Apm Mission Planner has burned one motor of my Hexacopter.

Greg Fletcher May 31, 2011 at 10:08pm

I haven't done a copter but I have some safety tips from one motor craft. Never upload firmware with a motor pluged in. If your uploading you don't need ESC power you have USB power. This simple step could save a lot of motors. I use an automotive fuse for the ESC power and a separate supply for the avionics/servos. It's on the back of the plane outside and I use it more as a motor switch. I have always seen servos jump and jitter during programing, didn't have to worry about getting cut or any thing. I had a motor spin up once on the bench and decided not to ever let it happen again. Think about safety people, yours and your equipment.

Bart May 31, 2011 at 5:32pm

1280, official DIYDrones Store ESC. Just smoke, everything still worked afterwards.

Dani Saez May 31, 2011 at 4:14pm

Hi,

it also happened to me, more than 6 months ago when I was starting in this. I had the battery plugged and I plugged the USB, and then one of the motors started to smoke, no noise, no nothing. Changed the motor and everything was ok.

I was using ver 1.6 SuperStable from ArduPirates, and only had one of the ESC feeding the APM.

I believe it must be some HW issue, ever since, I'm using an 3A BEC for the APM, and never plug the USB if battery plugged, always plug USB first then the battery. Never had a problem since.

hope that helps,

Dani

Developer

Jason Short May 31, 2011 at 3:37pm

May I suggest disconnecting the power between your APM and power board/ESCs while using USB. There is a two wire cable that connects and powers the APM during flight. I !NEVER! have my flight battery connected when loading code or running the CLI. Not only is it potentially dangerous, it can ruin batteries and potentially start lipo fires if you leave it unattended for a long period.

Jason

Christopher May 31, 2011 at 1:53pm

My problem is on a 1280 board

Christopher May 31, 2011 at 1:47pm

This happened to me to !!!. I was uploading to the latest firmware through the mission planner to the APM and one of the motors started moving backwards and forwards loads of smoke and burnt out without me touching anything !!!!

I checked all the connections and they are good. there must be some spurious message coming from the software. Also when I went through the set up process before I did the firmware up date I invoked the motors command on the command line all the motors spun in tern correctly, but when I moved on to another command the motor that burnt out later kept spinning and I had to disconnect the battery to stop it

YOU NEED TO LOOK AT THESE PROBLEMS !!!!!!!!!

Patti U-aksorn May 30, 2011 at 6:17am

For me this issue happen to me 3 time. but my mortor not burn. One of it just spine about 20% of full speed by it self. I notice my ESC firmware is not same. Then I think it must be some noise from ACM that old ESC's firmware can't filter out make this happen.

With ArduCopterNG I found some time my mortor stop after start spin about 10 sec. So I try swap that mortor with other arm after then this never happen.

I think the issue must be matching ESC & mortor + noise from ACM make this happen.

Flávio Henrique P. de Oliveira May 30, 2011 at 5:35am

I happened to me three times, I've saved twice, the last time I lost one motor. I'm using turnigy 25A plush with APM 1.0
it happens when I connect USB and battery together

Greg Fletcher May 29, 2011 at 4:49pm

I wouldn't think a speed controller would do anything to the motor except "beep" the prop until it receives a valid signal to arm. luispez and Leonardo Lisboa maybe you are using the same type of ESC? Since both your problems happen at reset, maybe an invalid pulse period is causing a certain type of controller to burn a motor and other controllers just ignore it?

Ritchie May 29, 2011 at 3:51pm

ESC connections are probably bullets instead of soldered. If so thats why.

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Apm Mission Planner has burned one motor of my Hexacopter.

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