Hi, I am trying to calibrate my Aikon SEFM 30A BLHeli_S ESCs using the all in one method following the instructions on the ardupilot. Here’s what I do:
Turn on my transmitter and put the throttle in the high position
Connect my LiPo battery to my FC and ESCs
Disconnect the battery while throttle is in the high position
Reconnect battery while throttle is in high position
Result:
I hear 3 beeps from my ESCs (I’m using a 3s battery), 2 beeps from my transmitter, and then the 3 beeps from my ESCs occurs again
What I expect:
I’m expecting to hear those 3 beeps from my ESCs followed by an additional 2 beeps on my ESCs which would indicate that the max throttle position has been learned, and then I should be able to lower the throttle and the rest of the musical tones should play, and then calibration would be complete. However I hear no additional 2 beeps after the 3 beeps (which indicate the battery size), which means my ESCs did not learn the max throttle position. I’m thinking the reason for this is because my ESCs never actually entered calibration mode.
FYI:
I was able to successfully calibrate my ESCs and then even ARM my drone once, but that was a test before I finished putting everything on the frame. Electrically it’s the same, I just didn’t have stuff ziptied down or anything. I don’t know if this is helpful but I thought I’d mention that I was able to get it to work once. I’ve also searched the internet for
problems that others have had that are similar and had no luck trying their solutions.
Hi Shawn, thanks for your response. To start out I don’t really have a reason to use DSHOT instead of PWM so if that’s a better option I might do that. The information on my specific ESC is that it supports automatic detection of Oneshot 125, Oneshot 42, and multishot protocols. I’m not sure if that last one means DShot or not, but I don’t have a reason to use one over the other right now. But I didn’t find anything that suggested I could set mine up for DShot. If I could get DShot, does that mean I can just ARM it and fly?
My transmitter/receiver calibration was completed before I went through the calibration process. My MOT_PWM_MAX and MOT_PWM_MIN values are 2000 and 1000, respectively, which is what they were when I did the RC calibration steps. I did try the Semi-Auto calibration process again (I tried it several times before today as well) but still no dice.
What are some other things I may be missing?
P.S. I’ll take a video to show me following the steps for the different calibration methods, then you can know whether or not I’ve missed something.
You might want to make sure you’re running the most recent version of BLHeli_S since those ESCs have been around for 6 years or so.
DShot would allow you to just run without needing to calibrate the signal from the FC to the ESCs.
If your flight controller supports bidirectional DShot, you might want to try flashing the ESCs with the Bluejay firmware and using bidirectional DShot.
Alright don’t hate me, but I connected my ESCs to s5-s8, and I have a quadcopter which is why they wouldn’t calibrate this time. I should have used s1-s4. I am now able to calibrate and fly. But thanks to your suggestion I am looking at getting dshot to work on there. Based on the esc configuration tool I think I’ll need to temporarily flash betaflight to use the esc configurator tool to flash bluejay on there.