I recently purchased the thruster commder RB-BLU 136 just starting testing. It’s simple and impressive. I was running it on a Chevy vote battery 24v the basic ESC needs a external 5v power I bought a cheep one 5v 3A. The Smoke came out right away LOL so what is the amp draw 5v on the bord? I’m running 2 T200 testing on my 14ft John boat. Soon it will be the way Airplanes navigate on water
In your setup, you should be able to directly connect the POWER connection to your 24 V battery.
When powered via the POWER connection (as in your setup), the Thruster Commander can be powered by a 7~28 VDC unregulated power supply (such as your 24 V battery). The microcontroller on the Thruster Commander runs on 5 V, which is supplied from the 7~28 V supply via an onboard linear regulator. Assuming you aren’t connecting anything to the 5v pins on the Commander other than the potentiometers and the pre-installed jumper on the SWITCH pin, it should draw less than 10 mA.
You should not need the DC-DC converter unless you plan to run other systems off the Commander’s 5v pins, in which case the onboard regulator will not be able to provide enough power and you would need to connect the DC-DC converter’s 5 V supply directly to one of the Commander’s 5v pins and disconnect the POWER connector.
As for the Basic ESCs, their circuitry is actually powered directly by the battery in your setup (through the red and black wires) via an onboard regulator, so you do not need to provide 5 V to them.
The documentation for the Thruster Commander mentions ESCs with and without Battery Eliminator Circuits (BECs) because ESCs previously sold by Blue Robotics, as well as some other ESCs sold by other vendors, have BECs that can supply 5 V to other electronics through a third, red wire in the PWM connection. In such cases, the Thruster Commander will be powered by the ESC’s BEC via its 5v pins, eliminating the need to connect 7~28 V through the POWER connector. However, the current iterations of Basic ESCs, including the ones you are using, do not have built-in BECs, which is why you need to supply 7~28 V power to the Commander via the POWER connector in your setup.
Please see the Thruster Commander product page and the Thruster Commander guide for more details. You should be able to use the same wiring as is shown in the guide.
Thanks that wasn’t clear on the small card that was sent with the comande board. So I added the 24v to 5v 3a just to be sure. I must have gotten a bad one it Smoked in less than two minutes. I Really Hate to see Smoke. I’ll look over the instructions again. Hopping to do real time testing again today. I’ve setup the thrusters at +&- 45 degrees for more turning speed. Hopefully I’ll Belding a lot of these setups. It would be nice to 24v thrust with only 12v lol. Thanks again have wander full holiday