Options for voltage telemetry

ArduCopter Copter 4.5
1

I’m working on a project where we’d like to use battery voltage telemetry for the battery failsafe.

Wanting to minimize costs, I’m wondering if it may be safe to use ESC telemetry for this purpose.

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I’m aware of three ways that ESC telemetry may be fed to the flight controller:

  1. Bi-Directional Dshot
  2. Telemetry output the telemetry pad on an ESC
  3. Telemetry provided by FETTEC One-Wire protocol

As it happens, we have FETTEC esc’s available, and we’d prefer to use the One-Wire telemetry if possible.

Up to this point, we’ve used the Mateksys current sensor with an I2C connection to the flight controller. This works well. But as this project is taking a “minimalist” approach, if we could just use voltage data from the ESC and set up our battery failsafe based on battery voltage, we’d like to go that route for this project.

Thanks!

2

Option 3 works. Try it out.

3

When using the ESC telemetry for battery monitor, the voltages (from each ESC) are averaged and the currents are summed.
The only thing you miss out on is the current drawn by the flight controller and other accessories - this may be insignificant unless you’ve got some high current payload.