hydra240 issues

[tiletony]

i just finished putting on the connections to my new hydra 240.....set the throttle points and pluged in the batteries...this is all on the tble nothing is in the boat yet just testing it out...pulled the trigger a few times and it was slow..i was running 2 packs 2s 8000mah thunder power lipos...the controller has 2 sets of wires that seem to be in parrelle...as the motor ran slow thinking it would run like its on 4s....so pluged in the 2 packs on a series connection and now that battery lead will not work...so one connections works when a battery is plugged in (very rough) and the other battery connections does nothing....i thought this thing was good for up to 6s?

[Raydee]

On the 240 OR any Hydra with 4 battery wires the wires need to be soldered together. So basically you have 4 battery wires that need to be 2 battery wires when done. You cannot hook up one battery to one set and the other to the other set of wires.

http://www.castlecreations.com/support/documents/hydra_hv_user_guide.pdf
Read 2.1 in the instructions, they don't explain it as clear as they should but the seperate power boards in the hydra controllers aren't internally paralleled so you have to wire it externally that way. What I normally do is solder a bullet on each wire and they take a little of the insulation of each of the red and black wires and make a bridge with a small piece of wire between the two leads and solder them together. If you are going to run your batts in parallel that works nice because you will have four bullets when done. If you plan to run your boat in series you can just solder one bullet to a black and one bullet to a red lead and then take the existing black and red and solder them directly to the outside of the same color bullet.

[ncornacchi]

Tony is right. I had some fun getting these wire soldered together into a 5.5mm bullet, then I capped them with an electrical crimp called a buchanan, and shrink wrapped...very solid and clean looking. The wires, being run in parralell, should be terminated at the same end. At least, that is the code for electrical wires in parralell..

[tiletony]

ok i soldeder the wires together (after i had them seperate) and when i pulled in the battery with no motor hooked up it smoked a lot of black smelly smoke from the middle of the controller...my hv120 smoked almost them same a while back...could it be my batteries or my connections???my batteries are only 10 to 20 cycles used i bought them new from thunder power and the connections are traxxas..i shrink wrap them and the work no problems on my rc trucks just this boat i have trouble with

[Raydee]

hmmm that's not right. Can you post a pic of the connectors and the ESC? Did you take out the red wire from the receiver harness to disable the onboard BEC? Sounds to me like that is the part that smoked.

[tiletony]

that was one of the first things i did eas cut the red wire..i am trying to post some pics but having a hard time figuring it out

[Raydee]

Hmm that is strange that is smoked then. Maybe you already did the damage by hooking up the packs with the wires not connected? I never tried that so I have no idea if that would be the culprit or not.

To post the pics just go to the manage attachments down below.

[tiletony]

thats what i was thinking... if i did damge to the bec once i cut the wire should it still work??

[Raydee]

Honestly I am not sure but I would think that if only the BEC portion of the radio board fried it might still be fine to use with a external BEC. The problem will be if more than just the BEC fried.

[tiletony]

would that be the problem with my hv 120??? it had a red wire which i did not cut because it wouldnt work with out an external bec, but i left it uncut and it fried too???? i did plug in the batteries before i cut the red wire with the hydra 240!!!man this is getting expensive

[Raydee]

THe internal BEC is only good fr up to 3s, after that you need to remove the red with from the receiver connector and add a external bec. Will either of the controllers work with a external BEC and the red wire removed? If not just send them back to Castle and explain that you made a mistake and they will problably repair them for you. They have been great to me so far with the two controllers that died on me.

[tiletony]

ok that is what i keep doing....i did plug in 2s with the red wire and it was cool...then i pluged in 4s and it smoked so i quickly unplugged it and cut the red wire...and it wont work now...thank you so much for helping with this...i have blown 3 esc doing this...castle was cool and fixed it the first time and the second they made me pay a little but they said it was because i had to high of a kv motor...even though i told them it blew up on the bench not the water....