Help! Motor issues

[AirRig101]

Hello everyone! I've been watching flite test and have been a fan for almost a year now, I would say. I've learned a ton from them, and was recently inspired enough to buy a power pack (c) and a TX/RX pair. Now, I've been trying for the last few days to get the main rotary motor to spin, but I just cannot get it to. I've verified that the transmitter is bound to the receiver correctly, servos will run off of all the channels, and probably most important, the throttle channel is 100% working. I've come to the conclusion that the motor must be damaged somehow, as it doesn't do a few of the startup beeps/noises that I was told to expect by flite test. I think I might have burnt it out by briefly connecting two of the leads to the battery directly, being a total moron, I know, but I have absolutely no experience here. I don't want to rush into buying a new motor because they're expensive, so can anyone tell me if I'm not doing something really obvious? I have all three leads from the motor connected to the corresponding bullet connectors on the ESC.

Component specifications:
3S1P 11.1V 2200 mAh 25C battery
FlySky FS-i6 transmitter
FlySky FSiA6B receiver
Other components contained in the power pack c


Appreciate any help, let me know if I need to explain something more, I'll be watching this thread by email

 

[TheFlyingBrit]

More likely you have damaged the ESC than the motor. As long as non of the bullet connectors touched each other when the power was introduced you may be okay motor wise?
But the sounds your talking about should come from the ESC, you may have accidentally fried It or it was a faulty one to begin with ? so try and find a cheap ESC or borrow one to try it out first.
Find a local flying club they are usually a very helpful bunch willing to help.

 

[leaded50]

the three cables from motor should go to connectors at ESC.. this ones can be put in anywhere at this... and interchanges to get correct rotation.

 

[Gnobuddy]

AirRig, do you own a DMM (digital multi-meter)? If you do, there are some simple checks you can do to see if you damaged your motor when you connected two of its wires directly to your battery.

If the motor was damaged, it would most likely have been by overheating and burning out one or more of the fine copper wire windings inside the motor. If a winding was burnt out in this way, current can no longer flow through it, and your DMM can detect this.

First, set the meter to measure resistance (ohms). Now disconnect the motor from the ESC.

With the motor disconnected from the ESC completely, measure resistance between each pair of motor leads. If we call the three leads A, B, and C, measure between A & B, between B & C, and between C & A. If the motor windings are undamaged, you will measure a low resistance in all three cases. By "low resistance" we mean less than one ohm. Most cheap DMMs will not measure any lower than maybe 0.3 ohms, so it's fine if you see 0.3 ohms or 0.4 ohms.

Please note that if your meter shows "OL", it means "overload", and not "zero ohms"! If you see "OL", that means the meter is seeing a very high resistance - and if your seeing that when measuring between two motor leads, then the motor has been damaged.

Instead of setting your DMM to measure resistance, you can also set it to measure continuity instead. This setting will cause the meter to beep when you touch the two meter probes together, or whenever a sufficiently low resistance is connected between them.

So if you set your meter to measure continuity, and measure between wires A & B, B &C, and C & A, you should hear a beep from the DMM in every case. If you don't get a beep in all three cases, you have one or more damaged windings, and the motor is no good.

If you don't own a DMM, do consider getting one. You don't need anything fancy - a cheap model will do just fine. I have bought usable DMMs from Harbor Freight (in the USA) for as little as $5 USD. Just make sure the meter has the ability to measure resistance and continuity.

I now live in Canada, and I can't find any $5 DMMs here. But Amazon and Princess Auto still carry decent DMMs for $30 CAD or less.

-Gnobuddy

 

[Robert S]

'... $5 DMM...". Thats the sort of thing you could find at Radio Shack. I miss Radio Shack.

 

[Gnobuddy]

I miss Radio Shack.

Ah, the good old days, when retail stores actually had a chance of staying in business!

I missed the golden age of Radio Shack. By the time I first encountered them, their glory days of selling computers and electronics components were over. They were selling mostly overpriced, mediocre-quality audio equipment, and then that morphed into selling mostly cellphones and cellphone plans. I did buy a lot of hook-up wire and resistors and LEDs and other small components from them, though.

I know nothing about business, but even so, I couldn't understand how Radio Shack management expected to survive by selling cellphones, when there was such an enormous amount of competition for that particular slice of the consumer pie. Every giant retailer from Walmart to Target to Best Buy already sold cellphones, and there were cellphone stores in every mall in every city.

There's been a bit of a resurgence in DIY electronics, what with the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi and Make magazine and Adafruit and Seeed Studio. Perhaps if Radio Shack had found their way to that area, they might have survived longer.

But it does seem very hard for brick-and-mortar retailers to avoid the giant sucking sound that is Amazon.

-Gnobuddy

 

[Robert S]

Ah, the good old days, when retail stores actually had a chance of staying in business!

I missed the golden age of Radio Shack. By the time I first encountered them, their glory days of selling computers and electronics components were over.

I got my first PC from Radio Shack around ~1988. A Tandy 1000EX. I upgraded it to 512k RAM ( yes... Kilobits), added a math co-processor and a external 2.5 inch floppy. I think it had a Tandy specific version of DOS 5.1 operating system.

my father likes to remind me how the salesman said, "You'll never need more computer than this." Or something to that effect. It was awesome. Lol.

 

[Whit Armstrong]

I had the same issue, and the answer made me feel like an idiot!

Is your throttle cut switch on? Mine was, and I was having such a hard time until I just started randomly flicking switches and it worked!