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Castle Creations ESC Wont Calibrate

Posted by Ray Collazo on October 4, 2014 at 3:31pm

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

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Tags: pixhawk, castle, quadpack
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                  • Ray Collazo > Ray Collazo October 9, 2014 at 2:08pm

                    Thanks for posting those setting Tom, I'm going to run a compare tonight. I had to take a little break from it as I am getting a little frustrated. It seems the RC out is just unpredictable. The only parameter that seems to affect it is RC3_MIN. 

                    I got the Castle USB programmer yesterday and may get in there tonight and see what's up. I was told by Castle support guy to change my Motor PWM settings to 8khz instead of the default 12khz. This is to match the motor properly.

                    Castle Tech Wrote:

                    "8KHz setting in the ESC on the “motor” tab for the T-Motor 3506-25, factory setting is 12KHz. Too high of a setting or too low can cause miscommutation issues (generally rpms will be erratic, but it also may shut the motor down midflight if the miscommutation becomes too bad)."

                  • Tom Mahood > Ray Collazo October 8, 2014 at 5:54pm

                    Ray, I changed some of the ESC timing settings but I run 17" props on T-Motor MN3110 470KV motors, sorta large. In any case under the Castlelink motor tab I set Motor Start Power to High, Motor Timing to Low and PWM Rate to 16 KHz. I believe all else was left as stock. The Castlelink setup is most valuable for being able to solder the ESCs direct to the motor wires without bullet connectors. The software allows you to change prop rotation at will.

                    I've posted the param file for my Tarot 650 here. I use the same motor/prop/ESC combo on a tricopter too, with the same basic settings.

                    Um, one other thing.....You do have ALL three wires from all ESCs plugged into the Pixhawk output bus? 

    • Ray Collazo > Tom Mahood October 5, 2014 at 10:17pm

      Tom,

      Thanks a bunch for your reply. Your link is very helpful. I went an check on the failsafe screen and it seems like the Servo/Motor Out is higher than the RC In. In my case I have my taranis at 1070 for the Min. and 1895 for the Max. When I arm the Servo/Motor Out is at 1170. 

      I tried lowering the Input to 1000 and that makes the S/M Out 1110, Arms, but no luck. I even tried recalibrating RC, no joy.

      I Set the input to the lowest setting and got RC IN to 982 and the S/M Out went to 1087, I thought that would do the trick, but got the same, it Armed, but no Motors.

      You had mentioned in your post that RC IN should be the same as Servo/Motor Out, and if not it is a Pixhawk/APM issue. Any ideas as to why the Pixhawk seems to be adding PWM to Servo/Motor Out?

      Thanks again Tom.

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