Hey, I’m a complete newbie to Helis and the electronics related to it, and am trying to build a quadrocopter(first one.) I want it’s motors(brushless) to be Arduino Uno-controlled and have three doubts related to this: I have no idea about how to connect an ESC to it. I’ve read that it can be co…

ESC designed for RC control (model cars and planes) use a pulse width modulation scheme for control. Connecting the ESC to an Arduino is as simple as using the servo library. The ESC does not draw its power for the motor from the PWM control lines. There are separate leads for the motor, the battery…

There are a couple of issues with using straight PWM. These come from the 1-2mS pulse width in a 20 mS period (50 hZ) typically used to control the ESC. The default PWM frequency for some of the PWM pins is 488 hz, others are 1Khz. Depends on the arduino model. Not every ESC responds to that cleanly…

Philba, I was under the impression that the Arduino Servo library did the 1 to 2 ms pulse every 20 ms as is required by most servos and ESC. Although this is a PWM scheme it is not the traditional square wave PWM that you might use to directly control a motor via an H-Bridge. I hope I am right beca…

Skye, you are right, I misread using PWM. I’ve seen postings from a fair number of people talking about using analogwrite to control servos and such.

Not a hard thing to do. The PWM term covers soooooo many different waveforms.

Connecting an ESC to an Arduino

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Skriptkid June 14, 2012, 10:28am 5

Thanks a lot fll-freak and Philba @fll-freak: Exactly wanted I wanted to know :D. @Philba: Didn’t know that :o So thanks for letting me Thanks again, guys. Really helpful

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Connecting an ESC to an Arduino

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