Apologies for my ignorance/newbie status, but I’m really struggling to get a HobbyKing HK-30A ESC working with a brushless DC motor (ex HDD). Does anybody have experience of how to initialise these or similar a ESC? I’m not helped by the lack of manual (neither supplied with the item or on their website).
I don’t need a complicated solution, the choice of the old HDD motor was purely for precise speed control and a really smooth bearing. Once the motor is at the speed of choice there will be no breaking or feedback or anything else clever going on, so a complicated library is overkill… I just need to know how to get it running. (I can write C#… it’s just implementing this hardware that’s got me stumped)
So far I’ve tried sending a full 2ms/20ms to (as I understand it) give it full throttle at power up. I’ve tried the same a 0ms/20ms, and somewhere in between. I get nothing. After a period of time i get a very quiet beep beep beep (rising in tone, like “123” ) which I think means I’ve exceeded the time for setup? I get no beeps at any other time.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, I’m tearing my hair out, this has to be really simple… isn’t it? :-[
This post really should be in “FEZ Rhino, Domino, Mini, Panda and USBizi” section.
Go to the Code site (link is in the menu bar above). Then do a search for “ESC”.
Yes, schoolboy mistake with the location of the post, sorry about that, this is my first venture in to forums so I’ve got a bit of learning/etiquette to figure out.
Gus: Can I move it now it’s been posted or not?
Ianlee74: I’m browsing your code and it looks great, nice and simple / to the point, I shall blatantly steal that and adapt it to my own purpose if you don’t mind ;D
Just in case anybody else stumbles across this and specifically has a HobbyKing HK-30A ESC or similar and is struggling… the boot up sequence I’ve got working so far is
Turn the 12v power on to the ESC.
Straight away (whilst the ESC is still looking for a logic input) put 100% in via your PWM in for 4 seconds
Then power down the PWM input for 8 seconds (motor.stop if using Ian’s code) whilst the programming finishes (i.e. whilst you ignore all the programming options and leave things as default), then you’re good to do anything you want.
The downside of my little experiment - It seems that my 1A bench power supply hasn’t got enough juice to spin the motor, after a few seconds of failing to meet the power demands of the motor (and the motor turning weakly) the ESC seems to power down (even if I leave the code in an endless loop just to prove the point). I guess it’s some sort of emergency shut down for people using these for model aircraft???