Servers by jDrones

First time ardupilot user needs some help

#1

hello there,

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

#2

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.

#3

http://www.mateksys.com/?portfolio=f765-wing#tab-id-5

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

#4

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

#5

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.

full_param_list.param (22.6 KB)

full_param_tree_1.12.21.param (23.0 KB)

any and all help is greatly appreciated

#6

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

#7

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.

Thank you

#8

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.

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