Sound system & barrel recoil problems

[John Pissey]

Hi All

I am having an issue with my sound system and barrel recoil. At first I thought that I had strained my servo while manually testing it when I had the action a little to snug for it to work remotely. When I finally had the recoil working remotely the sound system would either quit working or change sounds every time I fired the gun.

I bench tested it again with a normal servo free standing and it would work fine but every time I used the Savox the sound would act up. I called up the Savox technical help line and they said they doubted that the servo was strained and that it was probably a power dip that is causing the issue.

Mark from Armortek said that it is quite possible that I was having a power dip and suggested putting a battery pack paralleled with the module power to help augment the power supply. This does work better but with mixed reviews. Sometimes it works but often it still acts up. Has anyone had this experience and if so do you have any advice?

It was suggested to me to install a BEC (battery eliminator circuit) combined with an ESC (electronic speed control). I have no problem buying either of these items but I don’t want to keep guessing about solutions for this problem if I can help it. I would also like to point out that I have not install my batteries yet. They are on order but not here yet. I am using a variable AMP and voltage supply transformer for my source of power.

Thanks John

[Sam Hough]

Hi,

Do you have any tools to monitor the voltage to see if you are getting a drop?

What sort of battery pack have you tried? Nicad/nimh have pretty low internal resistance so should provide pretty good stable power supply.

Have you tried different power supplies for servo and sound module? If you have common earth the servo shouldn't care that it has a different power supply.

As well as voltage drop it might be worth worrying about electrical noise.

Either way the cure could be cheap passive components.

I think you are wise not to invest more just yet.

NB I'm just keen amateur and my only formal education in this area was 20 years ago.

Cheers

Sam

[Mark Heaps]

Just spotted this thread and my advice would be to buy the batteries and then re-test.
The industrial lab power supplies I work with are variable 0-36V 0-3A and I would not expect them to provide reliable results for the tests you are doing. As soon as you draw more current than it can supply then the voltage will drop.
Attaching a battery in parallel to the PSU output will only provide limited assistance.