I have 6 different Drones and have bashed them around like crazy. I have broken a bunch of props, arms and landing gear. Most of the equipment I had was relatively on the cheaper chinese clone side (ESCs, Motors). And never had a motor burn out from a simple stall. I recently invested in a higher end craft based on a Tarot frame, with Ca$tle Creation$ ESC, and T-Motors MT 3506's. just the motors and ESCs cost more than most of my other machines.
I have made a bunch of flights with it and was pretty fortunate to not have any major crashes with it. The other day after a nice flight, I landed it almost perfect but one of the landing gear legs caught a Rock and it gently tipped over,stalling 2 of the motors. Throttle was all the way down since the landing. You could imagine my disgust when I saw thick white smoke pouring from that expensive T-Motors 3506.
Motor is fried. 65 bucks for a simple tip over.
So my question is. Is there any way to prevent this from happening again? Is there anything I can do to safeguard against this or is this a freak thing? Could I have a screwy ESC that failed to pump current when it should have?
My lesson here is that there really isn't anything special about these expensive components like Castle and T-Motors. I have not had any motor ever burn out and have stalled more motors than anything in the past.
You feedback is much appreciated.
Replies
Hi Ray,
The problem is (or might be) that when the copter was landing, even with the throttle all the way down, the copters flight controller may not have actually decided you were down yet and instead tried to restabilize you to horizontal.
Of course it does that by throttling up any tilted down motors.
Obviously if the motor can't turn this can cause a problem - lots of current to a non-turning motor.
Some motors can handle this pretty well, but over-current is always possible and without any cooling "Pfft".
I am using mostly KDE motors these days, they are even more expensive than T-Motors but they are seriously over designed for very high over current conditions with high temp, windings, magnets, conformal coating and spacers.
(They also have a really excellent triple ball bearing stack).
Don't get me wrong, T-Motors are great motors, just not quite so heat tolerant as KDEs.
It could be that you could also handle the overcurrent with ESC programming, or maybe you just got a bad motor.
Best Regards,
Gary