ESC Telemetry connection

Hardware Pixhawk family
1

Greetings,

I’m sure you will find this question reveals the obvious truth that this is my first drone build. I’ve got a holybro durandal flight controller, Holybro PM07 PDB and Holybro Tekko32 Metal ESC’s. I’m at a loss as to the Telemetry connection from the ESC.

Where do I connect ESC telemetry to?

Currently I’ve got 12awg power run to the ESC, a 2200uf cap, the three phase motor connection with 16awg, PWM, and data gnd connected with 22awg. I’m scratching my head about the return telemetry data connection.

Also,

Maybe I should post this as a separate question. Anyone got a link to a page or doc that can explain what the “CAP & ADC” section of the PM07 PDB is for? Seems like a lot of board real estate dedicated to this…

2

Google “Ardupilot ESC Telemetry”. Top of the list is the Wiki link for ESC telemetry.

1 Like
3

Thanks, What’s blowing my mind now is that everything I’ve found suggests connecting multiple ESC telemetry outputs to a single UART on the FC. Is that right? Won’t they just talk over each other?

4

Yes, that’s right and no they won’t.

5

Thanks! Any chance you could shed light on CAP & ADC? I’m thinking maybe a capacitor bank and an Analog to Digital controller? Doesn’t really make sense in my mind, but maybe.

6

Cap is for Capture and there are 2 spare ADC inputs. I don’t know how they are configured in firmware.

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7

Thanks again for your help. Understanding the acronyms and abbreviations goes a long way toward understanding the whole system!

I finally managed to get everything wired up, unless I add an FPV type camera/video transmitter to the drone. Should be in the air as soon as I can design and print a mount for the battery (tattu plus 10,000).

For some reason I had picked up QGroundControl instead of Mission planner when I first started working on it. There’s some incompatibilities in the dev build of arducopter that supports durandal and QGroundControl. As soon as I switched to Mission Planner, things (software wise) started going a lot smoother. I wish I’d figured that out before I wasted nearly 500 bucks on an un-necessary controller (QGroundControl was demanding one). I guess that’s how you learn a lesson the hard way.