Nice. The movement looks great. So smooth and responsive.

So, I'm a little at a loss on what you did. It sounds like you did remove a ground wire and things started working. So they were correct? You did have a ground loop.

You say you removed the ground wire between the Sabertooth and Arduino. It's hard to see your schematic you posted above because it's so light. Is this the one:

Hi Dave,  yes the wire you highlighted I have removed, but thats unrelated to thr movement.

The smoother movement is down to DJ adding the option for me to increase max speed for spin.

I'm still a little nervous every time I power it on since the other unit work fine for a while before it caught on fire.

I personally don't think the issue is the loop itself but the current that is diverted through that side of the board when the loop is present and that side of th3 board not being designed for that kind of current flow. I would hazard a guess that if both grounds were connected to b- this may not be an issue.

So with no common ground, how is voltage referenced? I’m confused how a circuit with no common ground would work because the voltages would be floating

Hi DJ the common ground reference is there, the 12vdc buck has a pass through ground so it's the same as the Sabers.

So our theory here is that the red dotted line portion of the loop in my simplified ground diagram is not rated for 25 amps. It's the only thing that makes sense. Not an issue if the controller is on a separate power circuit or being power by the saber itself. Speaking to someone else on Facebook they say this is a known issue but not openly explained.

We did it!!!!! And we could not have done it without the help from here thanks.

2 days at the con most of the issues we ran into were mechanical in nature. I learned a lot and probably have a good months worth of redesign/testing to do. But there's nothing like having it out in the real world.

Connection issues with VNC, I completely forgot the onboard PC needs an internet connection for the Mobile hotspot to work. First day I had to beg/borrow a monitor/mouse to start up but then I set it to auto connect to my phones hotspot and just VNC in from my phone for start up and pre checks. Worked great.

Dj the options for max speed where awesome!!!! Super usefull depending on were I was in the convention center I could adjust for the surface, carpet and brick needed more power, tile dialed down to same setting as my home. Would have been great to be able to maybe have multiple pre-sets, like Hi/low that you could then be tied to a button or script.

I have about a page worth of upgraded new features to work on adding but overall it went down really well, and the kids loved having him around. Ran into a few people who are thinking of droid builds but are nervous about the control side of things, and where pretty impress with how simple the programing was on Arc. Might see some more ARC droids here in NS.

This is outstanding! I'm so happy you were able to work out enough bugs to get him working. It looks like it was a fantastic event and you all had a blast. This really makes me smile!

Awesome!!! I enjoy hearing success stories - specially when there are so many potential unknowns. But you did spend a lot of time prepping. Good idea about being able to set those values programmatically!