We are using the Flycolor X-cross 50 amp ESC’s for combat robotics. They are small, very reliable, and seem to be able to handle well in excess of 50 amps. We are using BLHeliSuite32 and configure our ESC’s using the interface available for the Macintosh computer. I have a few questions I have not really been able to answer after a few hours of researching on the internet. Would you be able to answer any of these?


One – How do I know if I am using MultiShot, DShot, or something else? I can’t really see any way to tell by looking through the menu’s on BLHeliSuite.

Two – Is there any way to do current limiting with the FlyColor ESC and BLHeli?

Three – We usually use “Tank Drive” and almost without fail, one side is more powerful than the other. Is there any way to adjust the power by working with the settings on the ESC? I can see “ramp up power” and “maximum” acceleration, but neither of these seem to be designed to do what I am trying to do.

Four – We have “braking” turned off, but the motor is still clearly doing some braking. Any suggestions there?


We are using an Arduino Nano and a USB cable as an interface with the Arduino 4-way interface.

1. ESC protocol is set in the flight controller firmware. Otherwise, you are just default to PWM.

2. The suite has a current protection option. That is where you turn on this feature. I believe you can also set the amp. To be honest, I am not sure if this feature is still available.



3. Joshua Bardwell has a video series talking about all the features. This will help you fine tune to get a little more power out of the brushless motor. Otherwise, I recommend bigger ESC and bigger motor.



4. Sorry, I don't have an answer for you.

We cooked an ESC today.  I suspect it failed during "braking," and that the breaking function takes all the built up energy in the weapon of our combat robot, and sends it somewhere.  I imagine that this energy is what cooked our ESC.

I have been trying to turn off the braking function using BlHeliSuite.  We can see that the "braking" is set to zero, but there is still very clearly significant braking going on at zero throttle. 

The ESC we are using is the Flycolor X-Cross 50 amp esc.  

Any suggestions?

Is this combat machine you're building for Robot Wars?

What do you have "Non Damped Mode" set to? If this is set to OFF then there will still be some element of ESC braking. So to eliminate ALL ESC braking you need to ensure that "Brake On Stop" is set to OFF, and "Non Damped Mode" is set to ON.

The screenshot below doesn't show the settings values you need to apply, it is simply just to illustrate all the settings that are available for the latest version of BLHeliSuite32 (which as @ today is 32.7.0.5) connected to an ESC running the latest version of BLHeli_32 firmware (which as @ today is 32.7).

Snow Leopard. Thanks for the reply. I feel like we are narrowing in on what I don't understand. I don't seem to see any "Non Damped Mode" setting on BLHeli suite when I am changing the settings on the ESC.

I am going to assume that the very first step is to assure that I have updated the firmware on the ESC and then make sure I am working with an updated version of BLHeliSuite. I am going to outline my plan below, and if you see anything obvious that I should change about my plan, it would be a godsend if you would make suggestions. I am pretty sure the braking is the issue, as the damage to the ESC was extensive. I imagine an ESC that fails due to typical overheating would have a bit of the shrink wrap melted and would smell a bit. This ESC was totally destroyed. The shrink wrap was pretty much all gone, most the electrical components on the ESC were melted and out of place, and when I looked at the the soldering points where you attach the wires, they were totally melted, many wires had shifted location substantially, and some had come completely off.

I am somewhat new to this, but I will give you as much information as I can.

ESC Model: Flycolor X-Cross 50amp. http://en.flycolor.net/index.php?c=category&id=182
BLHeli: BLHeliSuite32xm 64 0.9.1.6 (running on a mac)
Interface: Arduino Nano w/ ATmega328 using arduino 4 way if
ESC Firmware: Not sure (I will try to figure this out first thing tomorrow)

I see nothing wrong with your plan and it sounds like a logical set of steps to me.

I don't use a Mac so I can't verify if the latest version for the Mac is the same as the latest version for Windows but they both have the same modified date on them and they should be built from the same source code files so I don't see why there would be any difference.

