SSD F1 Board run & stop / ID change

14242 Views 58 Replies 15 Participants Last post by bleny luke, Mar 15, 2011

RichG

Discussion Starter · Jun 14, 2005 (Edited by Moderator)

4

Hi All

Have done some testing this afternoon. More work to do but thought I would pass this on so that others can check and feedback.
My worry is it seems to obvious.

(Don't get excited yet )

I decided to systematically try a virgin Saloon & F1 board in a Boxter & a Slot.IT Audi.

F1 Board in Boxter, came up ID1 without programming, ran 40 laps all ok.
Saloon board in Audi came up ID1 without programming, ran 40 laps all ok.

Swapped F1 board into Audi, came up ID1 without programming, ran 1/2 a lap stopped.

Picked up, looked at it restarted, another 1/2 lap stopped again, would not restart. Checked ID had changed to 6. Another brief run changed to 4.

Held wheels in the air now only ran for a second and stopped, no ID change.

Noticed that a Slot.IT car does not have the suppression ferrite and capacitor on the motor.

Fitted the suppression components, all ok for 20 laps. Took them off, immediately had problems.

So can anyone who has had problems with modified cars stoping after a brief time or ID changing check they have the motor suppression components fitted.

The Saloon board on the Slot.IT did not have the suppression components fitted and seemed fine, cannot explain this at the moment.

Any feedback welcome.

Another thought (we need a Smilie with a lightbulb) The retrofit boards come with, and The Boxters / Audis have suppression components fitted to the guide blade as well as the motor. Are people fitting these or removing them as in the instructions. May not be relevant but I do not understand why a Digital ready car would need them and an older car would not. Probably worth some testing. A comment from someone at Scalextric would be nice.

Richard

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drummer

· #2 · Jun 14, 2005

You the man! Yes, yes so simple, obvious.
Initially I retained all suppression components but after reading in the instructions that they werent really necessary have opted to leave them out in some cases. And it is only the later conversions that are having problems.

I'll change this tomorrow and see if I have anything to report.

well done Rich

martinkay

· #3 · Jun 14, 2005

The problem with the ferrite choke is that is exactly the point where the wires break (mainly on Audis and Boxsters), if they are going to, following some "heavy treatment". When this occurs I never bother to keep the ferrite choke on the wire that has broken as it doesn't give you enough spare wire poking out to be able to solder the break. I have a mixture of cars with and without ferrite chokes so will make a note, next time one swaps IDs, to open it up and see if it had the suppression fitted.

RichG

Discussion Starter · #4 · Jun 14, 2005

Thanks for the feedback guys. More feedback needed. I suspect this not the whole problem or solution.

A few more tests and thoughts.

Have retested the Saloon board in the Slot.It without any suppression. No problems with cut outs or ID changing.

Have tested the F1 Board in the Boxter with all suppression removed. No problems with cut outs or ID changing.

So some tentative conclusions.

1) The Slot.it motor produces more noise than the Scalextric one.

2) The F1 board is significantly more prone to interference pick than the Saloon board.

This could be due to one of two factors. The board layout makes it more prone to pickup, or the code in the microcontroller is for some reason less resilient to errors.

Will do some more testing to better understand.

Provisionally I think that motor cut outs and ID changing are due to interference from the motor, and perhaps the pick ups corrupting the program in the on board microcontroller.

A corruption of the running code would cause the car to stop, and could also cause it to go into a mode that fries the chips.

Or could cause the car ID to change.

More data and testing needed but you should definitely fit the standard suppression. I will look into weather enhanced suppression is possible or useful.

Feedback from Scalextric on the fitting of the pick-up ferrite & capacitor would be valuable if anyone can get it. I feel that they would not have been added to the standard cars unless necessary.

To be continued.

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drummer

· #5 · Jun 15, 2005

The F1 car that stops, changes ID and locks at full throttle, Ive checked and it has the suppressor fitted between the guide & the motor and the one between chip & motor has been removed. Will add one back there and see if it helps.

ciao

RichG

Discussion Starter · #6 · Jun 15, 2005

Hi Drummer

Have just done a quick test on the Slot.it with an F1 board and only the pick-up suppressor fitted. Car would only run a few inches before stopping, so looks like it is the motor one that is key. Look forward to hearing your results.

