Calibrating the ESC

#1

I am currently trying to calibrate the motors on my drone but it is not working.

I am using the Readytosky® 2212 920KV Brushless Motors CW CCW for F330 X525 F450 S500 F550 S550 DJI Phantom Quadcopter(4PCS), 4X XXD HW30A 30A Brushless Motor ESC For Airplane Quadcopter, and the RCmall Flysky FS-T6 High Precision 2.4G 6 Channel 6ch Radio Controller Transmitter and Receiver Kit for RC Helicopter Racing Drone.

When I connect the battery to the drone the motors beep. The motor connected to the Receiver thats connected to the ESC connected to the motor as shown in the video beeps continuously every 5ish seconds. When I power on the controller holding down the button, the blinking red light in the receiver becomes constant. However, when I move the joystick up on the controller nothing happens.

I checked the settings on the controller and the joystick corresponds to channel 3 which is what I plugged the ESC into.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions. I would also be happy to set up a zoom call to explain my problem in more detail.

Calibrating ESCs Motor shaking/stammering
#2

Hi there Fritz!

One important thing to note is that your RC controller must be powered on and the throttle stick up BEFORE you power on your drone with the battery. I don’t believe the ESC calibartion will work if you power your drone on first before powering up the RC controller.

#3

Your suggestion does not seem to be working. I don’t understand how the controller will stay connected to the receiver if we power off the drone. Regardless, we paired the controller with the receiver and got the light be solid with the throttle stick up and still nothing happened.

Also, when we try and measure the output from the blue wires on the ESC with a multimeter we get a reading of 0 volts as well.

#4

Hi there @Fritz

The transmitter doesn’t have to be connected tot he receiver when initiating the ESC calibration by putting the throttle stick all the way up, and in fact I think only works if the receiver is only powered on after the RC transmitter throttle stick is all the way up.

I think that’s normal for the three leads from the ESC connecting to the motors to read a zero voltage when the motors aren’t moving.

Have you ran through the RC PWM endpoint calibration in mission planner? I’m wondering if your TX/RX aren’t working? It they are and your drone motors are beeping, I am struggling to think of why the calibration wouldn’t work :confused:

#5

Thank you again for the quick response.

We choose to move forward and connect the ppm encoder. By following the light signals and sounds we were able to get the motors to spin!!! However, 2 worked great, 1 only partially spun and made a scrapping sound, and 1 did not move at all.

Do you think we need to go back to the individual calibration? We also made a mistake and did not cover the bullet connectors in tape so they may have shorted. Would this be a reason they are not working?

#6

Hi there Fritz! Glad to hear you got your motors moving.

A prolonged short on the motors very well may have caused damage to the motors. Have you tried moving the motors not working to a different ESC and seeing if the motor starts working? If so, it could actually be an ESC issue.

What type of motors are you using? Could you post a link to them?

#7

Thank you for the suggestion. We had tried that and it turns out two motors are dead and two ESC do not work. We are going to replace them.

Here is the link for the motors:
Readytosky® 2212 920KV Brushless Motors CW CCW for F330 X525 F450 S500 F550 S550 DJI Phantom Quadcopter(4PCS)

#8

Hi there Fritz
I had a similar issue and I also thought that two motors or ESCs were damaged but turned out they were working fine. So I hope yours are not actually damaged. In my case I found that I made a connection mistake between the motors and the ESCs. In most videos online they connect the ESCs and the motor just randomly and not mention anything about this. CW and CCW should be connected like in the pics below depending on the type of motors that you have but you could try and check.

Example 1
Example 2

#9

@caleberg 10 points
@Othman93 5 points

closed #10