The options you see in the GUI most likely depend on the version of firmware that is present on the ESC so that might be the reason why some of the options seem to be missing. The Flycolor X-Cross BL-32 ESC was released some time around the middle of 2018 so if the firmware has never been updated on it then it could be quite old. The latest version of the BLHeli_32 firmware is currently 32.7 and that was released some time back in October this year.

What type of load are trying to spin with the motor? Are you 100% sure the 50A rating of the ESC is up to the task? If it's some kind of heavy spinning disc or cylinder, the current needed to get the motor spinning could be exceeding the limit of the ESC. Likewise, if it's some kind of axe that the motor is moving which has a stop point, then if power is still being provided to the motor after it has hit that stop point, there will be excess current draw to the motor which is being held still and that scenario can easily cause the ESC to burn. This is one of the causes of ESCs burning out on our multirotors where the blades are being prevented from rotating (i.e. because they are hitting the ground or caught in the branches of a tree), and applying throttle in such a situation has a high chance of burning the motor or ESC. Have you tried measuring the current being drawn through by the ESC when you activate and deactivate the weapon?

I do suspect we are exceeding the 50 amps during start up if the kids lay on the throttle too hard. This would also happen if the weapon is stuck on an opponent and one of my kids forgets to let go of the throttle in a case such as this. I had hoped that the temperature limit setting would help prevent damaging the ESC here, and if we occasionally lose one, that is O.K.

We use the Flycolor XCross 50 amp, because it handles quite a lot of current in such a small package, and both space and weight are precious.

The weapon is 5 pounds of spinning metal, so that has quite a bit of energy, and I expect it spins at over 4000RPM.

The reason I suspect that it is the breaking is because the damage to the ESC was WAY past what I would expect for an ESC damaged by simply drawing too much current to spin the weapon up.

---

My first step will be to see if I can see the "damped lite" setting, turn it off, make sure braking is off, and then see if I can burn up another one by getting it up to full speed and then immediately going to zero throttle.

I will report back.

So, this morning, I hooked up one of the ESC's and I see that "Non Damped Mode" is set to "off." I will set it to "On" and do some testing. I imagine that this may well be the solution.

Thank you Thank you Thank you....

I changed the damping setting. "Non-Damped mode" is now set to on.

When I spin up the weapon in the forward direction and then release the throttle, the weapon spins down slowly and smoothly. No braking at all.

Interestingly enough, when I spin it up in the reverse direction, there is still quite a bit of braking.

Not sure what to make of that.

When you get braking after spinning the motors in reverse, is this with the "Motor Direction" configured to be "Normal" in BLHeliSuite and using specific coded to spin the motor in the opposite direction that it has been pre-configured to run, or is this happening after you specifically configure the motor direction in BLHeliSuite to be "Reversed" and then just execute code that simply just runs the motor in whatever direction they have been pre-configured to run?

Also, is your ESC now on the latest 32.7 version of BLHeli_32?

O.K.

I have a lot of clarity now. It appears there are many settings that can trigger braking like behavior with BLHeli. First of course, you need to set the braking to off. Next, you need to turn "Non-Damped Mode" to on. Thanks for that advice.

Finally, we were using Bidirectional mode, and we needed to change that to "Bidirectional Soft." It looks like Bidirectional mode has a minimum throttle speed of 5%. I imagine that, unless the trim was set exactly, that in one direction, the throttle, when not set quite exactly to zero, as giving me 5% throttle in the opposite direction the motor was spinning.

Bi-directional soft fixed the problem completely. I think Bidirectional Soft allows throttle speeds all the way down to zero, so, if your throttle is not perfectly trimmed, you may still be getting 0.01% throttle, or something small like that, and then there is no noticable effect.

We are no longer burning ESCs!!!

Thank you for all of your help!!!!

Thanks for sharing that info. Some of us here probably learned something from your research. I certainly did.

