I am having an issue with getting my motors to spin when arming the Pixhawk. System arms fine, a solid Green light on the Pixhawk but the Castle ESC just blinks a little red light and motors don't spin.
I read other topics that suggested that I recalibrate the Castle ESC and I tried all the procedures and I never get the last tone when I move my throttle stick all the way down.
I have been searching on how to get the ESC's calibrated and nothing Pixhawk related comes up. I am using the Castle Quadpack 35.
Does anyone know or have experience with these ESCs?
Craziest thing is that I was able to get this to arm yesterday without issues and motors spun up. I did absolutely nothing and today no spinning.
I have tried recalibrating my Radio, compass and Accelerometer.
Thank you
Replies
Ray, if you are running the standard Castle Multirotor firmware on your ESCs, then they can't be calibrated. They have fixed endpoints. The normal APM calibration routine is a waste of time. You have to adjust the endpoints on your RC Tx throttle to conform to the Castles. It's a bit annoying, but I've found them to be excellent units and are the standards I now use in my builds. They just take some adjusting to get used to. The reason you may have got them to arm once is perhaps your RC Tx throttle low end is really close to what the Castles want to see and a little minor drift was enough to get it to work once.
If you look at this thread I talk about getting them to work.
UPDATE----
Tom,
After going insane for a week, I finally got a replacement Pixhawk and swapped the old one, loaded up the settings from the old one, and first and every shot I got Arming and even got a few flights in today.
I was impressed with how it flew "right out out the box" without Autotune. After I load the Gimbal and Gopro I plan on doing an autotune, especially since I switched props (12/4 Wooden Turnigy).
Thanks again for all of your assistance. It has been a learning experience, and I now know way more about Castle/Pixhawk/Taranis setup than I ever wanted to.
.
Glad it worked out. I wouldn't have guessed a flaky Pixhawk. I think you'll be very pleased with that combo. The performance and size of the Castles have made it worth my putting up with their quirks.
Tom,
I went out today and I noticed something different and sure enough, everything seems fine. When I push the safety arm button, the Castles began to chirp (Three Constant beeps), I armed and motors fire flawlessly. Every time.
Even though I am happy it seems to be working, I am not sure what happened here. It would seem that even before trying to arm, the throttle PWM settings really did not matter, but the problem was before when the ESCs did NOT chirp up hitting the safety arm switch.
Any ideas?
Thanks again, you certainly are a wealth of info on this subject.
I forgot about pushing the safety button. The post I linked to was in regard to an APM, which has no button. I have a couple of Pixhawks and they work exactly as you described in your first paragraph. I haven't looked to see if on my Pixhawks the RCOUT for channel 3 matches the RCIN but I will.
That's odd about your RCOUT not matching your RCIN after recalibrating. What screen are you using to observe your RCiIN/OUT?
I used the Failsafe screen to view. I'm wondering if that delta between the two values is based on some multiplier in the PX4 settings.
Ray
By any chance do you have your motors set to spin when armed? I believe the code adds in a small amount of PWM to pull that off. I have mine set to not spin so I'd expect to see my RCOUT equal my RCIN.
I do have them set to spin when Armed. My issue has something to do with the Safety switch not enabling the ESC.
I made absolutely no changes, and today I go in to Arm and I hear nothing from the ESC upon arming.
Starting to thing something is faulty here.
Ray
Looking at the notes I made at the time, I see the Castle ESCs won't arm unless the PWM value is less than 1.11 millsec. With the Mot_Spin turned on, you might be exceeding that.
You might try turning off the initial motor spinning and see if things start working reliably. It could be that you were right near the upper limit PWM to arming, and the motor spinning additional PWN just barely pushed you over the edge some of the time.
Another suggestion to to hook your aircraft up to a PC via USB and try arming/disarming (after pushing the button, of course). The HUD should show an armed state. If that's not clearly working, there could be a mechanical switch issue.
Thanks Tom,
I did try Mot_Spin off setting too. When connected to MP, it shows Armed state fine, its just the Motors that do not fire up, they remain blinking.
The tough part about this is that it is not consistent. For example, it seems like I can get it to arm after it has been unplugged for a few hours, especially overnight, or when I come back to work.
Would you be able to share your settings in MP so that I may be able to do a compare and possibly crack this caper?
I recieved my USB cable for the Castles today, I'm going to check to make sure everything seems ok in there.
Did you make any adjustments to the ESC settings?
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