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11Jul/119

Paris MultiWiiCopter V4.0 board

Hooking up the components of the Paris MultiWiiCopter V4.0 board is a pretty straightforward job so if I can offer any advice, take your time and make sure not to miss any pins like I did. After making a concerted effort to have neat wiring and solder joints between the Arduino Pro Mini, the Wii Motion Plus, the BMA180 accelerometer and the BMP085 Pressure sensor, I found I wasn't getting any output from the sensors in the MultiWiiConf software. After deconstructing the board sensor by sensor, I found pins A4 and A5 from the Arduino board to the Paris board had been missed so effectively they weren't connected to anything. Now those particular pins are pretty important (well I guess most pins on the Arduino are pretty important to connect) as they take the input from the sensors! They're labelled as SDA and SCL and carry all the important stuff from the gyro, accel and baro sensor as input to the Arduino.

If you're familiar with the layout of an Arduino, you can see in the photo below the two pads in question missing any connecting pins. After soldering up these pins, everything worked fine.


*August 2011- Some more info on hooking up the baro sensor (http://fangin.com/blog/2011/07/26/connecting-the-bmp085-baro-to-paris-v4/)

*9th October 2011 - Added two pictures to show the connection between the BMA180 SDI Pin (#7) to the SDA connection on the Paris board.

*23rd December 2012 - Added a picture showing that I soldered the DC Bus closed. The advantage of leaving it open is to prevent noise entering the CPU and sensor section, the downside is a seperate uBEC is required to power the ESC / Servo side.

 

WMP, Paris V4.0 BMA180, Paris V4.0

 

Troubleshooting the new V4 board by connecting the output of the new WMP into the old (known working board).

Paris V4 Troubleshooting

Comments (9) Trackbacks (0)
  1. Hi, thanx for sharing you experiences. Could you send me how did you connect BMP085 to the other components, please?
    Thank you,Jan

  2. Hi, it's a little hard to tell from the photos but it doesn't look like you have anything connected to the SDI pin of the BMA180. Is that right? Looking on the MultiWiiCopter site, in one of their photos of the 4.0 board, it looks like they have a green wire connected to that pin.
    Thanks
    Steve

  3. Steve,

    I added two more pictures to confirm the SDI pin (#7) of the BMA180 is connected to the SDA pad on the board. In that last photo, it’s the white wire that shows that connection. Hope that helps. 

    Matt

  4. Thanks Matt, much appreciated.

  5. Hi,
    Many thanks for the guide – exactly what I needed.  Did you enable any of the jumpers on the paris board?
    Iain

  6. Hi Iain,

    Are you referring to the DC bus split on the bottom of the board? I've just added a photo confirming I left it closed (connected) so the two sections aren't split and I don't need to use a seperate uBEC to power the ESC / servo side of the bus.

    Matt

  7. Hi Matt,
    Thanks for clearing that up.  I had been reading about people blowing the outputs on the bmp085 by not getting the solder joints correct.
     
    Cheers again and merry xmas.
     
    Iain

  8. Hello! Thanks for the pics, there are pretty clear. I have one question. I will be using the same setup except for the acc. I will be using a MW+ and a NK (both clones). Also, I am thinking about using an external BEC for the noise issues I read somewhere, but do you think this is really necessary? Also, If I use an external BEC, I read somewhere that since I am powering everything through it, I need to disconnect the power (VCC) cable of the FTDI sparkfun breakout board to be able to get the readings…is this true??
    Thanks a lot!


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