ESC placement / power wiring
Hello I came up with this way of installing the ESCs that I found makes for a neat tucking away of cables. Doing them one by one I noticed that by having the cabling take a natural route around the power board my routing ended up so that while an ESC is located underneath the power plate on one side, its control cable connect to the power board control outlet on the opposite side. And as it happens so does the motor cables. So a motor will correspond to the power board speed control connector on the same side as that motor. Should it turn out sides needs to be swapped around to match the APM sw then it´s simply a matter of swapping the control leads around and these have plenty of length. I connect the input power cable of each ESC to the socket located 90 degrees clockwise ahead of the ESC. Which power socket you chose does not matter from a functional point of view since they are all interconnected. Use the one that makes for nice cable routing as I did here. I used four straps in total to hold wiring neatly. My control cable wiring is wrong in the photo, but I´ll swap them around.
Per request, here are photos with the dome and platforms attached. I have some more electronics to mount before takeoff, but you get a sense of it.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by John Owen on -
I like how the connections from the ESC to the power distribution board are easy to access. This will make it MUCH easier to disconnect the ESC's when programming and configuring the board!
If you can, could you post a picture of the dome attached when you have that done. I would like to see how it looks as an almost finish product.
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Permalink Reply by Sebastian Gralla on -
you just need to disconnect the red/black cable going to APM, nothing else ;)
(as far as I know, I have different ESCs and it works like this)
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Permalink Reply by Simone Chiaretta on -
This is a pretty neat solution.. much better then the "strap the ESC" to the arm one
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Permalink Reply by Gunnar Forsgren mobimation.com on -
It seems in the early preproduction hardware the lengths of various cables were different and there was no provision for in-arm routing. It would be possible to reduce the "nest of wires" further by shortening wires to the optimal length for this method and doing lots of soldering/shrink tubing jobs. But that borders on "aesthetical fanatism". The above show what can be done with the production kit components as-is.
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Permalink Reply by John on -
Let us know if you have heating problems with the ESC's protected this way.
Mine are on the arms so they will get some air to stay cool.
I like your idea so give us some feedback on the heating.
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Permalink Reply by Sebastian Gralla on
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if you want to get a magneto, keep an eye on the readings
the way you routed the cables could cause a big magnetic field when powering up the motors
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Permalink Reply by Gunnar Forsgren mobimation.com on
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Magneto is on its way from the store, so I better have that in mind, thanks.
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