I’ve moved my gear from one hexa frame to another and having problems getting all the motors to test.
-On the frame is a Pixhawk 2.1 running copter 3.5.5(when this started)
-Hobbywing 30A Platinum opto ESCs - all were working on the original frame
-Sunnysky X4108S 480KV motors
-Frsky R9 receiver connecting to a Taranis+ (SBUS from the R9 to the Pixhawk)
I’ve been on a trip and got back to putting this thing together this morning. Got a quick compass calibration done and brought the frame back inside. As I’m doing the motor test to verify my wiring and connections to the Pixhawk, I seemotors A and C aren’t turning. The rest respond normally. Motor C was easy - had the signal and ground backwards on the Pixhawk. Found motor A took about 70% THR before it would turn. Started investigating that and try to set the THR limits on that motor individually, which didn’t change anything.
In the meanwhile, a friend shows up and we decide to run the Mission Planner ESC calibration. Seems to run and do its thing. Power up and now motor A and C are the only ones turning. Upon power up, the motors are beeping and if I put my ear next to each motor, I discover nice solid beeps from A and C and a faint clicking from the others.
Ran down all the wiring and confirmed all connected and correct.
We ended up trying to calibrate a couple of the suspect ESCs individually and also re-run the Mission Planner calibration.
Finally flashed Arduplane on the Pixhawk, then flashed Copter 3.5.7 with no effect. Same A and C motors are turning, the others, nada.
It appears all the gear is OK, since all motors were turning and responding at some point, but now something isn’t working in Pixhawk when it talks to the ESCs.
what size hexa? I have a new F550 and can send you the parameter file for 3.6.rc10. It is still not really tuned but does fly safely. I’ll go ahead and tell you the worst part of flying is the takeoff. My hexa always wants to flip over. I fly off sand and no damage is done except to my pride. The best way is to arm and take off fast. I’ll save my parameter file if you can use GQoundControl or APM2. Or I’ll install MP …
you can also test your ESCs by swapping the plugs with A and C. Just plug in two others for RCOUT pins 1 and 3. test, then do the last two. You should have clipped the red (center) wires going from RCOUT to the ESCs on all but 1 of them.
Thanks for the reply. The frame is about 900mm, a bastardized Tarot 810mm frame with longer arms.
I bought a Hobbywing ESC programmer box and it was able to talk to the good ESCs- on motors A & C, but the rest appeared to be dead, so no way to flash new firmware, etc. Dropped a message to Hobbywing tech support and never heard back.
Bought 6 new ZTW 30A ESCs. All fixed now. Did the compass calibration and an auto tune yesterday afternoon.
Lol, you obviously know what you are doing. It can be hard to tell sometimes. What size motors and props are you running on that beast? I finally got autotune done on the beach. Between wind and people walking by that I had to avoid the battery would die before it finished even one step. Today I said screw it and just let it fly around over the ocean. Its a $128 china hex kit for fishing, so when I drop it in the ocean I’m not out a lot of cash. I dropped a phantom 3 in 200 feet of water a couple of years back. That hurt.
No idea what happened to the ESCs. Just spending too much time trying to run it down, so
got the others. All up weight should come in at around 4300gms with 4 x 5200mA batteries in a 2S2P arrangement.
Your “fishing” story happened to me in Montana, late AUG. Dropped a $1500 Tarot 650 quad into Flathead Lake, which is fresh water. Running a 2.1 Pixhawk, the frame sat in 40ft of water for 5 days. After I realized how much money was down there, divers went down and found it after 25 minutes. Can’t say enough about telemetry and GPS.
Everything is back flying except a couple of Frsky telem sensors and of course the battery.
It was showing 0.5V when they retrieved it. Even the GoPro4, not in a case, survived.
Meanwhile, I’m out back with the hexa that’s now fully configured. I added on the rear batteries and mounted the gimbal and camera. Figuring the pitch response would be different with those masses hanging there, I decided to run another auto tune for pitch only.
Funny thing happened… When I switched up auto tune, as a flight mode, one motor stopped and the frame started spinning. Happy that it didn’t lawn dart itself immediately and also happy it would hover, albeit spinning, on 5 props. It wasn’t spinning too terribly, so I played with it a little with right stick and yaw. Yaw had zero effect on the rate of spin. I also should have tried super simple, but went ahead and dumped it in the tall grass behind the house. Appears no damage.
It’s on the bench right now and all motors spin up normally. I tried looking at the log file and I can download it, but when trying to open it, Mission Planner tells me the file doesn’t have any FMT data, so it can’t open the file. No idea what that means.
one of the first data rows has the format specifiers for each data type. These look wierd like TimeUS,Roll,Pitch,Yaw,Alt,Lat,Lng,Q1,Q2,Q3,Q4 £•€¶POS QLLfff . The end of the line are the formats . L is latitude or longitude, f is a float, etc.