Recently put together a 450 quad with a kk2 board.. I got to say that you get alot of board for $29.00. Wanted to share a quick vid of some flip/roll practice. Im still tuning but is almost there

450 Quad KK2 FC Practicing Flips n Rolls (2 min 0 sec)

Originally Posted by theothercliff

I just want to make sure that what you have is good and that you don't damage stuff by plugging it in wrong.

Then have a look in the other thread, linked to a couple of times:
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showt...2#post23901337

To efx: here is more detail about parallel adapters with the kind of connector that you have.

Red wires are supposed to be positive and and black wires are supposed to be negative.

I have a friend who is an electrician who absentmindedly plugged two batteries straight together with these connectors. He got them back apart in less than a second, but the connecters were blackened by then. The rule that he should have followed is before connecting, make sure black goes to black and red goes to red.

Notice that on the battery (or anything that gives power) the red wire has the larger plastic connector sleeve and has the female metal connector inside. Notice that on the ESC (or anything that receives power) the red wire has the smaller plastic connector sleeve and the male metal connector inside. This allows you to plug the red wire into the red wire and the black wire into the black wire, but it means that power sources (e.g. batteries) and loads (e.g. ESC's) must be wired differently.

A simple extension cord for this type of connector is the most confusing. It has a different wiring on each end because the side that plugs into the battery must act like an ESC and the side that plugs into the ESC must act like a battery. The confusing part is that you can swap sides with this extension cord. When you plug this extension cord in backwards to the battery, you have put the positive on the black extension wire. It will work because the red battery wire is actually connected to the red ESC wire even though it connects through a black extension wire.

Watt meters act like an extension wire. You run the motor as normally, but you can read the meter as it runs. You plug the battery into one end and the ESC into the other end, but yours is not wired that way. Either you need an adapter on the right (load) side or they have the wrong color wire on the right side. I would plug a battery into the left (source) side and measure the DC volts (NOT AMPS) on the right side to make sure the polarity matches the wire color. I would not plug a load (ESC) into it (right side) until I knew the polarity was correct, because you will be plugging black wires into red wires (which may be right or may be wrong) if you do.

A parallel battery adapter is an extension with two plugs to connect to batteries and one plug to connect to the ESC. Imagine two separate complete extensions on the table in front of you with the side that connects to the battery on the left and the side that connects to the ESC on the right. On one extension, strip away about a half inch of insulation from both wires in the middle of the extension. On the other extension, cut it in half and throw away the right half. Strip a half inch of insulation from the ends of the remaining piece. Place it on top of the full length extension with the half piece to the left where it came from. Solder red to red and black to black. The best way to do this is to actually cut the full length one in half in the middle so you can slip two pieces of heat shrink tubing (one each for red and black wires) on before soldering. I actually use 3 pieces, one for red, one for black and one big one over both. Of course you can do this starting with wire and connectors, but it gets confusing with the red and black wire, the male and female metal connectors and the large and small parts of the plastic connector hood.

When done, you plug two batteries in on the left side, making sure that black goes to black and red to red. After that, the right side connector acts just like a single, bigger battery.

You only plug one battery into the watt meter at a time. You plug it into the left (source) side. This paralleled battery acts just like one battery.

If you are going to make a Y adapter first get some pigtails with connectors already on them or some wire and connectors. If you buy pigtails, they will be inclrrectly colored for either the left side or the right side. You can fix that with colored heat shrink tubing. Better yet either buy one pre-made or buy two extensions and assemble as described above.

For anyone reading this, be aware that you should never parallel a discharged battery with a charged battery. The charged one will try to charge the discharged one way too fast, damaging your batteries and possibly causing a fire. You should never ever parallel two batteries that have a different number of cells or chemistry for a similar reason. It is perfectly safe and reasonable to parallel a big battery with a small battery or an old battey with a new battery, just make sure they are both fully charged. I go the extra step of measuring voltage to make sure they are within a tenth of a volt of each other before connecting them together.

The balance connector is a different issue. These batteries should be disconnected from each other so they can be charged and balanced separately. If you have a Lipo alarm that connects to your balance connector, connect it to one or the other pack. I would connect it to my oldest, least balanced or most expensive pack. You should not parallel your balance connectors when discharging because a single low cell can cause a large current to flow through the small balance connector.

Edit: I see you have already successfully made a Y adapter and got your watt meter figured out. I'll leave this here in case someone else needs it.

LiPo packs are not to be trifled with. Tapped banana plugs together once by accident when charging... vaporized part of one of the plugs.

My 4000aH 40c 3s battery can, safely, discharge 1700+W in 90 seconds and it can do a lot more unsafely.

Originally Posted by flarssen

Then have a look in the other thread, linked to a couple of times:
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showt...2#post23901337

We were discussing 4mm bullet connectors with the confusing red plastic hoods.

Originally Posted by theothercliff

We were discussing 4mm bullet connectors with the confusing red plastic hoods.

Right. If you scroll up a couple of posts there, you can see his parallel adapters.

And, why is one way more correct than the other?

Thank you Fred good to know that. I'll be okay, I just have to let the fingers heal now as they still hurt. At least this got me thinking on how else we can protect fingers from props. I was thinking that maybe a dip switch may work best to force the board into esc calibration and not let any props work until this is moved back after calibration instead of the two fingers on the buttons. Just an idea.

