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Upgrading To A Heng Long RX18 MFU And I/R
In this guide I will outline how to upgrade the RX14 board to an RX18 MFU board and add on the heng long I/R to make a battle ready tank. For the guide I upgraded my Panzer IV F2 and used all heng long stock parts. There is quite a bit of soldering involved, but on a scale of 1-10 i give it a 3. Most of it is all done at once and easy to reach all the spots to desolder and its just solder splicing connectors back on. To make it easier to follow i divided the process into two parts, part one is upgrading to the RX18 and part two is installing the I/R components with a third optional step of wiring it all up to work with the left sticks up triggering. At the end of the guide you will also find cart buttons to add the kits which include all the parts you need to complete this project up to step 2.
RX18 MFU
3 two wire red/black cables
1 three wire blue/green/yellow cable
1 upper hull wiring harness
heat shrink tubing
double sided foam tape or other method to secure RX18 to hull
zip ties
switch for smoke (*see paragraph two)
Tools Needed -
Phillips Screwdriver
wire clippers
soldering iron
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We begin with the disassembly of the tank so we can swap out the RX14 for the RX18. I won't go into major details here because if your attempting this it's probably not the first time you disassembled a heng long tank. Once you have the hull apart you will need to remove the RX14 from it's mount and then start desoldering the connections for the motors, switch and battery, and sound control knob. The receiver, speaker, and smoke unit all already have their proper wires and connectors. I suggest desoldering one connection at a time and resoldering it to the proper connector. This way wires from one motor wont get soldered to a connector for another motor.
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Before getting into the meat of the project it should be noted that the RX14 has one major difference over the RX18 and that's in it's onboard smoke switch. You can see this in the third from left photo above. Heng Long appears to have adopted the proper technique of using a single pole switch inline for the smoker power wires with the new RX18 board. This means that upgrading from the RX14 will require splicing in a switch and locating a new mounting point. Of course if you don't use the smoker you can just tuck the wire away and move on.
I started with the motor wires since they were easy to reach. They only have red/black and they match right up to the new connectors red and black wires. When you solder make sure you put some heat shrink tubing onto the loose wire and then shrink it after the soldering is done. I then moved onto the switch which is basically the same thing but you need to make sure the battery ground and switch ground black wires are soldered together. Next we get to the volume control knob, it has three wires and none of the colors match. If your using the blue/green/yellow 3 wire then the colors match red to blue, black to green, and yellow to yellow. Now that we have all the proper connectors soldered and each joint protected with heat shrink tubing its time to start plugging everything in.
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The markings on the RX18 can be a bit cryptic. We can start plugging it all in starting with CN1, plug the two wire battery plug into here. Next is the 3 wire volume control which gets plugged into CN4. The 2 wire speaker cable plugs into CN5. Left motor 2 wire cable plugs into CN6 and the right motor cable into CN7. The 3 wire receiver cable plugs into CN8. CN9 is the upper hull wiring harness which may be a bit short so just leave it loose and plugged into the rx18 for now. CN10 is where the smoke unit plugs into the rx18. With everything plugged in we can now try the maiden test of the new rx18. For this we can just loosely place the hull on top but make sure to reconnect the upper hull harness and the antenna wire. If everything is soldered right and connected properly the tank should start right up and run with its new internals. If its all working it's time to mount the RX18 and secure all the wires out of the way with zip ties. Then reassemble the tank and test it once more....congratulations you now have an upgraded I/R ready tank!
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Parts needed -
I/R Receiver
I/R Emitter
1 Three wire connector
2 thin wires to mount emitter led
1 I/R Harness connector block
heat shrink tubing
zip ties
Tools needed -
phillips screwdriver
wire clippers
soldering iron
We begin with the 3 wire connector which will mount the I/R receiver and soldering it to the harness block. If your using a 3 wire with the colors blue/green/yellow solder them in the following order. With the harness connector facing you and the joints to solder farthest away (see first picture below), solder the green wire to the point third from left, the yellow to the point fourth from left and the blue fifth from left. Next up is the I/R emitter and since there is no harness for this the color wires used will vary. I will describe it referencing black/red with my wires being solid green for black and white for red. You just need to decide what color of yours is black and which is red then remember it during the process. You will notice the emitter has two prongs, the short one is the ground and the black wire will be soldered to it with red going to the other. Make sure you get some heat shrink tubing on the bare prongs though. The mounting process will probably twist them up and they could short the emitter. Now that we have the soldered emitter assembly we can solder that to the harness block. Your "red" wire solders to the very first point on the left and the black to the second from left.
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You should now have the completed I/R harness assembly and now is a good time to plug it in and make sure it works. Your going to need another I/R tank though to test with though. Your I/R wire harness should have one side with a 5 wire plug and a two wire plug. Since my panzer does not have an MG light I was unable to include that in this write up. It and the recoil should just be soldered to the 8 point block the I/R is soldered to, using a Stug as reference will help. Plug the 5 wire connector into CN2 on the RX18 board. If you have another I/R tank you can start them up and gently place the tanks new I/R facing the right way and battle. If they work you should see two shaking tanks from the hits.
Parts needed -
Reed Relay P/N 275-232 (Radio Shack)
Flash LED (can reuse the airsoft warning LED)
Wire for connections
Zip ties
Heat shrink tubing
Tools needed -
phillips screwdriver
wire clippers
soldering iron
Assuming you have everything apart the first thing we want to do is find the block where we will solder the relay's coil trigger wires to. Having a volt meter to test this with can save extra work later or possibly a blown RX18. In the first photo below you can see the small square pcb board i found that supplies 5volt power on left upstick. You'll want to check your version with the tank on and make sure it's dead with neutral left stick and supplying 5 or so volts when you push up on left stick. If so, you can solder a red and black wire to thier appropriate positions. In the same photo i used a small brown wire for black and white w/brown stripe as my red. These can then be soldered to the coil contacts on the reed relay. Now we have power to our relay and we need to solder the wires that will be used to complete the circuit to trigger the fire sequence. Same deal here, you'll need two wires red/black which get soldered to the two points on the far right of the I/R harness block. Use the second photo below for reference if you need to. This photo also shows the points to solder the flash LED wires to. The black LED wire goes to the second from right point and the red LED wire goes to the fourth point from the right. You can basically ignore colors since the cirucit we're closing with the red/black wires is a loop rather than power/ground wires. I chose to repurpose my airsoft guns red warning LED as my muzzle flash and did not need to find a new mount for the flash LED. If you're using a seperate flash LED you will need to mount it somewhere.
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Now a quick note about the reed relay. Remember these things use an electromagnetic current to operate the mechanism to close the normally open relay. Now remember that the speaker is also an electromagnetic circuit, but a much larger one than the relay. When you position the relay and mount it make sure it is far enough away form the speaker so that the speaker does not trigger the relay. If you don't the first time you start up the tank you'll have a convulsing noisy flashing thing on your hands!
There is a decent amount of soldering involved, but it's mostly done in open air or on unassembled parts which gives you plenty of room to work. If you have some soldering knowledge and a saturday afternoon there is no reason why every Heng Long tanker can't have his own battle ready I/R battalion.
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