I'm assembling a quadcopter and have run into a problem
So, I have one two cell LiPo battery if I've understood things right, it outputs about 7.4V and has one ampere hour.
Now, I have one radio receiver and one flight controller (It's basically the motors + a circuit that stabilizes the copter). If I connect the battery to the receiver it it works, If I understand my multimeter right, the receiver used 7.5V.
IF I connect the battery directly to the flight controller it also works and also seems to use 7.5 Volts.
Now, If I've understood things right, if I were to connect all there 3 in a series, the receiver and the flight controller would each get half of the voltage, which I guess is not enough(?).
So what I did was to connect them in parallel which, if I've understood this would mean they would both get 7.5V.
However, when I connected everything I started seeing smoke from the flight controller and removed the battery ASAP.
So now on to my question, Have I made some serious error in my reasoning or is it more likely that I made some error in my actual uhm. connecting stuff?
I've triple checked that I didn't mix up positive and negative anywhere
EDIT: ok, so I did some troubleshooting and I found out that most receivers have the same output voltage as they have input voltage, so my receiver would output 7.5V (which I tested). And normally receivers should operate at 5V or so. which means that the flight controller receives more voltage than it should.
I'll now try to connect an UBEC before the receiver to reduce the voltage
Second edit: so I tried with the UBEC and then it seems like the flight controller didn't get enough power, the LED display lost it's backlight illumination, so I hokked up a seprate battery to the UBEC so the flight controller and receiver have different batteries and then I fried the flight controller. I'll buy a new one and do some schematic-drawing next time, thanks for the help everyone
Best Answer
I have friends who have tried to hook up similar things in "parallel" and all they ended up doing was providing a short between the batteries and thus the smoke and very hot wires.
Take a closer look at your parallel connections (or provide us a diagram) to make sure that you are not just providing a "+" to "-" of the same battery. It sounds like an obvious thing not to do, but when adding all of the RC connections in you might not notice what is happening. As a result you are exposing your components to a very large amount of current.
Just a thought, could be something else entirely. Good Luck