Quad motor setup sanity check

Hardware Multirotors
1

Hi all,

I’m building an experimental quad motor fixed wing vehicle that I’d appreciate a quick sanity check on before I commit to the final design.

As this is an experimental design, I have intentionally over spec’d for redundancy & resilience, and so I’m intending to split the inboard and outboard engines into pairs on their own circuits.

Each motor pair will run on their own 4in1 Holybro Tekko32 F4 65A with a dedicated 4s 60C 5000mAh lipo. Initially, each motor will only pull ~24A(ish) but might rise to ~42A each on my next testing phase. So a total of ~50A to ~90A on each circuit ultimately, though this is still well within each ESC’s rating.

An H743-Wing FC (running Plane) will be powered by it’s own 2200mAh lipo, and each ESC wired directly to its own battery pack not the FC, with only signals running back to the FC (all gnds tied obviously).

The receiver is a DBR4 Gemini Xrossband running on both frequencies, again for resilience.

So my main concern is am I likely to run into any gotchas running a pair of 4in1 ESCs with only 2 motors on each? Is anything likely to complain about this setup?

Cheers,

~N

2

Nope, no issues to be expected whatsoever.

3

Yea, as @amilcarlucas said. 4-in-1’s are really just 4 single ESC’s on one board typically with a current shunt resistor on the Power input pad before splitting to each section. I don’t think you are getting much redundancy by using 2. Some certainly.

Of Interest-Matek actually created what they called Serialshot with one CPU on the 4-in-1. Sounds like a cool idea but it didn’t go anywhere.

4

Awesome, thanks for that, I appreciate the confirmation.

The reason for the dual 4in1 is that, aside from wiring and cooling being problematic for 4 single ESCs, at least initially, if a battery or ESC fails I’d rather lose a pair of motors, than have to deal with asymmetric thrust as well as a loss of it.

1 Like
5

Are you running that in normal or Mavlink? In Mavlink mode the data rates on the dual frequency modes are useless. K1000 (low band) has been very promising on the bench so far.