Willis

· #7 · Jun 15, 2005

The problem apparently not exclusive to the F1 chip and possibly "noisy" engines from other manufacturers may also be an uncertain cause.
The reason I say this is a Scaley DTM Opel V8 coupe retro fitted with a saloon chip. The ferrite core and capacitor are still in place directly attached to motor lugs as per original set-up, therefore the core and cap are engine side of the chip so unless this is a particulary noisy engine this questions engine noise being the culprit for the ID changes on this car.
The car it will run ok for a number of laps and will then swap ID as per other posts. The chip from box originally was default controller ID1 as per all the other chips I have fitted. I know it has reset to ID1 from ID2 and to either 1D4-6 this is because I usually run with 3 controllers and if the car fails to respond to one of these I generally reset the ID rather than find out which of one the ID4-6 it has adopted.
I don't now whether this helps or hinders the the debate.

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RichG

Discussion Starter · #8 · Jun 15, 2005

Hi Willis

As I said in one of the posts I don't expect this to be the whole problem or solution. Life's not like that,

however I think motors that generate varying amounts of noise, F1 boards that seem particularly susceptible to noise, and the need to fit at least the motor suppression components all have a part to play.

I am going to try and work out why the F1 board is so susceptible to noise, as that may give us a clue as to improvements that can be made to all setups.

Noise is a logical reason for most of the problems that are being described, there may however be other factors in play.

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RichG

Discussion Starter · #9 · Jun 15, 2005 (Edited by Moderator)

4

Ok, the F1 boards susceptibility to pickup was bugging me, so spurred on by the fan club,

have taken a closer look and found the problem.

This is the standard F1 board the the motor is connected to the black & red leads (red is hidden at the bottom) These are fed via the tracks I have marked in red. They go right across the board, past the input leads and all the other components on the board.

This is one I modified earlier.

I have cut the tracks on the red lines and moved the red and black leads to the other side of the board, thus bypassing all the opportunities for pickup.

Result is that whereas before in my Slot.it Audi I could barely go a few feet without a cutout or ID change without the motor suppressor fitted, have just done 40 laps with no problem.

Now I am not sugesting that you modify in this way. I just wanted to find the problem. The board may be OK with the motor suppressor fitted. More work needed. However I believe that it is always better to fix the problem than mask it.

Perhaps Scalextric could consider relaying the board. I would also suggest they carry out some interfererence susceptibility tests.

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tvwino

· #10 · Jun 15, 2005

Rich,
I've only encountered the problem of a car stopping, or running at max pace once, and that was with the Fly Corvette Safety car I converted - and guess what, I decided to leave the suppression stuff off of both the pickup and motor, the first time I have done this. It seems ok right now, but I'll experiment when I get the chance - but suspect you are 100% accurate with your assumption, and it is likely a combination of car, motor used and environment that keeps the severity and nature of this problem quite variable.

drummer

· #11 · Jun 16, 2005 (Edited by Moderator)

Nice work again Rich, I will get to these mods over the weekend if not before and test each fully, I cant do much worse than what I have with this vagrant chip.

So, Ive not looked, but is the Saloon chip not layed out in this manner (power running the length of the board as per F1 chip)?

RichG

Discussion Starter · #12 · Jun 16, 2005

I would describe the saloon board layout as better, but not good. I suspect that in practice only one of the tracks is to blame Black on the F1 Board equivalent to red on the Saloon board. (why they are opposite ways round I do not know, means you have to connect the motor differently for F1 & saloon)

If I can be bothered I will unmod one track at a time to see which is the main culprit.

I tried to induce a failure in the Saloon board / Slot.it / no suppression set up by wrapping the motor leads around the board in various ways and failed. So it can't be that bad. As a generality I would advise people to run the motor leads directly away from the board.

