Been having a lot of fun messing around with this Speedybee f405wing controller. I developed a strange issue today that has me absolutely flummoxed. All of a sudden with no major changes I simply can’t get the motor to throttle or initialize when the ESC is plugged into the flight controller. When the battery is plugged in, it will do its small startup chime but then it stops. it won’t announce the cells or beep any more than that. It was working this morning and stopped suddenly.
The usual behaviour is that upon plugging in the battery, the ESC will do its start up chirp, then start beeping until the flight controller initializes, then it will do the cell count and final beep. It only does the first part now.
I can calibrate the ESC and get it working perfectly if I plug the battery into the ESC directly. It only doesn’t spin if it’s plugged into the ESC part of the PDB, although it does do the startup beeps. I’ve tried multiple ESCs and both are working but have the same issue. I’ve tried setting the minimum pwm to 1k and max to 2k. I’m positive the ESC is in the right servo slot, and I can see the transmitter throttle working on the transmitter setup page when connected to Mission Planner. I’m basically at a loss here.
Even though I had attempted it about 4 or 5 times, on the 6th try somehow the calibration stuck and now the motor works. I tried binding it to another radio, and then rebound it to the Edgetx radio going thru the FC and that fixed it. I guess if anyone else runs into this problem, try binding to another radio and back again lol.
EDIT: This did not in fact permanently fix the problem. It happened again, where the motor doesn’t initialize if it’s powered thru the PDB. If i connect and reconnect the ESC while the board is powered it suddenly beeps to life and runs just fine. very bizarre. I’m not sure if this is a problem with the board itself or with ardupilot
I’ve seen some reports of quality issues with the SpeedyBee stuff (which I don’t find surprising, if the price they ask is half of Matek’s, there has to be a drawback somewhere), although that mainly seems to include cases of their own 4-in-1 ESCs blowing up in mid-air. I’d be curious to hear if your problem goes away by swapping out the F405-WING for another one - looks to me like that’s the only thing left to try.
That’s basically what I think except it’s strange that it works flawlessly and perfectly as long as you unplug the ESC from power and back in again. Current sensor reads everything fine, it beeps exactly as it should, throttles up just fine. It’s like it’s getting stuck in the initialization phase.
I found this old thread that seems to describe exactly my issue, but of course no one could figure it out and just suggested doing the same thing I’m doing.
I did change ESCs before the problem started. I’m wondering if there is some difference on the ESC side that causes this.
I am experiencing the same issue with both the F405-WING and F405-WING MINI. I have tried it with two different blheli32 ESCs that test out perfectly via FTDI and I then calibrated to 1000-2000 PWMs manually. Then I connected them to a servo port on the FC. I tried both dshot and pwm. The throttle servo never sends a PWM signal, almost like that channel has crashed somehow. The radio sends the signal to the FC, I can see it happening in Mission Planner radio calibration. All the servos move, except for the throttle. ESC calibrates all the way to the last beep but stops short. It doesn’t pick up the throttle PWM signal. I have not tried cycling the ESC post boot or delaying the ESC power-up. I’ll try that next.