Hello,

Decided to rebuild my quad with a new FC and tidy up some things, but running into massive issues!
The relevant parts are;

Kakute f7 AIO,
Wraith_32 V2 35A

I seem to be having major connection issues with the FC and ESC's. I first noticed it when each ESC did it's boot sequence at a slightly different time, and then in BLHeli_32 Suite all ESC's initially showed up, shortly before ESC's 1 and 3 disappeared when I tried to change a setting. NEVER to come back?

At this point all motors still spin up in the motors tab in Betaflight.

I ended up soldering the esc signal wires one by one to an old F4 Fc and flashing the latest BLHeli (32.6) to them and everything worked perfectly fine. But then upon reconnecting them to the f7 a few of the motors were getting weird jitters when disarmed, this continued with different ESC protocol settings and seemed to have no effect. Then randomly one motor did the jitter and SMOKED a motor, worse than i've smoked one before. The ESC fried too, it got so hot it melted the unmelted heatshrink onto the ESC.

So I went online and ordered a brand new wraith 32 V2 and DYS f40 pro ii.

Hooked them up and still having issues with esc's 1 and 3 not showing up, esc 1 is the BRAND NEW wraith! So i'm thinking something with the FC?

Note Initially the FC had betaflight 3.3.0 but about halfway through I updated it to 3.5.6 but saw no difference.

Also ESC 2 seems to do the jitter thing randomly.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thank you,

This is sounding more likely to be a problem with the flight controller IMO, especially as the ESCs were previously working with another FC and you are able to successfully flash the ESCs via another FC.

There was another member on here in the past day stating that they had successfully used Betaflight with the same FC and ESCs as you. The ESCs that member has are the Holybro Tekko32 ESCs but they are identical to the Airbot Wraith 32 V2 ESCs. That member didn't mention any issues running their Kakute F7 with the Tekko32 ESCs using the DSHOT1200 protocol. In fact, the member's exact words were "everything runs great". See point 3 of that members comments in another post HERE.

I take it you have flashed a new version of the Betaflight firmware without making any changes from the default config settings other than the setting the ESC protocol to DSHOT? If you didn't do that (i.e. you flashed and made some other config changes) then I suggest you try that first to eliminate any other settings that could potentially be interfering with something.

If you copy and paste a dump of your settings (preferably inside CODE tags) then someone can also take a look over those.

(21-Mar-2019, 11:17 PM)SnowLeopardFPV Wrote: This is sounding more likely to be a problem with the flight controller IMO, especially as the ESCs were previously working with another FC and you are able to successfully flash the ESCs via another FC.

There was another member on here in the past day stating that they had successfully used Betaflight with the same FC and ESCs as you. The ESCs that member has are the Holybro Tekko32 ESCs but they are identical to the Airbot Wraith 32 V2 ESCs. That member didn't mention any issues running their Kakute F7 with the Tekko32 ESCs using the DSHOT1200 protocol. In fact, the member's exact words were "everything runs great". See point 3 of that members comments in another post HERE.

I take it you have flashed a new version of the Betaflight firmware without making any changes from the default config settings other than the setting the ESC protocol to DSHOT? If you didn't do that (i.e. you flashed and made some other config changes) then I suggest you try that first to eliminate any other settings that could potentially be interfering with something.

If you copy and paste a dump of your settings (preferably inside CODE tags) then someone can also take a look over those.

Interesting. I had very similar issues to what i'm having when I first set it up with my Airbot F4 Pro Corner FC, can't remember how I solved it but I remember the ESC's would show up after leaving the whole lot unpowered for minimum 3 days, then immediately after somw would disappear.

Yes complete default settings, I even tried with DSHOT600, Multishot, etc but no changes.

(21-Mar-2019, 11:17 PM)SnowLeopardFPV Wrote: This is sounding more likely to be a problem with the flight controller IMO, especially as the ESCs were previously working with another FC and you are able to successfully flash the ESCs via another FC.

