this is the first time using Mission planner and arduplane but i do have experience with betaflight so im not a complete rookie I have a matek f756 wing that i am setting up for the first time, i am using the latest mp and the latest arduplane downloaded on 1.8.21(mission planner 1.3.74 build 1.3.7563.27684 and arduplane v4.0.8beta1(5ffd40f9). so far flashing and setting up the fc has been fairly uneventful, untill i plugged the power in and my esc smoked, a mosfet burned up, the esc was a spedix gs 35amp which is a blheli 32 esc. which im trying to set up for dshot protocol and also telemetry to serial 5. i want to provide a dump so you guys can look it over and see if it was any settings that i changed that smoked my esc. can someone explain what and where to get the parameters for you guys to look at.
i want to use one motor on this plane, which is on servo1. with timer groups i will only beable to use servo one and two using dshot protocol. is there anything i need to do to servo2 to turn it off? or is just not hooking anything up to the servo port good enough?
thank you for you time,
wayne
The smoke was likely wiring (reverse polarity or short etc) not software.
What are these timer groups you talk about regarding servos?
With a fixed wing (as opposed to a quad) all this esc tech, " multi shot, d shot etc" is not needed as the latency, resolution etc is not even a little bit critical. The esc speed command is not being driven from a fast acting loop control and planes just fly along with a more or less constant (open loop setting)
As far as telemetry I’s concerned, you can get your overall current ( which will be 90% motor load anyway) from the shunt on the power module.
if you go here and below the pic there is a tab that says ardupilot mapping. which says PWM1~PWM10 & PWM13 are Dshot and PWM capable. However, mixing Dshot and normal PWM operation for outputs is restricted into groups, ie. enabling Dshot for an output in a group requires that ALL outputs in that group be configured and used as Dshot, rather than PWM outputs.
If servo and motor are mixed in same group, make sure this group run lowest PWM frequency according to the servo specification. ie. Servo supports Max. 50Hz, ESC must run at 50Hz in this group… i want to use dshot for servo1 and servo2 is in that group. so what i think it says it that i need to also set servo2 for dshot as well, even though i am not using servo2
Yes, you may be right there, you can connect your elevon servos and your esc’s to whichever pwm channel you choose then assign the functions .
So yes you can make one group for esc and one group for servo,
You can just use g1 and g2. Set ch1and 2 for servos and ch3 and ch4 for dshot
i am testing out ardupilot to see if i like it enough to start to use it with my new crafts. even if things are not needed i still would like to set it up the way i want to make sure it works as advertised. i can also guarantee that the esc smoke was not due to wiring. i triple and quadruple check all my work before i even hook it up to usb power and a couple more times before battery power . in my short time in the hobby i have accumulated 4 quadcopters and 5 planes this is the first time a esc has ever let out smoke.
would these files be the files that would tell you if something was set up wrong? this was how things were set up when the esc smoked.
Had the esc been used successfully with a motor prior to connecting it to the matek? Could it have been destined to happen on first power up due to an internal fault in the esc?
Dshot wiring is same as pwm and esc’s auto detect protocol so even if you had settings wrong in FC, if it was all wired correctly it shouldn’t have smoked. Sorry
This esc was in a plane before that ended it’s life in a crash so that could have been a reason why it smoked. I throughly checked this esc before installing and from what I could see there was nothing wrong with it. I do not know if a setting could have cause smokage, that’s why I’m asking. I just don’t want to have to replace a bunch of escs before I get this plane back into the air with the autopilot.
I agree. It may not function if settings are wrong, but it shouldn’t smoke. If you say the wiring was good, then there must have been some other fault from the previous crash.
I also agree that Dshot won’t make any real difference on a plane. Planes don’t need the filtering or response that quads do. PWM, and keep moving.
Thank you guys for the help, the esc had to have been on its way out, I got a new esc and it works how it’s supposed to.
I have a concern about ekf, it is and has been showing flags, velocity_horiz and pos_horiz_abs as off these two have always been unhealthy . Will these turn on if I start flying in manual flight mode? They have always been in the red since I have been trying to get this bird air born no mattention how long the plane has been powered up the ekf has never been anything else but red. I have tried to walk around outside with it to see if some directional movement would help it, without luck. But I only walked 100 yards maybe.
If you’re in manual mode then none of that matters. In MANUAL mode you’re flying old school RC. No assistance of any kind from the flight controller.
Verify that you’re getting proper GPS lock. Verify that all the calibrations have been done in flying configuration (GPS and compass modules installed in their positions). If you can do the calibrations outside and away from sources of interference.
What I’m asking is, is there a chance that while flying, can the ekf become healthly enough to work correctly? If that is the case do I have to come back to the launch site for the plane to know where to go on a rtl failsafe? Or is all that is needed is a 3d gps lock before take off and the rtl will know the direction to bring it back to, to get the rc link back?
I don’t know enough about how EKF works under the hood to say for sure. I haven’t taken off with a plane where the EKF system was not working correctly to know how it would respond. I have had EFK errors or failures in flight. In those cases the planes did not fall out of the sky or anything like that, but their flight performance was significantly degraded and often resulted in an early return home if the error didn’t clear.
So I read in the forums some where that connecting the plane while it is facing north is a work around for this bug on these versions of the fw 4.0.6 to 4.0.8 I think. I did this while I flew my plane and everything seamed to work. I also read on one of the ekf wiki pages that it might need a little flying for the last stages of efk to turn healthy. The couple times that I was paying attention to the ekf messages via yappu lua before flying my plane there was no ekf messages. I don’t know what made the difference but during the first flight session, autotune, stabilizes flight modes worked, rtl, and autonomous missions all worked perfectly. So I’m a happy camper