Tamiya Electronics tip
 

Something I learned while messing with my Tam electronics, hook it all up and test the mechanical and electrical before putting it in the model. I extended my IR emitter int he barrel and now it doesn't work. Does anyone know if you can just hook up the recoil, MG LED, Emitter etc to a 7.2v battery to test them or does the Tam electronics alter the voltage?

RE: Tamiya Electronics tip
 

Unless you have the TBU unit, that is only the flash led that goes in the barrel. My tamiya Panther flash led gave me problems from day 1.bi finnaly replaced it with a new one from AAF and this one works perfectly every time. They must be very sensitive or you may just have a bad one like it did. for 50.00 bucks it aint a cheap fix, but I dought Tamiya honors the warrenty being it is an electronic part. Contact them and find out. Im curious. All they are really is a capacitor that stores a hich current charge that is released when triggered. Cappacitors can be very finnicky.

RE: Tamiya Electronics tip
 

The flash is *not* an LED, it's a strobe. It needs to be driven by very high voltage (thousands), which is created by the high voltage driver (that's what makes the faint whine every time the cannon is fired). You can't hook this up to the battery directly. You may also have problems if you try to extend it, as the high voltage can arc between wires or through wimpy insulation at the joint.

The IR & MG LEDs should be easy to extend, as long as you don't mix up the polarity. But, you can't directly connect them to a battery without a current limited resistor inline, 500 ohms should bring it down to a nice safe level (probably dim, but enough for testing). You'd need a digital camera to see the IR LED.
If you have a voltmeter with a diode testing mode, you should be able to test that the LED hasn't blow up or shorted by disconnecting and probing the pins in the connector. You should get a reading of around 0.4-0.7 volts one way.

The recoil unit is probably fed pretty much to full voltage once it's triggered, but my Sherman doesn't have one, so I can't check.

D.

RE: Tamiya Electronics tip
 

Thanks Dave, will try your ideas out.