Ardupilot (APM) 2.5 - Setting up and testing your motor connections
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- Опубликовано: 17 окт 2024
- ArduPilot (APM) 2.5 Motor configuration
I finished building this model yesterday after flashing the ESCs with the latest Simonk firmware. It then took over 3 hours to figure out what I had done wrong -- the model inputs seemed to be 90 degrees out of phase with the controls.
I suspected that I had reversed two of the motors but which two? The wires run inside the model and I had carefully (I thought) marked up the ESC connections to the APM board with numbers to clearly show how they were connected.
Eventually, I unplugged one of the motors at a time and riased the throttle slightly - I spotted that motor '4' stopped spinning when I unplugged the 'number 3' connection and vice versa.
Now flying well and I'm learning all about the APM 2.5 (V2.9.1) firmware.
Sorry about the quality of the audio the size of the new quad means that I have to fim outside if I want to spin the props!
Thanks for watching and post any comments of questions.
Happy Flying!
Just pulled my old H-frame back out of storage to revive and modernise it. Your videos are still valuable, after all the years. Thank you.
Hi Muhammad, Thanks for the comments. I'm making another quad so I've recorded the process on how to update the ESCs following your suggestion. It should be available on the channel in the next hour!
Happy Flying!
Thanks for the comment, i tries to mount the board as close to the middle of the model as possible but I needed to work the space on the frame.
It seems to fly fine, but I am planning to move a few of the pieces about when I rewire the model for the new motors and ESCs and use a hard case for the APM to allow me to secure it.
I plan to move the APM2.5 to the centre a you suggested and move the Rx and satellite to the back when I get the bits. Watch this space!
Happy flying
Thanks for the feedback. I'll be posting more when the new ESCs arrive..
I've ended up putting some heavyweight motors and props on this model as with all the electronics and FPV gear it weighs over 2kg.
You should aim to have the model hovering around 50-60% throttle and that will give you enough headroom to fly in almost all conditions. I'm using 30A ESCs, 11x4.7 props on Turngy D3536/9 950KV motors.
On smaller quads weighing around the 1KG mark I use 20A ESCs, 7x4.5 props and Turngy D2822/14 1450KV motors.
Hope this helps.
Haai! Do you get good results with the Video TX on top? I have moved mine to the button (aeroquad, cyclone). But have to see if it's better....
I've tried both now and the biggest improvement is using the circular polarised aerials.
I don't fly far with FPV so I've not reached the 'edge' of the TX range (yet!). Thanks for asking.
Happy flying!
Are you using any KK board in this quadcopter with APM 2.5? Why no gyros??
The APM is a self contained system, no need fore anything else!
Cool! Thanks for sharing!
I was just wondering, which board would you choose for stability, the dji naza v2 or this one.thanks
I've not used the DJI Naza V2 myself. It looks super stable but the price has always been a factor for me. The choice boils down to budget and what you want to do.
This board can perform extremely well, despite its age, and can do some very neat tricks like auto return to home and land, mission planning, remote telemetry to a ground station, to name a few..
I will be doing some video of how stable this thing is once it's run through the autotune and autotrim functions in the coming weeks. With the GPS functions it will sit in the sky, even in good wind.
Not sure this answers your question. If you find an unbiased review of the two together let me know.
Happy flying!
Great videos. A sincere thanks for contributing to the hobby. Happy Holidays.
Great video, I didn't know about the motor test command in terminal, thanks! I'm interested to see more APM videos.
Thanks for the reply,
What battery capacity are you using?
We have been working with fixed wing aircraft to get the most stable platform for aerial video we can for a year. Now it's time for multirotor! Great advice and informative video, thank you.
We are looking at a small light quad for training and a heavier lift quad to lift about half a kilo
regards Andy
Cool Video, i am looking at building a quad. What motors and props are you ending up using to fly in wind ?
I moved up to D3536 910KV motors swinging 11x4.5 props. You can see the motor in my review of the upgraded alloy motor mounts for this frame.
Happy flying!
