Some helpful words for future improvement

[MaxDu]

Dear OneTesla:

I received your OneTesla TS kit for Christmas, and I wanted to tell you that assembling it and testing it was overall a great experience and extremely entertaining.

That being said, I would love to talk about some things that could have been better. These are not complaints, but instead friendly advice.

Interrupter board:
The two voltage regulators were very hard to disseminate. This might have been my own problem, but I had to search up part numbers since they didn't match the part numbers on the manual.

The LCD contrast is sensitive to the battery voltage (I assume you use a voltage divider contrast setup). The initial voltage of the 3-volt batteries made the entire LCD maxed out, and I had to drain the batteries through a resistor shunt to lower the contrast. I suggest you add a manual contrast adjustment.

The standoffs for the LCD board are just a little too tall (I understand--these are standard sizes and there isn't much to work with, so this might be nit-picking), so the connection with the LCD male headers are "questionable"

I recommend using anti-bump protection for the switch controls, aka there's a very small (like 20 ms) timeout per switch signal. I found it very hard to switch between manuals because it would register multiple clicks.

Main power board/overall
Again, the voltage regulators were hard to tell the difference between, since they weren't the 7805 regulators that were specified on the manual.

This might not be feasible, but I recommend using a better breakout point connection point

The coil endcaps contained the wrong size hex holes for the nuts that were in the kit--I had to glue them in place, which worked fine. This might not have been a design error, just a supply error, so it might not have been your error.

The manual specified FAT as the format file for the SD card, but the only format option I could get was FAT32, which worked fine. It did specify in the manual to not use FAT32, which is a bit misleading.

The manual specified a 250 C soldering temperature for the receiver, but none of the solders I had could melt at that temperature. I used a 330 C temperature and it was fine.


Those are the few things that I've noticed, coming from an electrical engineering background. Again, these are not meant to be negative in any sense. I love what you guys are doing, and I just wanted to give some suggestions based on my experience building the kit.