try to identify what causes it but I believe this is something inside a configuration that is not mentioned in the documentation.

Now because of the broken parts there is still a very slight way to get the main board working and continue debugging the flight algorithm. Since the Xbee connections are bad only on one side we ignore the labels of the breakout plug the xbee in backwards and wire accordingly.Not a good fix but it works for now.