Parts came in today.
Wooo!!!
Once again, big thanks to mini-Box for the great service and discounts.
Here is a good image to give you an idea of the scale of things. The ITX board is 6.5 by 6.5 inches. It should fit just about anywhere inside the tank bays. The problem with the tank is that the inside is sectioned off by inner walls. This gives the body some stength but gets in my way.
My fist step was to get the board up and running and do some tests to see how much current she pulls. I found an old 10Gig laptop hard drive, a floppy, CD-Rom, and a copy of good ole Windows 98. I figured there was no good reason to stress the little guy out with a copy of WindowsXP, especially since it only has 128M of Ram right now.
My first problem was that it drew way more current than I was hoping for. I must confess that I didn't read the freaking specs like I should have and I was expecting about a 1Amp draw from the board. Once I strip it down to the board and the Hard Drive only, its pulling about 2.1Amps. Eventually I'll replace that Laptop HD with a Compact Flash card and that should save me about .5 Amps of draw but its still a hog. I wish that I had gotten the MII6000 version that is fanless and draws much less power.
I took a look at some specs later and noted that the MII10000 draws about 15Watts when idle, and the MII6000 draws only 11Watts. Maybe the extra processing power will be worth it, we'll see.
In light of this new info, I realized that one little 12V 7Ah battery wouldn't be enough. Not only would it empty itself too fast, it would probably run hot. Luckily I already had 2 batteries of the same type so I started figuring how I would fit all this crap inside the hull of the tank.
Here is the clean tank hull, the motors and gearboxes are the only internal devices from the orginal tank.
Here is how I plan on squeezing it all in there. The motherboard is in the rear with the faceplate mounted in the back of the tank. Batteries go in the large center bay of the hull on either side, this leaves me with a gap between them for the hard drive or the SV203 or whatever else. The RDFR speed controller goes up front next to the motors it runs.
(click for larger image)
Once again, big thanks to mini-Box for the great service and discounts.
Here is a good image to give you an idea of the scale of things. The ITX board is 6.5 by 6.5 inches. It should fit just about anywhere inside the tank bays. The problem with the tank is that the inside is sectioned off by inner walls. This gives the body some stength but gets in my way.
My fist step was to get the board up and running and do some tests to see how much current she pulls. I found an old 10Gig laptop hard drive, a floppy, CD-Rom, and a copy of good ole Windows 98. I figured there was no good reason to stress the little guy out with a copy of WindowsXP, especially since it only has 128M of Ram right now.
My first problem was that it drew way more current than I was hoping for. I must confess that I didn't read the freaking specs like I should have and I was expecting about a 1Amp draw from the board. Once I strip it down to the board and the Hard Drive only, its pulling about 2.1Amps. Eventually I'll replace that Laptop HD with a Compact Flash card and that should save me about .5 Amps of draw but its still a hog. I wish that I had gotten the MII6000 version that is fanless and draws much less power.
I took a look at some specs later and noted that the MII10000 draws about 15Watts when idle, and the MII6000 draws only 11Watts. Maybe the extra processing power will be worth it, we'll see.
In light of this new info, I realized that one little 12V 7Ah battery wouldn't be enough. Not only would it empty itself too fast, it would probably run hot. Luckily I already had 2 batteries of the same type so I started figuring how I would fit all this crap inside the hull of the tank.
Here is the clean tank hull, the motors and gearboxes are the only internal devices from the orginal tank.
Here is how I plan on squeezing it all in there. The motherboard is in the rear with the faceplate mounted in the back of the tank. Batteries go in the large center bay of the hull on either side, this leaves me with a gap between them for the hard drive or the SV203 or whatever else. The RDFR speed controller goes up front next to the motors it runs.
(click for larger image)
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