Synchonizing Four ESCs At Once

 (note: this one has been sitting in the edit queue for quite a while.  Long time readers will notice with amazement the Arcticopter I.)

When setting up a new quad, it's important to set the endpoints on each of the ESCs.  Here's an easy way to do them all at once.

Grab a breadboard and five 3-way male pins.  Four of these will be for the ESCs, and one of them will be for the throttle channel of the receiver.

Put the pins in the breadboard like this.  This will allow all ESCs to be controlled at the same time by the receiver.

Hook up all the ESCs and the receiver.  Make sure all the connections have the same orientation.








Now follow the endpoint syncronization procedure for your ESCs. Almost all of them are similar to the procedure in section VII of this manual.

• remove any props if the ESC are in an airframe
• power up radio
• move throttle to max
• power up ESCs
• the ESCs will make their initial sound, then go into a continuous beep mode
• move the throttle to min
• the ESCs will make the final beep
• All ESC endpoints are now calibrated and consistent with each other.

blogodex = {"idx":"ESC"};

RCTimer ESC's easily flashable

There's a nice RCGroups post showing that the RCTimer ESCs are easily flashable, withe the pads conveniently aligned on the edge of the unit.  They use tgy.hex.

Note on reprogramming ESC's for tricopter

Msg 4 by Les Newell in this aeroquad thread:

These were HobbyKing Super Simple card programmable ESCs, not Turnigy Plush. They are virtually identical to the Towerpro 18A.
I don't think I2C is really needed. PWM can easily go up to 400Hz which is plenty fast enough.
This thread has a vast amount of Tricopter info. Tricopters use three motors for roll/pitch and rotate one motor for yaw. Stabilization can be done with one standard heli gyro per motor plus one for yaw. You use helicopter CCPM mixing to generate the correct throttle signals. This approach has a few drawbacks so I would like to have a go at doing all of the signal processing on-board.

And some notes on RCGroups.