Tuesday, February 8, 2011

prepping ESCs, motors, PDU

Here are the motors, after attaching the included bullet connectors.  Two of the motors are spares.  We've got two spare ESCs as well.
The motors come with a lot of pieces.  In addition to connectors and shrink tube, each motor comes with a mount, extra shaft, prop fasteners, and associated hardware.  This is my first multicopter, so I'm not used to dealing with so many pieces at once!




Tidy it up so the tiny pieces don't get lost.  Tweezers are handy at this scale!  I used the baggies that came with the motors to store all the pieces in groups.



We're using these nifty WAGO 222-415 5-wire connectors to do power distribution.  Here's what a single ESC looks like when it's wired up.






And here's what four ESCs look like.  I hope they're as tidy on the copter as they are here.
The WAGO connectors flip up to release the wire.  Instructions say to strip the wire to 1cm.
Here's everything wired up... 4 motors, 4 ESCs, 2 power distribution points, power cable.  The small box is my servo tester, which since it basically drives a PPM signal is great for testing motors too.

Everything seems great when run without load (i.e. no props).  Soon I'll have the load data, including thrust.  If I can figure out a good way to attach it, I'll hook my thermocouple probe to my arduino kit and measure the ESC temperature as well.

Here's what the final propulsion system looks like:




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