My guess is that after modding the F1 board might be better than the Saloon. As you can see the Red & Black leads go straight to FB1 & FB2 (assumed to be Ferrite Beads. They along with C5 decouple / isolate the board from the Motor.

On the Saloon board there are still some tracks before you hit the Ferrites.

Really the boards should have been layed out keeping the output tracks from the mosfets as short as possible and well away from the other components on the board, then directly from the Ferrite beads to the motor wires.

All that said it may well be that with the motor ferrite & capacitor both boards are fine. However we still have reported instances of saloon boards with Suppression components fitted having an Identity Crisis.

Final comment is that have described motors as being more "noisy". In practice I think that it is that they are more Power Hungry and consequently the gulps of current they take are larger and create greater opportunity for pickup in other components.

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RichG

Discussion Starter · #13 · Jun 16, 2005

3

Have tried unmodding one wire at a time on the F1 board.

Not the result I expected. With either of the wires in the modded position the board is fine. Put them both back to the original position and half a lap is the most I can do before the car stops.

As an aside don't cars go well with the body off.

Question about the Slot.it, my first one,

Under braking I get a noticeable squeal, it's not the brake pads,

but sounds just like it. Anyone know what it is?

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drummer

· #14 · Jun 17, 2005 (Edited by Moderator)

FYI:
Fitted the suppressor to the motor, seemd fine for 20 laps, and just as I said to myself, "I think its better", she stopped, overloaded & burnt out.

Was a good 20 laps though!

RichG

Discussion Starter · #15 · Jun 17, 2005

Hm,Sorry to hear that, looks like this one is going to be harder to put to bed than I thought.

Can you just itemise. Which board, suppression, mods, if any, car etc?

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drummer

· #16 · Jun 17, 2005 (Edited by Moderator)

New Scalextric F1 BMW, Sports edition. FI chip, retro-fit. Was running at 13v at the time.

Sorry Rich, Was only pickup side then added the motor side one.

RichG

Discussion Starter · #17 · Jun 17, 2005

With Motor & or Guide suppressor?

RichG

Discussion Starter · #18 · Jun 18, 2005

We need to get to the bottom of the car controller problems and come up with a fix.

I have trawled through the posts on the forum and attempted to extract all the failures.

This is cryptic but if you have had a failure it will make sense.

Squishy 18 Feb 2005, 16:11 AudiTT Saloon Fried
justmarty 27 Feb 2005, 00:59 ?Boxter Saloon Dead
Mr. Burns 14 Jun 2005, 14:22 Boxter Saloon ID change
martinkay 14 Jun 2005, 16:19 Boxter/Audi Saloon ID change
SinclairZX81 22 May 2005, 05:04 Slot.it 962 F1*2 run /stop
drummer 23 May 2005, 12:02 F1 High speed stick
drummer 23 May 2005, 12:0 F1 ID change
Willis 31 May 2005, 11:05 Slot.it Nissan F1 run / stop
Willis 15 Jun 2005, 11:13 Scale DM Saloon ID change
tvwino 16 Jun 2005, 00:19 Fly corvette Saloon High speed stick (once)
drummer 18 Jun 2005, 10:31 Scale F1 BMW F1 Fried

(what do I have to do to get tabs recognised?)

There seem to be 4 problems, some common between Saloon & F1, some not, some are probably interrelated.

Fried / Dead Saloon & F1 3
ID change Saloon & F1 >4
High speed stick Saloon & f1 2
Run / Stop F1 2

A number of these failures are in the original unmodded cars, Fried / ID change

Run / Stop & high speed stick seem to be in modded cars.

I think fitting the motor suppressor is going to fix some of this but not all.

So no conclusions just wanted to get a handle on the number and types.

Comments and additions please.

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drummer

· #19 · Jun 20, 2005

See my new thread, may have significance here, re; ID changing.

martinkay

· #20 · Jun 21, 2005

Not noticed this before, today an Audi I was driving was hit smartly up the rear by another car, and it instantly stopped. Not a broken wire, but.. you guessed it... it had become a different car ID. So that's another possible cause to add to the mix. The suppressor was not fitted on this particular car.

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