Dittobaker

I have a Rustler XL5 that's about 2 months old. Today when I tried to power on, no luck. I've tried two sets of batteries (NiMh), both fully charged before trying.

When I press the ESC button, the receiver blinks once quickly, and the ESC doesn't turn on. If I hold the ESC button, the receiver blinks once, and the ESC blinks to show which mode it's in, but then goes off.

I have made sure the transmitter is turned on.

I've tried disconnecting the battery and reconnecting (even holding the ESC button with the battery disconnected).

I have tried re-pairing the transmitter and receiver.

I've disconnected the wires between the receiver and ESC, inspect them, and reconnected them.

Anybody know what's going on?

3 second video of what happens... https://youtu.be/fNMG91Wr6Mw

Redjet78

bad esc is my guess ? Redjet78

RustyUs

I think you should be getting a solid green LED on the receiver when power is applied to it. Seeing it (green LED on receiver) fade real fast...I'm kinda with Redjet78. Contact Traxxas.

Doesn't matter, but battery in the video is a NiMh pack. I'd still whip out a multimeter and see what the voltage is.

Dittobaker

Multimeter shows about 7.5v from the battery.

1QwkSport2.5r

7.5v is darn close to nominal voltage for a 6-cell stick pack. Fully charged you should see 8.0v or better. I'd be curious what the voltage drop is when the ESC and receiver are powered up. I would fully investigate the batteries and charger before dismissing the ESC as being bad. I've had it happen so many times where I thought the battery was bad because it would be dead coming off the charger yet another charger made it come back from the dead. A dead pack can show nominal voltage but fade off quick once a load is placed on the pack.

Dittobaker

Thanks for the feedback. I'm going to do some testing tonight of the charger. The more I think about, the more I'm suspicious of the charger.

I'll post what I find.

1QwkSport2.5r

Is it a wall wart charger?

Dittobaker

It's the DC charger that came with it plus the AC adapter.

RustyUs

Bazinga!

1QwkSport2.5r

I would indeed investigate the charger. I have a feeling it's the cause of the problem.

Rusty - I'm betting you've run into the same situation with bunk battery chargers?

RustyUs

Not lately. Probably more situations involving bad battery packs that have bad cells, and/or solder/weld joints coming undone.

Dittobaker's situation, and receiver's LED fading quickly, bugs me. ESC is "smoked" and somehow able to send little spurt of energy to receiver before shutting down, or, like 1QwkSport2.5r questioned, battery is not able to supply sufficient energy to ESC. I think the load would not be that great just by turning on the ESC. But I'm no electronic CPU capacitor wiz .

Dittobaker

Weirdly enough, it was the connection between the DC charger and the AC adapter. The female housing had a crack in it, which means that the male connection was a little lose. It appears that it would get enough of a connection to light up the charger, but not enough to charge up the battery. I taped the female plug up to make it tight, charged the battery, checked the battery that it was indeed fully charged, and everything worked fine. Ran the Rustler for about 15 minutes and all works as it was supposed to.

I had originally assumed that the batteries were charged since I had connected them and seen the light flashing. However, after trying to charge the batteries again and the multimeter still showing low charge, I knew something was wrong. That's when I found the loose connection.

1QwkSport2.5r

There we go! Glad you got it figured out. Perhaps it may be in the cards to invest in a better battery charger down the road.