I am about to purchase the Arducopter 3DR kit and I have a question about the speed controllers. I have numerous Castle Creations Phoenix Ice Lite 75 speed controllers and was thinking about using them instead of the 20A units normally provided with the kit. Other than being overkill for the the AC2836-358 motors and slightly heavier, are their any other issues I should be aware of? Has anyone have any good or bad things to say about the castle creation controllers?
Thank you
Keith
Replies
Thank you for the help! This is the first quad I have ever built and I had intended on using the normal controllers supplied with the 3DR kit but they are currently out of stock. Since I have a bunch of these other controllers just sitting in a box I figured I would try to save $100 and give them a try.
I plan to contact Castle Creations and get their advice on setup.
Thanks again!
The only issue I can think of is that most ESCs have built in filtering that is good for standard RC vehicles (cars, planes) where there's a human pilot but it's not necessary/good for quadcopters because it slows down the response rate from the controller (whether it's an APM or something else). So the standard Turnigy ESCs and Arducopter ESCs can be reprogrammed (there's an Atmel ship inside) but I'm pretty sure a Castle Creations is very different internally and could not have it's firmware modified to remove this filtering.
Also the Castle Creations might lead to you needing to modify your PID values slightly..maybe.
..but...after saying all that, I think the castle creations ESCs will work but for me, I'd go for the Arducopter ones and then update the firmware to the non-filtered variety.