Ultraborg/Thunderborg combination power

I am really sorry, the BattBorg V+ and GND connections were the wrong way round in my diagram :(

You are quite correct, the V+ for the BattBorg should be connected to the +ve on the battery and the GND for the BattBorg should be connected to the -ve on the battery.

I have attached a fixed copy of the image below and removed the old diagram.

It is fairly likely that this mistake will have damaged your BattBorg. If you send us a message using our contact form with you address we will send you out a replacement.

Hopefully it was just the BattBorg which was smoking.

Since the LED on the ThunderBorg is still working there is a chance that the board itself is still fine and something else is causing the problem. At this point I would suggest we try and check if the ThunderBorg is working correctly on its own.

Disconnect both of the 3-pin cables between the ThunderBorg and UltraBorg and see if you are able to talk to the ThunderBorg again. If this works then the problem is likely to be either with the UltraBorg or the connections to the UltraBorg.

If you cannot see the ThunderBorg on its own it is possible that the cables are not making good contact. The wires you are using are quite short and the SDA / SCL signals need a good solid connection to work correctly. In this case I would suggest you try going back to the original cabling as per the DiddyBorg v2 instructions and see if that gets the ThunderBorg to work again.

Once we know if the ThunderBorg is working and if the cables needed to be changed we can have a better guess as to what is causing the trouble.

On a separate note you still have the 5V link jumper fitted on the UltraBorg. This should be removed when the UltraBorg is powered via the V+ and GND pins.

It is possible, but there are a couple of other things it might be.

The first thing to do is just try each servo on its own to see if it is okay. We have seen a bad servo upset all of the outputs on rare occasion. In this case removing the problem servo should allow the others to work.

The second thing to try is the tuning GUI. This will allow a larger movement range and bypasses the limit checking. If you can get the servos to move using the tuning GUI you should be able to set the servo up so that the standard GUI works properly.

It depends what you want it to do, but for a simple example you can modify the ubServoFromDistances.py example to set motor speeds on the ThunderBorg instead of servo positions.

All you need to do is add the usual import and setup code for the ThunderBorg (like in tbSequence.py) to the script before the loop.

After the setup code add a maximum power calculation like this:

# Power settings
voltageIn = 12.0        # Total battery voltage to the ThunderBorg
voltageOut = 6.0        # Maximum motor voltage

# Setup the power limits
if voltageOut > voltageIn:
    maxPower = 1.0
else:
    maxPower = voltageOut / float(voltageIn)

but with the correct voltages for your batteries and motor.

To set the motor speeds simply change these two lines:

UB.SetServoPosition1(servo1)
UB.SetServoPosition2(servo2)

for these instead:

TB.SetMotor1(maxPower * servo1)
TB.SetMotor2(maxPower * servo2)

Now the reading from sensor #1 should control the speed of motor 1 and sensor #2 should control the speed of motor 2.

The speeds will vary by the distance:

• Full reverse at 100 mm or less
• Stopped at 200 mm
• Full forwards at 300 mm or more