So far not had issues with the vertical lift ESC temperature but I am now building a larger heavier 4+1 version and may wish to ‘loiter’ in hover mode so for a small weight penalty it may be worth adding a 30mm fan on the ESC.
Looking at options to control it…
1 leave it powered all the time.
2 have an RC PWM relay connected to one of the lift motor outputs.
3 have an ‘inverted’ RC relay connected to the forward motor.
4 have a temperature controlled switch.
Problem with 2&3 is I will probably have DShot outputs to the ESCs so PWM relay won’t work.
Not keen on 1
4 too complex.
Ideally this should be done without using a servo channel as these get used up quickly on a VTOL.
None of these problems are insurmountable but ill throw it out there in case someone has a brilliant idea.
Had the first hover test today and the ESC quickly gets warm so I have arranged a 12V centrifugal fan to blow on the ESC, controlled by a PWM switch.
I see there is a servo function for auto flaps whereby the PWM output can be set depending on airspeed. This could work well to turn off the fan at a given airspeed.
Are there any pitfalls with this idea?
But better still would be to only have the fan running when one of the 4 lift motors is running.
To that end it would be great to have a LUA like
If servo_x is above y then set servo_z to q.hi
Else set servo_z to q.low
perhaps there is already such lua. Im not much good at this.
Thanks.
The ESC does put out temperature but when this one was installed in another vehicle sometimes it decided not to transmit temp, even though RPM always came down. I think it would be closer to my abilities to just turn it on when a lift motor is active.
Conversely, if it provides unreliable telemetry data, even for something as simple as the temperature, it does not speak well for the quality of the ESC.
