Man what bad timing for me. This is turning out to be a break thru weekend for me but I am realizing that I'm really crippled when the Micro Indoor forum over there is offline. Its such a resource and I've grown used to checking everything I do with whats posted there.
I've been trying to build the Koichi Tanaka DIY IR gear and just figured out late last night(after having given up weeks ago,temporarily of course) that my second attempt does indeed work! I had posted how I couldnt believe it didnt work because I did such a great job building it and have done comparable stuff before. Anyway, turns out the FET ground pin had so little soldier on it that it "opened" up when I tested it like a too small fuse. Of course I only tested with a pager motor, no actuator coils- pretty dumb huh?. After a through trip around the board with my meter I concluded too much was right for it not to work and connected a 156 ohm coil to the aileron pads. HOLY MACKERAL it works! inspection with a 60x scope revealed the problem(I have to know where to look with that much mag...even then its hard to interpret what I see sometimes). A quick touch with my new soldiering station and voila the motor works too. Gotta tell you guys this gear is SWEET! I could tell from the response of the magnet I placed in my coil...very precise control. The ESC seems a little course but then again the motor was no load so its hard to tell. Now I've got to decide whether to try to setup a 4mm pager with weight on shaft -11 ohm so it should be about right with gears or go with a DD setup..I'm ready to build a Living Room flyer and thats a tough call ..with the 4mm I should be able to use my Kokam 20 Lipo but teh DD setup I would need at least my 60...another gram plus. I' m pretty sure I can get teh DD setup to fly first try but the 4mm is another level below my experiance. Problem is the DD setup will be heavier therefore faster which is not good. Of course I dont know how to evalute without RCGroups..