kickapuppy
Junior Member
I have been working on a tricopter using the FliteTest power pack. I have gotten to the point of testing the motors on the flight controller and cannot get the EMAX ESCs to initialize. I have made sure the arm button is solid, calibrated the Tx, double checked that the FMU is arming, it is in stabilize mode, I can get the ESCs to initialize on a servo tester, or off the Rx, but on the Pixhawk I get nothing whatsoever.
I did some digging and came across a few threads of people claiming that EMAX ESCs will not work with Pixhawk because the voltage on the servo rail is 3.3v instead of 5 and the ESC draw pulls that down to 2.8v or 2.2v I don't know how accurate that is, but I was hoping somebody on these forums might have found a work around and/or possibly run into it and discovered they were just overlooking something.
Here is some links to other people describing the exact problem I am seeing.
http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/pixhawk-with-emax-blheli-esc-not-working
http://www.multi-rotor.co.uk/index.php?topic=12821.0
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/px4users/UrDdbw4o7ho
EDIT:
After some more tinkering I pulled out my spare MRM 12a BLHeli ESC and tested it with the Pixhawk. Sadly it worked great. The MRM ESC is running BLHeli 13.1 I am not sure about the EMAX ESCs from the power pack because the USB linker won't talk to them.
Kinda bummed I had to buy 5 more ESCs to finish this build, but on the bright side I will have 5 20a ESCs to make scratch builds with!
TLDR; Avoid the EMAX ESCs if you plan to use a Pixhawk.
I did some digging and came across a few threads of people claiming that EMAX ESCs will not work with Pixhawk because the voltage on the servo rail is 3.3v instead of 5 and the ESC draw pulls that down to 2.8v or 2.2v I don't know how accurate that is, but I was hoping somebody on these forums might have found a work around and/or possibly run into it and discovered they were just overlooking something.
Here is some links to other people describing the exact problem I am seeing.
http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/pixhawk-with-emax-blheli-esc-not-working
http://www.multi-rotor.co.uk/index.php?topic=12821.0
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/px4users/UrDdbw4o7ho
EDIT:
After some more tinkering I pulled out my spare MRM 12a BLHeli ESC and tested it with the Pixhawk. Sadly it worked great. The MRM ESC is running BLHeli 13.1 I am not sure about the EMAX ESCs from the power pack because the USB linker won't talk to them.
Kinda bummed I had to buy 5 more ESCs to finish this build, but on the bright side I will have 5 20a ESCs to make scratch builds with!
TLDR; Avoid the EMAX ESCs if you plan to use a Pixhawk.
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