In the multirotor world we don't generally have a need to use bi-directional motor settings meaning that the motors are either set to forward or reverse. So the other 4 bi-directional modes just don't get used which means that most of us probably aren't that familiar or don't have any real world experience with those bi-directional modes. People who fly 3D will, but 3D flight with multirotors is quite rare and there are very few people who do it because it requires some serious skills and nerves of steel

OK.

I thought I had it, but not quite.  

Right now, I have a setup that will work, but only if you make sure you do not reverse the direction of the weapon.

Using Bidirectional mode, the motor will slowly spin down from full forward rotation, as long as you go just down to zero throttle.  If you go to negative throttle, there is braking.  

My next thought is to forgo any sort of bidirectional capability on my spinning weapon and just configure the ESC to spin in one direction.  The thought there is that if the ESC will spin the motor in only one direction, and braking and damping are both off, then there will be no case where the ESC will try to slow the weapon down.

Unfortunately, when I try to switch from bidirectional mode to normal, the motor just beeps at me.  I cannot get it to work at all.  Tried two different motors with the same result.  If I switch back to bidirectional, everything works again.

Any thoughts?

(23-Nov-2019, 11:15 PM)cbixel Wrote: Using Bidirectional mode, the motor will slowly spin down from full forward rotation, as long as you go just down to zero throttle.  If you go to negative throttle, there is braking.  

When you think about it logically, it actually makes complete sense for the ESC to do that. If you slam the throttle into reverse, there is never normally any use case where you would want to for an unknown period of time before the motor actually reverses itself. You want that to happen immediately, which means the ESC needs to brake the motor as quickly a possible until it stops, after which it can then be run in reverse up to the commanded RPM.

What are you using to control the ESC? Is it something like an Arduino or are you simply just using a PPM receiver which is connected directly to the ESC?

(23-Nov-2019, 11:15 PM)cbixel Wrote: My next thought is to forgo any sort of bidirectional capability on my spinning weapon and just configure the ESC to spin in one direction.  The thought there is that if the ESC will spin the motor in only one direction, and braking and damping are both off, then there will be no case where the ESC will try to slow the weapon down.

Unfortunately, when I try to switch from bidirectional mode to normal, the motor just beeps at me.  I cannot get it to work at all.  Tried two different motors with the same result.  If I switch back to bidirectional, everything works again.

That's a bit odd. Again, the same question as above - what are you using to control the ESC?

As a workaround, with bi-directional switched on, try setting the "Center Throttle" to whatever the lowest value is than what your transmitter outputs with the throttle stick at it's lowest position (which is usually 1000). I've not tried it, but in theory the lowest throttle position would then be neutral (motor stopped), and because you can't physically go any lower with the throttle stick, the motor could never actually be commanded to run in reverse direction.

Here is my full setup.

Radio - Spektrum Pistol grip with matching receiver - https://www.amazon.com/Spektrum-2-Channe...B01N78H16P
Battery - 6S lithium ion
ESC - Flycolor x-cross 50 amp - https://www.team-blacksheep.com/products/product:1929
Motor - Turnigy Aerodrive SK3 5045 - https://hobbyking.com/en_us/turnigy-aero...motor.html


"When you think about it logically, it actually makes complete sense for the ESC to do that."
I agree, I think the ESC is performing what in most cases is a logical and helpful set of actions.

"As a workaround, with bi-directional switched on, try setting the "Center Throttle" to whatever the lowest value is than what your transmitter"
We must think a lot alike. I did try this workaround. I was not able to eliminate the braking, but I think I will have to try that again, as I can't remember exactly what I did try. I do know that, as you suggested, the idea is to modify the settings on the ESC so that it will interpret signals from the transmitter as all asking for something in the forward direction or zero. Nothing in reverse.

I have a nice little bench system set up, so I can try lots of things quite conveniently. I will try the throttle settings workaround again tomorrow.

I am confused by the systems rejection of "normal" for the motor direction. Would it be worthwhile to try to flash an older version of BL-Heli? I had even thought of trying to flash SimonK to the ESC, but, being a bit of a newb, I was worried that this might somehow "brick' the ESC.