Originally Posted by flarssen

Sorry to hear that. Hope you recover soon.
What happened was probably that your three other ESCs were fully initialised when you connected M1 with full throttle! When button 1 & 4 is pressed while the KK2 is power up, it will send that throttle signal to all ESCs.
The calibration process starts only when ESC is powered up (from the battery side) with 100% throttle signal.
The power meter is just like two pieces of wire connected between battery and quad, and is not the cause for this.

You are not the first, BTW: http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showp...postcount=6708

Fred

Hi Cliff, I do understand it, what I meant to say was that I needed to swap the actual connector not the positve and negative wires. I know those need to stay the same. Positive to positive and negative to negative. For the esc to plug in to the load side I just needed the male and female plugs changed while keeping the positves and negative going to the same. Sorry for the confusion. But I'll read that again and triple check things. I basically looked at my battery connectors and charger connectors then make my adapters to work with them.

Originally Posted by theothercliff

Stop! Don't plug anything in until you understand!

I just want to make sure that what you have is good and that you don't damage stuff by plugging it in wrong. The type of connector that you have can be dangerous because it can be plugged in backwards which is very bad to do.

I am writing instructions, but before I get them written, always make sure that black wires plug into black wires and red wires plug into red wires for store bought cables.

Or you could neuter the motors by removing the props or disconnecting one leg of the wiring.

Originally Posted by efx

Thank you Fred good to know that. I'll be okay, I just have to let the fingers heal now as they still hurt. At least this got me thinking on how else we can protect fingers from props. I was thinkimg that maybe a dip switch may work bets to forc the board into esc calibration and not let any props work until this is moved back after calibration instaed of the two fingers on the butoons. Just an idea.

Best way to protect fingers from propellers is to ... remove the propellers !!!
For setup, calibration of esc's, it is not that hard to take your props off.

LiPo packs are not to be trifled with. Tapped banana plugs together once by accident when charging... vaporized part of one of the plugs.

My 4000aH 40c 3s battery can, safely, discharge 1700+W in 90 seconds and it can do a lot more unsafely.

There are a number of anecdotes featuring a 3S lipo jump-starting a full size vehicle.

Yes disconnecting props and motors makes sense as we all know this. I was outside and it was dark and at that moment when the board started acting up before I even tried recalibration. I was getting ready to fly it. So that board was working fine before as you can see on the videos I took the day before, I wasn't expecting it to stop working the next day. So this can happen to anyone no matter how careful you are. I just wanted to bring this up to make sure it doesn't happen to anyone else. Again, the board started acting up BEFORE I tried recalibrating it, this is when I found something wasn't working correctly and I didn't have any tools with me. In any case I'm not trying to make excuses for what happened, just trying to make sure others don't get caught off guard and not use the first esc plug to recalibrate your escs as was posted above. Either way thanks guys. I'm still very new to quads so I'm still learning and sometimes you learn the hard way even when you try not too. I'll try to keep it to these cuts only.

I use XT-60 connectors on most of my small and mid capacity batteries....mostly anything with 10awg wires or less. For the larger capacity and high "C" rating batteries with 8awg wires I use XT-90 connectors. Yes they're big and heavy but they work.... and work very well.
It's kinda hard to connect these incorrectly, a nice feature IMHO.

As Viper22 and brontide mentioned, some of these high capacity Li-Po's can deliver a huge amount of current very quickly. And yes.....the higher capacity and high "C" rating batteries can easily crank over an average car engine.....not a recommended thing to do though.

Cheers,
Smithy.

Originally Posted by flarssen

Right. If you scroll up a couple of posts there, you can see his parallel adapters.

My original post was about parallel adapters and connectors. There were no pictures then. He posted some pictures while I was writing the long post. The original post (no pictures) is the post you quoted in your comment.

Originally Posted by flarssen

And, why is one way more correct than the other?

http://www.wowhobbies.com/images/pro...ector_b601.jpg
http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/s...alog/17062.jpg

He does not have Deans on batteries or watt meter. His are all 4mm bullet with the red hoods.

If you have a watt meter that has the correct ends (as he now has since he modified it) or a Y cable, with these plugs, you can plug them in backwards if you don't watch that red goes to red (or if you make the cable with the wrong color, pins, hoods, etc.

If he plugs in a battery to the right hand side of his watt meter now, it will burn out because the voltage polarity will be backwards.

If you have a correctly made Y cable for using parallel batteries, and you plug things in the wrong plug of the Y, you will burn things up with these connectors. That is not possible with other connectors like Deans or XT-60.

I spent yesterday "string tuning" my Quadnid and all went well except
for one glitch where it wanted to pitch & roll to down/left with SL off.
Control input was almost non existent to get it back level. Once level
I switched on SL and it tried to pitch to inverted. Went to SAFE then
back ARMED and it was doing the same thing. I shut it down and got
another battery and all was well.

I flew 4 batteries today and it flew very well w/SL off & on.

I ran out of HK 9x5 props so I tuned with GF 10x4.7s.
I'm not sure if this is the reason my run times have gone down.
I'll have to get some more 9x5s and see what happens.

In the mean time, I was wondering if there is any correlation of
power usage with high gains as opposed to lower gains.
If so, what would be an estimate in percentage?