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Flashing The ESCs

A project log for The Hackaday Drone Testbed

A quadcopter used for testing drone components for Droning On

adam-fabioAdam Fabio 06/06/2014 at 03:451 Comment

The HobbyKing Blue 30 amp ESCs need to be flashed with SimonK's firmware. Unfortunately, whoever designed these ESCs didn't leave the flash pins in an easily accessible position. A clip on TQFP came to the rescue. Using  an Adafruit USBtinyISP, and running kkMultiCopter FLash Tool 0.76, flashing the ESCs went pretty quick. The hardest part was keeping that clip steady while the flash and verify ran. 

Once the ESCs were flashed, I hooked them up to my lab supply. Adding a receiver, a servo, and motor created a simple test setup to verify everything was running correctly. 

One odd thing with this particular setup is the SimonK startup tones seem much quieter in volume than I've seen on previous builds. I have to hold the motor to my ear to actually her anything. Checking across multiple motors and ESCs produces the same results.  This could be due to my lab supply having crappy filter caps. Once the batteries are soldered up, I'll give that a test. 

The motors do run fine though. No stuttering or bogging, though my lab supply isn't capable of supplying anywhere near the current this system can take. 

Discussions

zakqwy wrote 06/10/2014 at 00:57 point
Great to know ESCs can be flashed--I hadn't even thought about that, and I'm having stuttering problems with a few stock Suppo units.

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