RCU Forums - Receiver battery problem.

A couple things here. If it was a reverse polarity that caused the short, you have more to worry about than just the battery. Think this through a bit. Your battery should should plug into a switch harness and in return that should plug into the receiver. At this point, all of your servos plug onto the same bus, that is how they get their power.

So, there are a number of things that could have caused this. A shorted servo wire would put that kind of load on the battery. A shorted switch would do the same. (I saw this happen out to the field just three weeks back on a plane that has flown many times). You could have in fact have fried the battery from the reverse polarity if the receiver allowed it. In that case, chances are really good that the receiver didn't take this very well either.

Before you start pluging in new batteries and such, it would wise to find out just what went wrong before you fry more stuff. Why don't you give us a better description of your setup, including servos and such so we can get a better idea where your real problem lies.

For what it's worth, the futaba 1000mah receiver battery that burnt the leads up due to a bad switch is now flying in my plane. I skinned it and replaced the wire and put a new shrink wrap on it. I cycled it three times to verify it was OK and now it has a number of flights on it. This doesn't mean that your battery is good, only that it might be after having the wires replaced.

An example of why just throwing new parts at the system now is not a good idea. I used to repair big main frame computers. I worked in Flint Mich at the time and one day my manager ask me if I would like to go to Chicago to replace some heads in a Disk Drive ( we used to do that back then ). This was a strange request as Chicago had a hundred times more Customer Engineers that we did so why did they need me? It turns out that one of the very large accounts there had a head crash on a disk pack. In the old days the operator moved disk packs around from storage to acitve use. Some times, dirt would drop into the drive when they put the pack on and cause a head crash (the head littery hit the disk and damaged both the head and the disk pack). This happened, but the operator though the drive was bad, so he put another pack on it and the bad head crashed that pack also. Humm, must be a bad drive, so he them mounted both of the crashed packs onto two more drives, crashing them. Not one to give up easilly, he keept moving packs and adding new ones into the mix, by the time the dust was beginning to settle, he had trashed over 120 drives. It took a team of twenty Customer Engineers about three days to sort out and reparir the mess. What should have been a simple 30 minute repair on one drive and maybe even not loosing the orginal pack turned into a major catastrophe The moral of this story is don't start swapping parts until you know what fried the first one to begin with.

Don