I am having an issue where when I plug in battery power as if I were about to fly, everything boots up and works just fine- except the ESC. I get the intial tones (3s battery), but not the final motor armed tones. I found that if I unplug the ESC signal wires, then plug them right back in, it initializes.
When I power first via USB, wait for everything to boot, then plug in the battery, it initializes just fine. Obviously that’s not going to work long term.
From everything I’ve read on here and from other sources, the root cause of this issue appears to be something with how my ESC decides when/ at what signal level to initialize. It seems that when I power via battery, the ESC immediately sees a small, possibly unregulated signal from the throttle channel, and refuses to arm until I unplug/replug the signal wires. I thought I could be fancy and use the 0 PWM throttle channel output setting under the ARMING_REQUIRE parameter but that didn’t work. I thought that may be because even at 0 PWM there is still a small voltage across the ESC signal wires. To confirm my suspicion, I measured voltages across the signal and ground pins in the armed and unarmed states. Here’s what I found:
Unarmed Voltage= 3.5mV
Armed Voltage = 165mV
Suspicion confirmed.
So basically it seems that my FC has to be fully booted up before I can arm my ESC. That seems goofy to me because my previous ESC worked just fine. My workaround if I can’t find a simpler solution is going to be putting in a mechanical arming plug to control the ESC signal wire- that way I just plug it in and I’m good to go.
Anyone have any idea of a simpler way to get this dang ESC to arm? I have calibrated everything and removed all arming checks (the rest of the autopilot arms just fine). So please don’t just say I need to calibrate my ESC and radio- been there done that.
Here’s what I’m working with:
- Matek F405 WING w/ Arduplane 4.0.9
- E-Flite EFLA1050 ESC
- Taranis X9D + SE radio
- X8R Receiver using SBUS
Super frustrated and really hoping I’m just missing something with this ESC.