I am looking for some starter PID settings before I go out to AUTOTUNE.
A couple of times this thing has gone sideways on me and crashed (at a very low altitude).
Hexacopter
Frame. Tarot T6
FC Pixhawk 2.1 Cube - Orange
ESC BLHeli 32 DSHOT150
Motors U7 420kv
Battery: Tattu 17000mAh 22.8V 6s 15C Lipo Battery
That’s an easy one as it’s right in the Tuning instructions:
https://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/tuning-process-instructions.html
Xfaca’s spreadsheet makes it very easy.
Awesome! Thank you for the quick response!
tarot.param (22.4 KB)
here is a file of the model i re-work right now, a 690 frame with 5S D4215-650kv motors. what is important in that file is a more or less 
properly set INS_HNTCH harmonic notch filter section that GREATLY improves stability with less than ideal pids.
you may need to look up details of how it need to be setup, also, my model now flies barebone, so, it is greatly overpowered with INS_HNTCH_REF=0.12 from loiter motor throttle from MOT_HOVER_LEARN= 2 and MOT_THST_HOVER=0.1303587.
obviously, if your hover thrust is in other area - update the INS_HNTCH_REF accordingly.
all that should allow you to run autotune fine.
also, just out of curiosity - it is not quite common now to see anybody building a 17Ah T6 - what is the use case, if you do not mind to share? what payload you plan to utilize it for and what other peripherals?
i want to experiment with some companion computer on my 690S for optical avoidance but did not get to anything yet, just reworked the base platform for now, using matek f765.
Paul,
Most if they use case is just fun! But the inspiration came the last time I was up on my roof with a leaf blower. I want my drone to clean off my roof.
By the way, I have it flying really well now but I keep blowing ESCs. That’s my next challenge.
The good news is that it was tuned well enough on my last flight to be able to land it with just 5 motors running.
This was super helpful!
I have it flying really well now but I keep blowing ESCs. That’s my next challenge.
The good news is that after applying the spreadsheet settings it was tuned well enough on my last flight to be able to land it with just 5 motors running.
on DSHOT ESCs - if you mounted them on arms under motors - put a 40V 350mF capacitor on each power line to ESC. i frankly did not see much point to use dshot ones - i still have old oneshot simon-k esc from 5 years ago, it works fine on those low kV motors.
if you will use dshot 32 ESCs - make sure to feed telemetry wire back to the controller - then the notch filter can be configured to use that telemetry - it works way better that way.
I have the capacitors on each ESC. I am working on the telemetry today.
Have you ever connected the telemetry to a Pixhawk 2.1 Cube - Orange?
I mounted the ESCs on the frame and have long cables running from the motors to the frame.
CF is conductive if you are not careful with insulating the ESC’s. I had a mini quad catch fire from this.
Good call. Have ESCs and capacitors insulated from the CF frame using heat shrink.
I did to my Cube Orange, ran it into serial 4 I believe
Any questions? Or did you just want to make sure it worked
wrapped ESCs do not cool down well enough. if you keep burning them down - it means something is not optimal.
you can get either ESC with heatsink or get an external one and put it on. dunno. i have old dumb ones with embedded heatsinks on both my heavy models - simon-k type. on new models i run tekko32 also with heatsinks on `em - out of 16 of them i did blow up one last summer. i wold not wrap ESCs like that as this way it cannot cool down well, but, it is difficult to say why it blew. was it really hot when it happened? was ESC itself hot to the touch? was it during the flight or at the initial lipo cord connection?
implementation of telemetry is not dependent upon type of the controller - it simply goes to the serial port. i stopped using heavy controllers quite long time ago - all the new stuff is more interesting that that.
like this one: https://instapiks.com/media/B_C4D8Pn042
H743 chip is quite nice.
If you fed the telemetry into the flight controller you could monitor the ESC temps and see if one or two is acting different from the others.
Did I miss where thesse are mounted? I have about 25 of the ESCs and not one issue. I have them mounted on Tarot X8s, X6s Tarot 680Pro
I do have them mounted under the arms and have a 1000Mf Cap in the arms of the X’s as well as 330Mf caps at the ESCs
I thought it was not good practice to mount a cube FC on anti vibration plate? Shouldn’t it just be mounted using foam tape?
Anyway
Here is an example of how I have mine mounted.
The above have caps in the arms like this:
Where the arms were too small I used a cap at the ESC like this:
I got telemetry working yesterday. I can now monitor the Voltage, RPM, temp, etc of each ESC. One question I have:
I ran all the telemetry wires from the ESCs to TELEM2, PIN 3 (RX). This works great as long as I have the cube plugged in via USB cable.
I have a Telemetry radio on TELEM1… If I run my ESC telemetry to PIN 3 on TELEM1 will the ESC data then flow through the RADIO instead of the USB?
Sorry, I am very new to this…
