thats a question, how should one dispose of the ammonium persulphate ?
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Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets

I buried mine in the back yard with plenty of water. The trees can do something with it. After all, ammonia is a natural substance....

I was reading a website on the toner transfer method and they suggested soaking it up in paper and throwing it in the bin.

I just noticed this line

if fail =< 4 then main
if fail = 4 then motor_off

and changed it to

if fail =< 4 then main
if fail > 4 then motor_off

but I still have to wait for 2 seconds for it to turn off. I might change it to 1 fail before turning off to speed it up a bit.

The second lot of code, for the relay controller, is fine tho.

Yeah, Neweyn and I worked out the related issue with the failsafe. The reason it takes so long to work is that the picaxe takes around 400ms to check the pulsin function. So if it's checking every 4 pulses, there is 1600ms (1.6sec) which is why it delays so much in failsafe, but works fine in the driving functions.

This was one of the reasons I started looking at upping the speed of the 08M to 8mhz, but then I had to keep changing it back to 4Mhz to handle the PWM properly and it was becoming annoying. Shortly after I started looking into PIC chips like Jake, but I never got that far
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https://www.halfdonethings.com/

I'm wondering if it waits for a high on the pin and then use count for say 4ms.

eg.
pulse:
If receiver = 1 then time
else
timer = timer + 1
if timer >= maxtime then failsafe
goto pulse

time:
count receiver,4000,w4
w4 = w4 + (error value from the if statement)
goto main

And knock it up to 8MHz for a finer resolution

The issue I was was that while it was counting pulses, it took too long. I'm guessing it's because the picaxe doesn't have an interrupt function. When you run the pulsin command, if it doesn't recieve a pulse instantly in the loop, it seems to hang (bout 400ms), waiting for a pulse.

Dumhed explain bits of this when he played with the serial commands for his picaxe 433mhz radio. The serial command doesn't stop if it doesn't get a signal, it just keeps waiting, and if nothing comes... it's stuck there till it gets hard reset

I was pretty content with the "turn the transmitter off and it stopped" failsafe without the counting system. As long as the signal was withing 1.5ms and 2.5ms, it was pretty likely to have come from the transmitter
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https://www.halfdonethings.com/

yep, that's why I ended up doing a hardware failsafe on my boards.
If the picaxe gets stuck waiting for a pulse, it stops sending an OK pulse to the failsafe, and after a short delay, the outputs are turned off.

It works pretty well, but I haven't played with it for ages.
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The Engine Whisperer - fixer of things

is it possible to poll the pin with the radio on it? rather than pulse in'ing.
IE do you have access to the hardware timers?
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Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets

I took my it in to uni today, for the obligatory oooh aaah session. I just had a drill motor hanging off it, going up, down, full forward to full back, showing all of the sparking at the motors brushes . I like it.

Easy question. Isn't it a better idea to use a diode arrangement like on a H-bridge circuit, rather than capacitors, to prevent the relays from arcing? It makes much more sense to me to use diodes. They have already taken out all of the ringing in the motor = no singing

Also, to run it at a higher voltage I was going to run the coils from the 12V reg. Instead could I put a resistor series with the coils?

capacitors in paralell with the contacts give the current some where to flow as the contacts open so it helps to stop an arc from forming they discharge again when the contacts close

I made a bit of a wiring mess

what the crap is it ? a speed controler ?

Hopefully

You can save a lot of mess by taping the relays into pairs and using little 25mm bridges across the positive and negative terminals to make it a single pair of power wires...

Like this:


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https://www.halfdonethings.com/

The reason why there is so much wire, is because I have no idea how or where it will fit, so I've left a lot of room for movement.