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Benefits of a shorter PWM frame for controlling ESC's in multi rotor helicopters

Posted by Christian Schulze on June 7, 2010 at 4:25am

Hi everyone,I have some questions regarding the concept of a shorter PWM frame for controlling multi rotor helicopters. With the assumption being the motors RPM can be adjusted at a faster rate, giving a more stable/responsive aircraft.B. In anyone's experience is this needed?C. Will this be supported by the APMega/ArduCopter?I'm referring to OpenPilot's TurboPWM feature - http://openpilot.org/TurboPWMThis leads onto a few more questions regarding which ESC's and motors are recommended for an ArduCopter like build, but I will leave that for a later discussion :)Cheers,Christian

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Replies

Christian Schulze June 11, 2010 at 12:33am

Thanks for the response Mike. I think at this stage I will wait until the ArduCopter design is further along before investigating this any further.
Mike Bakula June 7, 2010 at 4:51am

We inadvertently tried this at ERAU when we were figuring out how to do timer-interrupt based PWM. The short answer is that the servo amp burns up. You would need to modify the servo to handle the higher power dissipation, and once you open up the servo, you might as well go over to OpenServo (http://www.openservo.com/) or something. For motor controllers, the question will be how do they implement their PWM receive -- GWS units will miss early pulses.