Thanks so much. The dissonance between 1-4 and a-d were throwing me. Also my frame is labeled 3,2,4,1 where you have 1,2 3,4
Masha Allah, an informative vid bro, I am about to build a quad soon, waiting for all the bits to arrive. Thank you for the tips, the setup info and the hardware info will insha Allah come in handy. I hope there will be more to come :-) I suggest doing a SimonK flashing vids to bro.
Hi Got the same setup as your self less your fpv gear. Struggling to set this up, just keeps osculating All motors going the right way, what are your pid settings? did you set it up a x quad or h frame, Your input would be appreciated Ste D
Did you ever determine how your micrphone started up like that? Being a film sound man I always find it distressing for the producer when he is forced to edit with these strange artifacts. But we get the gist of it no prob. I really like the gobs of space on the H-quad frame to lay out logically the systems in distinct and separate groupings. You have convinced me to make my 1st quad in this form factor. I may have questions that I will attempt to ask thru PM feature if it is OK. Best Regards
Do i need to connect the battery to test the motors in the optional hardware menu? Because i click to test the motors and nothing happens. Tried to rise the throttle and i still got nothing
+faxikax Yes you do. The ESCs need the main flight battery power to turn the motors...
Greetings to you Painless360.
I have been experiencing problems with my XXD-A2212-KV1000 motors and not sure whats the cause. Let me try by asking you, what can cause a motor to suddenly stop working when plugged into this apm 2.6 ? No wires touched while building, and the motor beeped when plugged on and worked fine, but upon connecting to the apm, it suddenly stopped working and no beeps on the motor only and no spinning when powering on after the first successful connection.
Any ideas on what to try ?
Arming? What troubleshooting have you already done?
@@Painless360 Thank you for your prompt reply Painless360
The components I am using is the apm which is flashed with an earlier version for quadcopters as the last working apm quad version was giving me errors.
I am also using the APM 2.6 Power Module V1.0 BEC 3A output, simonk red shrink wrapped escs and XXD A2212 1000KV Brushless Motors, Five out of ten that are left & working, I purchased ten in total. I have the other stuff like a power distribution board (Mateksys FCHUB-6) and flysky fs i6 tx and rx in case you need to know.
I have not calibrated the escs so they are in sync when powering on and spinning up the motors, also in case that might contribute to my problem with the motors failing.
Regarding troubleshooting, I have tried another spare motor and it works fine, there is a beep from the esc and from the motor, and the motor spins up when throttle is increased, and vice versa.
When I try to connect the non-working motor that suddenly stopped working, its still the same problem, no beeping from the motor and no spinning up when throttle is increased, its as if the motor is dead by some unknown reason, but only when the apm was connected did that happen.
The truth is It did not happen to one motor, it actually happened to five motors, of which, four motors were connected in one go to test the drone if the motors are going to spin up, using the APM 2.6 Power Module V1.0 BEC 3A, the apm jp1 jumper was removed, and on three of the four esc plugs, I removed the live and negative wires, one esc plug had all three wires, then I connected to the apm, turned the drone on and suddenly two motors were stuttering, one worked and spun up, the other was dead, I tried full throttle and the problem still persisted, then when testing for the second time, all four were dead.
The fifth motor died with a different connection to the apm 2.6 , which was, still using the APM 2.6 Power Module V1.0 BEC 3A, the jp1 jumper still removed, I removed all live and black esc wires from each esc plug and left the signal wires only and connected all of those esc plugs with signal wires only to the apm, two began to work, one stuttered and the other gave up.
After that, I did not try again because of being scared to kill the final five brand new motors that are left. Yesterday, I desoldered the escs from the power distribution board and calibrated each esc with a working motor individually using the full throttle method on the receiver and then powering on the esc with motor directly connected to remote and battery and listening to the beep sound then dropping the throttle down to idle, all esc's successfully calibrated.
I have found another video from youtube with the person allowing us to download a config file for the apm, for a F450 Quadcopter Flamewheel or F550 Hexacopter, which I have just loaded now to my apm, but awaiting your reply for any other important info I might be missing before I try the motors again.
The APM is a very old flight controller I've not to used them for well over two years so I'm very out of date with them. I'd check that the ESCs and Motors are ok by running them directly from the throttle channel on the receiver and go from there.. Best of luck!
Hello Painless360, do you have anti-vibration for you GOPRO camera?
