Motors twitching and ESC's beeping

haha i found the solution, i have re-soldered the PDB twice, but obviously by soldering technique is rubbish on small wires, or the wires where somewhat broken, i did a manual calibration and for some reason only one ESC gave power to the receiver. so i plugged all ESC's directly into the APM and that worked, hmm such a simple solution. and cable wise much better its less cluttered and it shaves bout 20 grams of the total weight.

Read further if you want to know how i customized it and a little rant bout mu thoughts on the current design.

Why they use the PDB for the 3 pin's on the ESC i cannot phantom, it increases the risk of wrongly connecting ESC/motors and crashing (if i made it fly on the manual's reference connection, a cold connection could have suddenly started and crashed my copter just glad i had problems of this type before lift-off eliminating the possibility. also the manual should have told bout the possibility of directly connecting them)

And for future versions of the PDB, dropp it. sell a 1 in 4 out cable solution instead, and possible extentions for the esc to APM, it would be lighter and easier to hide/wrap, now my APM is place where the APM should be placed, which is MUCH closer to the center of center creating much less vibrations, also it fitted snugly between the screw pins for the PDB 4 rubber bands and the vibration is almost gone.

So improvement idea for next rev, remove PDB connect everything directly (Less weight, and higher fault tollerance)
Make placement of APM where the PDB previously stood stapp it with 4 rubber bands (almost no vibration)
extra impact one of the plates(Bottom one can be removed, also saves weight, and height, making what ever is on-top more stable (Less XY movement).

There now i have ranted enough.

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Thomas Lian March 1, 2013 at 2:24pm

haha i found the solution, i have re-soldered the PDB twice, but obviously by soldering technique is rubbish on small wires, or the wires where somewhat broken, i did a manual calibration and for some reason only one ESC gave power to the receiver. so i plugged all ESC's directly into the APM and that worked, hmm such a simple solution. and cable wise much better its less cluttered and it shaves bout 20 grams of the total weight.

Read further if you want to know how i customized it and a little rant bout mu thoughts on the current design.

Why they use the PDB for the 3 pin's on the ESC i cannot phantom, it increases the risk of wrongly connecting ESC/motors and crashing (if i made it fly on the manual's reference connection, a cold connection could have suddenly started and crashed my copter just glad i had problems of this type before lift-off eliminating the possibility. also the manual should have told bout the possibility of directly connecting them)

And for future versions of the PDB, dropp it. sell a 1 in 4 out cable solution instead, and possible extentions for the esc to APM, it would be lighter and easier to hide/wrap, now my APM is place where the APM should be placed, which is MUCH closer to the center of center creating much less vibrations, also it fitted snugly between the screw pins for the PDB 4 rubber bands and the vibration is almost gone.

So improvement idea for next rev, remove PDB connect everything directly (Less weight, and higher fault tollerance)
Make placement of APM where the PDB previously stood stapp it with 4 rubber bands (almost no vibration)
extra impact one of the plates(Bottom one can be removed, also saves weight, and height, making what ever is on-top more stable (Less XY movement).

There now i have ranted enough.
Al February 18, 2013 at 11:25am

I am having exactly same issue, except only 2 parallel motors twitch and beep rapidly (4 beeps per second). I have tried everything described below and no luck. Please post if you find a solution.
Jim Townsend February 11, 2013 at 7:12pm

A single beep and a corresponding motor twitch can mean that the signal wire isn't connected to anything. Do you have the thin 3 wire cable with the mini connector plugged in to the APM? And if so, are the polarities correct? If not, that could be your problem.

You can spin the motors without an RC transmitter using the "motors" command. This will activate each motor briefly in sequence.. The function is accessed from the command line in the terminal found in Mission Planner. You need to connect the USB cable to your computer to do this.

Detailed instructions are here: http://code.google.com/p/arducopter/wiki/AC2_Props_2

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Motors twitching and ESC's beeping

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