ZMR250 Build – Part 6 – Little Bee ESCs
The EMAX 12A ESCs don't support damped light so I ordered four LittleBee 20A ESCs. This video shows a quick comparison between the two ESCs and the effect of active braking.
ZMR250 Build – Part 5 – EMAX 12A ESC Update
In this video I look at updating the EMAX 12A ESCs with a direct connection to BLHeli via an Arduino Uno (as opposed to going via the flight control board). Initial reading of the supported SiLabs ESCs documents indicated it wasn't going to be straightforward. After some Googling I found the video below which shows step by step instructions how to do this.
The alternative would be just to buy one of the EMAX $10 programming cards which I guess is simple enough but then I'll never be able to do BLHeli firmware updates plus I like being able to use the BLHeli to check and set the ESC parameters.
After going through the process of soldering on a wire to each of the four ESCs and updating to the latest BLHeli, I found these particular ESCs don't support damped (damping?) light / active braking which is a bit of a bummer so I ordered four Little Bee ESCs instead. It would be interesting to compare between the two types of ESCs when it comes to flying but I'm not sure I'm up for the hassle of swapping out the ESCs.
ZMR250 Build – Part 2 – Power & ESC Check
In this video I hook up power to the fpvmodel PDB and to the EMAX 12A ESC. I'm trying to decide whether to solder the Sunnysky motors directly to the ESC or to the ESC leads. Removing the heatshrink from the ESC shows what looked like dodgy solder job touching the pins of the ICs. I wondered if they were going to work at all. After hooking up power and successfully testing them, I decided to use the ESC leads to connect to the motors for two reasons;
- Unlike other ESCs that have the three points at the end of the ESC to connect to the motor wires, these EMAX 12A ESCs have them along the middle of the board which means the wires would be staggered (different lengths).
- The connections are inbetween ICs and some of them make contact with the legs of the ICs. I don't want to break the connections with a messy soldering job.