#micro crawler

I got the 55mm metal axles recently and used it in my Orlandoo Hunter Defender build, but after thinking about it more, I decided to switch it over to the Rock Crawler that I built previously instead.

The reason is because the metal axles would be clearly visible on the Rock Crawler and looks really awesome, and the weight also makes it an even better crawler. As both of them are on 55mm axles, it’s a pretty straight forward swap.

Here it is with the axle swap completed.

I just received my 1/24 FMS FCX24M Land Rover Discovery. Here are photos comparing it to my 1/43 LDARC X43. It’s still remarkable to see how much smaller 1/43 is to 1/24 scale.

Obviously, first thing to do is to put it to some tests … Haha … I built some cardboard obstacles to see what the FCX24M can do.

Here is a video of the FCX24M in action. Really happy with how it performs out of the box.

Recently, I build 2 Orlandoo Hunter kits. The first kit I built was the OH35A01 Jeep, and I used the Orlandoo Hunter electronics, like the D4L transmitter, receiver ESC and 300RPM brushed motor. The second kit I built was the OH32X01 Rock Crawler. I used an AM32 ESC with a 1:30 micro brushless motor and the LDARC CT01 transmitter/CR1400M receiver.

Below is a video comparing how they perform.

The sound in the video above is from the Jeep on top, and as you can see, when it comes up against the obstacle, it just stops moving because there isn't enough torque to overcome it. So, I then had to press on the throttle a lot more until there is sufficient torque to get it up that tyre.

The Rock Crawler at the bottom can just maintain the same speed throughout, as the brushless motor has a lot of torque even at low speeds and was able to climb up that tyre without me having to increase the throttle.

Got myself the Orlandoo Hunter ME5-280 Alloy Threaded Shocks. They increase the travel over stock shocks by 90% and looks good too! I also bought the set of extra springs with different varying stiffness in case I want to make adjustments.

Putting it together is fairly straightforward and you can just directly replace your stock shocks. You do need to make slight adjustments to the length of some of the axle links so that the drive shaft angle don’t go too far out.

Below is a comparison between the stock shock absorber and the ME5-280. It is quite a lot taller.

Here is the final result.

Below is a video of my upgraded Rock Crawler in action.

You might have seen the AM32 Brushless ESC setup tutorial I posted previously over here. While it worked, we don't really know how that ESC was configured, or if it was properly configured in the factory. So, I got the AM32 ESC USB link module and hooked it up to my computer to check it out and see what I can do with the settings.

You connect the AM32 ESC's 3-pin connector that plugs into the receiver to the ESC USB link instead, taking note of the signal pin marked with "S". Connect the ESC to the battery, then plug in the USB-C cable to connect to your computer.

Next, use a browser that supports web serial like Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome, and point it to https://am32.ca. This USB link module uses the CH340 USB to Serial chip, so depending on your OS, you might need to install the driver for it. You can just click the "Port Select" button and see if a window pops up and shows you a "USB Serial ... " device. If nothing is listed, you probably need to install the driver. If a device is listed, you can just select it and click "Connect".

If everything worked, you should see a "Connected to device" status message on screen. Now, click on "Configurator". That's is, you can now see the current configuration of your AM32 ESC, and you can change it as you wish.

Before you mess with the settings, do check out the following video tutorial. It gives a decent explanation of the various settings and recommendations.

I followed most of his recommendations, except for the Motor KV and Motor Poles. I changed Motor KV to 4300 as that is the spec of the brushless motor I am using, and I change the Motor Poles to 12 (I counted the number of magnets to check).

Below is a video of my AM32 ESC with the above settings. I think it performs quite smoothly across the the throttle range, don't you?

Now, to be very frank, I don't really know if my settings now actually makes it perform better. It's really hard to tell based on the feel. I will still need to do more experimenting. I think it's running just a little more smoothly, but it could just be my imagination ... lol

I do have another AM32 ESC that seems to behave a bit odd and gets a bit out of sync at certain speeds, so I suspect there may be some misconfigured settings. However, it refuses to connect to my computer, so I am unable to change its settings. I guess it's a defective unit.

This is my third RC Defender, but the first one that I had to build. Having built two Orlandoo Hunter kits previously, things went pretty smoothly. For this build, I am also using a prepainted body kit that came with all the decals and painted rims.

There are also a bunch of upgrade parts like the roof rack, metal bumper, roof accessories, etc.

Another major upgrade is the use of metal axles. I chose to use 55mm axles, instead of the 50mm stock axles to increase the track width. That will make it more stable and I think it looks better too. Since the metal axles comes prebuilt, that saves us quite a bit of time.

Compared to my previous builds, something that I am doing differently this time is using a 1.6 mm screw tap to create the perfect sized screw threads for the ball joint screws. That completely eliminated the risk of the plastic parts breaking.

The rest of the build is fairly straightforward. I started with mounting the servo on the axle, but I didn't like how it is limiting the suspension travel, so I switched to chassis mount instead.

Next, instead of working with the electronics, I decided to finish the body first. Even though the body is prepainted, there are still quite a lot of parts to assemble and glue to the body.

I totally forgot to take pics of the roof rack assembly. A small hand drill was used to make a few holes to mount the ladder that goes up to the roof rack. The water slide decals were fairly easy to apply and looks awesome!

So, here is what the completed body looks like. I think it turned out great.

The Orlandoo Hunter Rock Crawler OH32X01 has very very little space for all the electronics, so I decided to go with the LDARC CR1400M receiver that measures just 13.5mm x 24mm and supports 4 channels, which is more than enough for what we are trying to do. It works with the CT01 transmitter that has a nice bunch of features.

The only thing to note with using this receiver is that it uses ZH 1.5mm 3-pin connectors which uses less space compared to the bigger 2.54mm 3-pin Dupont connectors commonly used in bigger receivers. This means we need to change the connectors on the ESC, servo, light controller, etc. I used the AM32 brushless ESC setup for this. To learn more about that, click here.

I ordered a bunch of pre-wired ZH 1.5mm 3-pin connectors and soldered it to my parts following the colours on the wires, without realising that the position of the pins on the receiver is actually different from the colors on the wires. The top connector below is how it was wired by default, but I had to use a small screw driver to get the connector pins out and change their positions. You really want to be very sure you get the pins right.

Also, because our AM32 ESC comes with BEC, we need to follow (2) below to solder that 2 copper pads to the actual battery connections so that the receiver can measure the actual voltage of the battery and share that information to the transmitter.

Below is how it looks like all wired up and powered on for testing. I remapped switch D to Channel 3 to control the lights. You can also see the battery voltage on the transmitter's LCD screen.

Everything worked great and I am really happy with this combo. Below is a quick test of the fully completed Rock Crawler in action.

I have been looking at finding a low cost setup for a brushless system for my Orlandoo Hunter crawlers and came across a cheap AM32 ESC available from AliExpress that some in the Orlandoo Hunter community have started using.

Had to do some research and with the help from some members of the Orlandoo Builders Guild, I managed to piece together all the information needed to put this together. The cost of the AM32 ESC, micro brushless motor and servo came to just $28. Below is just a quick demo of this setup and I have to say, it works remarkably well.