I successfully calibrated my ESCs with a Joystick and Mission Planner (connected to Navio+ by WiFi) already, done by this way:
1.) Plug Raspberry with Navio+ to the battery.
2.) Start ArduCopter
3.) Pull throttle on joystick to maximum
4.) Plugin in ESC to battery and calibrate it.
Now my problem: I just want to get my quadcopter build done and finally fix all wire connections on the frame. But after that step I’m unable to easily plug off the ESCs later, if I want to calibrate them again.
The question is: how can I calibrate the ESCs with above described setup WITHOUT to have to unplug them from the battery?
The Navio equivalent of a reboot is simply restarting the ArduCopter/Plane/whatever executable. So long as there is no requirement for the ESCs to reboot it I guess it should work following the sequence from the APM documentation, substituting a power cycle for a process kill then start script again. Depending which Linux method you used to start APM (e.g. initrc or service) there may be a cleaner way to restart it (I’m no Linux expert).
In the same way my ESCs go into program mode when throttle is max when started.
To my knowledge you cannot achieve that without powering off ESC by unplugging or switching.
Switching may require heavy power relays (mechanic or solid state) or switches to cope with high intensity.
Maybe you can find high-end ESC which are programmable with USB interface via RPi ?
I found Porta Quad Quattro, available in 12A and 30A, with USB connection. But flashing tool runs on windows.
Link : http://porta-quad.com/favourite12a/
Another idea would be to mimic ESC calibration with your radio, playing with exponential and trims.
Many thanks guys for helping me out. I did not get any working solution. Deltasight, your answer seems to confirm that. And many thanks for the link to the ESCs, I will take a look at these.
For now I’ll try to calibrate the ESCs with my new radio, just arrived today.
Hey all, I am trying to do this and I’m having some problems. I have spent quite some time navigating the forms and can’t seem to figure this out. I have the build quadcopter build that is found on the home page.
I am using mission planner and it shows I am getting data from the controller.
when I put the sticks to max and plug in the ESC they continue to beep mindlessly.
I have tried restarting the ArduCopter code with the joystick max and the Navio LEDs will cycle through all the colors.
I was wondering if maybe my ESC were not taking input for some reason so I put a logic analyzer on the pins and do not see any output at all.
I have yet to hear the confirmation beep waiting for calibration, but I have got the ESC to stop beeping at me at one point.
Similar to the RC calibration but with the range the joystick transmits, it’s better to program the ESCs directly and forget trying to calibrate via APM…
Also regarding the overall “PWM” (simulated) range sent from the joystick read this:
