I’m building a new quad using a Pixhawk 6c and motors that I know work as I’ve used them on a different build already. What’s new are some Sequre AM32 ESCs. They are wired correctly and the motor test worked fine.
Here’s the problem. When I arm the quad the motors spin but when I try to give it throttle they briefly and sluggishly start to spin up. They will then stop rather abruptly and try to change directions. At that point yaapu tele tells me that landing is complete.
I’ve tried to connect them to the AM32 configurator using passthrough and the Pixhawk. The configurator sees that I have 4 motors but it won’t read the info from them. I have tried it with the ESCs connected to the “MAIN” and “AUX” pwm out ports on the FC. I have even tried telling it that servo functions 9-12 are to be motors 1-4 respectively. All that did was make the configurator think I now have 8 motors instead of 4.
I get that AM32 is relatively new. I was hoping that someone could help me sort this out, please.
I figured out how to get them to work. I tried every which way to get the online AM32 configurator to work via the Pixhawk. I never could get that to work. So, I took an old FC from a piece of crap quad and flashed it with the latest Betaflight FW. After that, I soldered some servo lead connectors to it so I could connect the signal wires from the AM32 ESCs to it. I still left the ESCs connected to the PDB on my new build. The configurator found the Betaflight FC just fine and connected right away and read all four ESCs without any problem. When I tried flashing the latest FW to them there was one of the four ESCs that wouldn’t flash properly. I don’t know what the problem was or why it was happening but it finally flashed the latest FW to all four of them. Then I adjusted the parameters to suit the motors on this build. Interestingly, I had to reverse all four motor directions after flashing the new FW.
It was a pain in the butt to have to do so many workarounds to get them to talk to the configurator. I really hope we can get the problem fixed with ArduPilot FCs not letting us use the AM32 configurator since it sounds like BLheli is dead and all the new ESCs are going to be using AM32.
I don’t know what FW was pre installed on the ESCs. I probably should have noted it before flashing the newest FW version, which is 2.16. As for the Pixhawk Inflashed the newest version of FW that was available last month. I’m pretty sure that was Cooter 4.5.
I wonder if it will work with the latest Dev version of firmware as I believe it’s actively being worked on. I suppose now that you have it working you don’t want to mess with it but this is the firmware: Pixhawk 6C latest
Yeah, it’s working so I’m going to leave it alone for now. I really enjoy building drones. I have a nice 900mm frame coming from China. I may get a new Pixhawk FC for that one and try it out with the new FW version that was just released when I get it assembled. The speed at which things progress in this hobby means that a year from now everyone will be using AM32 ESCs and the AM32 configurator will be really well refined and it’ll connect to Pix style FCs without any trouble. In the meantime, I basically just took an old F405 FC with Betaflight flashed on it and made it my AM32 flashing tool. I wasn’t using it for anything anyways. Actually, I’m sure someone is already developing and producing an AM32 flashing device.
That’s cool! It can be daunting and frustrating at times trying to keep up and learn about new advancements in our hobby. But, it’s those advancements that bring us some really cool new features and enhancements of the hobby.
Servo 1-4. The reason for the duplicates is because it says that one has to use the Aux PWM out portion of the Pixhawk 6c to get pass through to work but I never could get it to work that way. In the end I used an old Betaflight FC to configure the ESCs. I just didn’t bother changing the servo outputs 9-12 back. There’s nothing connected to them so it doesn’t matter really.
