Costa's breadboard controller - part 2 final

Rather than a nuts and bolts view of the hook up wiring, I have rather re-posted the layout schematic with a note that the transistor view on the layout is the bottom of the transistor! Seem obvious but I had it reversed on Gordon's unit that I could never get to function. Most of the wiring tucks away in the unit and the drawing actually does a better job of showing the hook up than I could.

Thanks to the Ecurie guys for slotting me in to a race after a late arrival on Friday night - the controller was truly tested in action from first press and worked fine with a useful third overall, despite the rusty driver.

The pictures illustrate the neat and uncluttered final product. I have also included a cut out of the Gordon economy handle to illustrate how the black lead is bolted to both sides of the transistor top with terminals, one for the contact to the trigger and the other black lead to jack plug. The orange thing is a resettable fuse and well worth the extra precaution if you lend out your controller from time to time. The circuit theory borrowed from the excellent Christ Frost and Le Mans slot car web sites, with the neat artwork off this interesting web site:

http://home.arcor.de/slotracingtechnik/homepage/transistorregler.htm

The sprung button in the MRRC controller is a boon right out the box but, in this Parma Turbo project, I simply bent the end of the wiper arm and bolted on an old brush hood unit off an old can style motor (16D or C Can units fine) - the motor brush being the smoothest approach I have come across for cheapie homebrew units.

My unit will have the two pots facing out rather than in as I found my method of holding had me unintentially winding the sensitivity to zero through the race (not an issue for most other folks). That's it in this series, there may be a further breadboard approach to the interesting MRRC controller, time will tell. In the absence of the metal turbo frame, a small lightweight heat sink and fan (The dinky little Hobbywing RC unit for R85) will be fitted, along with reverting to the Tip36c and a 30 ohm total wiper board to explore the potential of other folk using the existing resistor as a wiper board.

Any net readers are welcome to email the team to find out the component sources etc, although most of mine were from Mantech, locally.