Currently when I power up the drone it’s in the purple and blue light which would mean the signal is SBUS? Does this mean I want to get it to be in PWM?
No, confirm you’ve connected the cable correctly between receiver and FC. Make sure you are using the dedicated receiver SBUS pin. If that does not work I’m not sure what else to suggest.
I wanted to share something that may help other beginners setting up a Pixhawk with ArduPilot and older PWM ESCs (I’m using SimonK 30A ESCs and a FlySky FS-i6X transmitter).
I spent hours troubleshooting what I thought was a failed ESC calibration. The symptoms were:
- Pixhawk connected to Mission Planner normally
- Safety switch worked (blinking blue, then solid blue)
- Motors would twitch slightly
- No motor response to throttle
- Repeating the ESC calibration procedure over and over produced the same result
The step I was missing was that after lowering the throttle, I also needed to ARM the vehicle by moving the throttle stick to the bottom-right corner and holding it there for about 5 seconds.
Once I did that, I heard the confirmation tone, the vehicle armed properly, and all four motors spun smoothly.
Many ESC calibration videos and forum posts assume the user already knows the ArduPilot arming procedure, so they focus on the ESC calibration steps and don’t explicitly mention arming. For a beginner, it can look like the ESC calibration failed when the real issue is simply that the flight controller is not armed.
So if you have:
- A Pixhawk that connects correctly
- A safety switch that goes solid
- Motors that only twitch
- No motor response to throttle
Check whether the vehicle is actually armed before assuming the ESC calibration failed.
Hopefully this saves someone else a few hours of troubleshooting.