Caddx Moonlight VTX Fried

Author: Dave
Date: 11.25.24 - 3:49am

Several friends fly RC planes FPV. One thing that is highly desirable is the ability to add head tracking so you can look around and see more. With a drone this isnt a problem since you can yaw at any time, but planes are more limited in flight.

The way this used to be done is to add a gyro contraption on the outside of your goggles, use a power splitter and have more wires going down to select RC transmitters and use the trainer port to get a couple more RC channels to the plane. The gimble is then hooked up to the planes receiver and takes a couple more servo ports. Lots of wires and setup.

Walksnail has a slick new system where the goggles L have the gyro built right in, and automatically transmit 3 extra signals directly to their moonlight vtx. The gimble then plugs directly into the vtx over a dedicated port. This is the more compact and efficient setup so got me to shell out the $600 for the setup (goggles, vtx, and gimble)

So out of the box all 3 need the firmware update. Ok..When I went to power on the VTX, it worked as expected. That is until it had a dead short on the 4th power up and set the power wires on fire!

I did a little probing, and it turns out two of the internal power wires had been pinched in assembly and the insulation squished out of the way letting the raw wires touch. Ouch. While my power leads mostly acted like a fuse, the micro power plug to the vtx also fried and was broken.

I contacted support, they responded well. He wanted to try to power up the boards and see if either one of them would work. The wire to the top board was an edge mount with some silicon to prevent shorts to the case. I didnt want to get into replacing that, so I just added some heat shrink over the compromised section of the wires. I then soldered on some power jumpers to the wires pads to the lower board.

VTX was still operable and could be salvaged. He kinda wanted me to keep it now that it was "fixed" but for $180 brand new thing, I wanted a brand new thing. I will have plenty of time to crash it and have to repair it later. They accepted the return without a problem. He had me mail it back to teh local distributor I bought it from, and is now mailing me a new VTX from china.

So fingers crossed the new one had better QC.

Comments: (1)

On 11.25.24 - 4:14am Dave wrote:
Ill also add in that the Gimble update requires a JST SH 1.0mm 3 pin plug and TTL-USB adapter which were not included in the $145 GM3 gimble. Apparently there is also a way to use betaflight pass through to do it. Mads Tech has a video on it. Once this was wired up the update went fine.

I was lucky to have a plug on hand because I am well stocked, but for $0.02 it would have been classy for them to include one in the wire pack. The $7 usb adapter was easy enough to order off of amazon. They do sell a $15 adapter on their website.

Hopefully the head tracking part will run smooth once I get the new vtx in. I havent been able to test that yet since the fry happened pre firmware update.

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