There was another member on here in the past day stating that they had successfully used Betaflight with the same FC and ESCs as you. The ESCs that member has are the Holybro Tekko32 ESCs but they are identical to the Airbot Wraith 32 V2 ESCs. That member didn't mention any issues running their Kakute F7 with the Tekko32 ESCs using the DSHOT1200 protocol. In fact, the member's exact words were "everything runs great". See point 3 of that members comments in another post HERE.

I take it you have flashed a new version of the Betaflight firmware without making any changes from the default config settings other than the setting the ESC protocol to DSHOT? If you didn't do that (i.e. you flashed and made some other config changes) then I suggest you try that first to eliminate any other settings that could potentially be interfering with something.

If you copy and paste a dump of your settings (preferably inside CODE tags) then someone can also take a look over those.

I wonder if I have fauly ESC's or something. I just soldered a signal wire to a different FC and powered them all up (only 1 was soldered to a diff FC) and one of the other motors spun to full RPM suddenly, luckily I was able to pull the batt before the motor got fried like the last one.

Below is the CLI dump:

The only thing I haven't done is run signal ground wires, I will do this next but I don't believe that would create a certain motor to falsely spin up?

I have attached 2 pictures one of the FC and one of the ESC that is spinning up a motor randomly. 

Thanks for your help!

(29-Mar-2019, 01:26 PM)bffigjam Wrote: I wonder if I have fauly ESC's or something. I just soldered a signal wire to a different FC and powered them all up (only 1 was soldered to a diff FC) and one of the other motors spun to full RPM suddenly, luckily I was able to pull the batt before the motor got fried like the last one.

It's not entirely clear what you've tried to do here. Are you saying you de-soldered one of the ESC signal wires from the Kakute F7 and soldered it to another FC? If you did this in order to just spin up that one motor from another FC that that's not going to work properly because both FCs have different ground planes so the signal wire connected to the other FC has no "complete circuit" without the ground signal wire also connected. So you may get some odd behaviour which might explain what you saw, but without seeing photos of the FCs and wiring to show exactly what you were trying to do, it's difficult to say.

(29-Mar-2019, 01:26 PM)bffigjam Wrote: The only thing I haven't done is run signal ground wires, I will do this next but I don't believe that would create a certain motor to falsely spin up?

I have attached 2 pictures one of the FC and one of the ESC that is spinning up a motor randomly. 

You don't necessarily need ground signal wires but they help to clean up the signal and to mitigate data packet loss. This is more important when using one of the high speed DSHOT protocols for ESC control. It's also important that you twist the signal ground wires together with the signal wire.

There were no pictures attached to your post so I don't know if you did something wrong.

(29-Mar-2019, 02:05 PM)SnowLeopardFPV Wrote: It's not entirely clear what you've tried to do here. Are you saying you de-soldered one of the ESC signal wires from the Kakute F7 and soldered it to another FC? If you did this in order to just spin up that one motor from another FC that that's not going to work properly because both FCs have different ground planes so the signal wire connected to the other FC has no "complete circuit" without the ground signal wire also connected. So you may get some odd behaviour which might explain what you saw, but without seeing photos of the FCs and wiring to show exactly what you were trying to do, it's difficult to say.


You don't necessarily need ground signal wires but they help to clean up the signal and to mitigate data packet loss. This is more important when using one of the high speed DSHOT protocols for ESC control. It's also important that you twist the signal ground wires together with the signal wire.

There were no pictures attached to your post so I don't know if you did something wrong.

Weird that the pics didn't attach, i'll try it again with this post.

The ESC I hooked to another FC behaved normally, and I connected a signal and ground to that FC to complete the signal circuit.

The ESC that randomly spun up was still connected to the kakute f7.

Maybe it's not nice to hear, but i would suggest to try to improve your solder skills, i see a few near shorts in your solder.
In this thread you can also find some tips how to solder: https://intofpv.com/t-how-not-to-solder

The gyro on this FC is not the cleanest. The noise from the gyro could be causing erratic motors spin up. If you are running 32K gyro/loop, I would lower it. See if that works. If not, consider increase your filtration or even a cap on the lipo.