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Too much power drawn from APM.

Posted by Rizki Pratama on March 3, 2014 at 7:10am

I have been adding minimosd, 433mhz telemetry, a single servo for gimbal pitch stabilization.

I connect the servo positive and ground to one of the ESC BEC for power and connect signal to RC11 on APM.

I noticed that the receiver voltage went down to 4.8 and 4.7v in worst case when i bump up the telemetry to 100mw and minimOSD connected, so my solution is to power both the telemetry and minimOSD from one of the six ESCs on my Hexacopter similar to what i have done with the servo so the minimOSD and the telemetry got its own power from ESC and leaves APM alone powered with Power Module only signal is connected to APM.

Now i am getting a solid 5.0V reading at the APM Input side. 

Question: is it safe to connect ground to the ESC directly? will it create a ground loop? 

Everything seems to be working as normal if not better, i had a minimosd flicker when voltage supply down to 4.8 and OSD completely gone on 4.7v

Thanks.

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  • Rizki Pratama March 9, 2014 at 10:23am

    Thanks Flew around 5 times this weekend, everything seems perfect. I was afraid that my APM will brown-out and reset mid air, so this certainly avoid the problem. I happy that i catches this problem before its happened.

  • gsenroc March 7, 2014 at 4:12am

    Actually the ground is already connected if you plug your esc into APM, so I think you only need to plug the 5v to your telemetry, ground and signal to APM, which seems a good idea for your problem.

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