timmosav

I purchased an almost complete Fairwind from a guy who only enjoys the building as opposed to sailing of yachts. He'd started putting electrics in then gave up.

However as is often the case with people, he had not kept any of the instructions !!!!

Looking at the innards, most things seem self explanatory even to me a total newby to r/c boating in general, only a little bit of experience with electric boats.

As I see matters there are the following components he has installed but not connected through

Switch
Battery box
Receiver box
Rudder servo
Sail winch servo
Mysterious circuit board

Wiring seems to be:

Battery box to one side of the switch
Switch to receiver box
Receiver box to each of the servos

This leaves the mysterious circuit board - which is about 1.25 inches long by about 0.5 inches wide. There is just one lead coming from it, yet there appears no spare connections anywhere else in the equipment. The lead has a red connector on the end of it, slightly wider than the ones that come from the battery box, and there is a black connector affixed,

There is no names, markings or anything else visible.

Does anyone have a clue what this might be for, and how it would connect in


Andrew

DONS BOAT WORKS

My Feedback: (3)

Try the "Fairwind r/c sailboat home page"
http://fairwind900.home.comcast.net/

timmosav

Hi, thats a good web link - had a look on the construction manual thats available for download and theres no mention of anything like this.

Just got the magnifying glass out, and theres some words that look like Mini Volt along the bottom of it - connected all the other electrics in and they seem to work ok, which makes this item all the more strange.

scottrc

Sounds like its an on board volt meter similar to this one. They can come in handy on a sailboat so you don't have to open it up to check the battery.
http://www2.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin...&I=LXHDJ2&P=ML

Scott

timmosav

Hi Scott,

Had a look at the weblink and no its definitely not one of those - Ive seen those before in model helicopters.

The little circuit board doesnt have any manual switches or indicators - its a pity its in such an awkward place but I can't access it to get a picture, and it looks like its been epoxied to the balsa frame

bobslr

Hi
The only thing that I can think it could possibly be is a voltage regulator ???
So that you would have 4.8 volts going to the reciever with a 6 volt battery pack

Bob

timmosav

Hi Bob

That would make sense, I'll look closer at that consideration although I cannot see how it would fit in, unless it attached to the spare wire on the on/off switch that I had just assumed would be for a charging jack to connect to.

Am I correct in thinking that I will NOT need this if I install a standard non rechargeable battery box ?


I'll come back on this one over the weekend

cheers
Andrew

bobslr

Hi Andrew
What ever it turns out to be I don't think you'll need it,everything could run on 6 volt's with no problem's
Bob

timmosav

Hi Bob

Thats reassuring as I had connected up the electrics without using that circuit board and they all seemed to work.

After reading this morning I had visions of the electrics packing up in the middle of the lake


cheers
Andrew

Fairwind

Hi,

It is hard to say what the device was but maybe it was a servo stretcher. They are used to make a sail arm turn 180 degrees. I have no clue why the makers of Sail Servos, Futaba, Hitec ... don't make all their sail servos turn 180 out of the box, but they don't. A servo stretcher allows the sail arm greater range.

You can check out Robot Zone http://www.robotzone.com/customer/pr...&cat=19&page=1

Rick