I don't use it. I've balanced the props and motors and it seems to work fine. Have you tried anything?
i am await for my prop balancer from ebay, currently it is out of balance and i have tried to mount my iphone4 direct to the frame, video result was horrible lol
Hi Stephen, I will send you a link to a zip file that I've just created that shows all of my setup detail exported from MP. In summary - when I setup my model MP didn't have a 'H' option so I used 'X'.
Interestingly, I have a similar issue with a new Crius Se v2.5 board I'm using in a 450 class quad. Trying to figure it out - jittering motors when the model gets too far from level. Better if I trim back the PID settings to almost nothing..
Let me know if you track down the cause. Good luck.
Hello Painless,
What was the command line .... "setup motors", it seemed you added another line in the video.
You type 'setup' and press enter. Then type 'motors' and press enter again.
Happy flying!
Painless360 Thanks Painless,
I found that in Arducopter 3.1 the command has been changed to "test" then "motors"...
This helped determine I had setup the motors in the wrong direction.....
Good to know, thanks for the info. Happy flying!
Hi..thanks for these videos.I have problems at motor test.none of these are not working by ArduPilot .I finished ESC calibration but no working 4 motors together.
Just got one of these boards in, I set up everything and my quad won't even stay stable in the air. It just rocks around and flips over right away. Is there anything I can do to fix it
I had this and it was two of the motor connections were flipped when I plugged them in - D'oh! That is why I made this video and also now triple mark the arms, escs and servo connectors.
I'd triple check that you have the motors connected the right way, make sure all of the props are not on upside down and ensure that the board is facing forward on the craft.
Hope this helps.
Hi!
Great video!
I was wondering if there is a way to control the motors individually? like if I want to turn on motor 1 for 20 s and motor 2 for 30s say?
+Swetapadma Sahoo we've never tried. Why would you need that?
I am trying to build the code for a hybrid copter, hence needing to switch between motors. Trying to figure that out!
Sorry, that's beyond what we know. There are some nice PWM libraries in the Arduino code.. Best of luck!
what motors/props are your moving up too?
Hi Sir, I want to use Ardupilot for X-copter. I have no idea how to connect the motors. could you help me with that?
Hi Reza, the answer is in the video. You can forward to the section that shows how to connect them at 8:04 in this video. Hope that helps.
Happy flying!
Painless360 Thanks but that is not answer of my question! i want to know how to connect the motors to FC for X-copter NOT H-copter!
I'm using 5000mAh packs at the moment and get 8mins of flight time but considering 6000+mAh to give longer flight times. I've posted a new video that may help you select a set of motors for your new project - hope it helps.
Happy flying!
Hi can you help me how to connect BL gimbal to APM with tilt control?
The gimbal setup instructions for APM are here - ardupilot.org/copter/docs/common-cameras-and-gimbals.html - hope it helps...
When I got to Terminal and click "Connect", it just gives me a whole bunch (continuously) of letters and numbers. It never stops until I click out of it.
APM retired the terminal a while ago to save space in memory (the APM is getting very 'mature' now). ardupilot.org/dev/docs/using-the-command-line-interpreter-to-configure-apmcopter.html
I thought the APM 2.5 had to be in the middle of the quad?
Hi Thanks for kind reply, you sound like a northern lad? I am from Bolton, would be nice to have local fellow comrade's to share interests together. How do I get the zip file?
I have also got a full setup of a FPV hex quad with Naza and gimbal controller, works a dream a, but want to do the autonomous flying. Cheers Ste
what about APM bangood clone are they worth?
Thanks for sharing, though I would like to comment 3 things: first the direction of your motors is not as recommended on the ardupilot first time setup page (cw and ccw direction should be alternated) 2. For best results your apm should be in the center of the frame with the added benefit of more separation of your fpv and rc signals. 3. Please make a comment IN the video NOT to do this when using a single power set-up for your motors and APM. If you connect a single power set-up (powering the motors+apm) and then supplying additional power to the apm with the usb could damage someone's board.
Hi Jos, thanks for the feedback. As of the date of installation the motor direction was right with the version of the Firmware and APM code I used to setup. This video was to show only the neat trick with the motor command line as I'd spent two days trying to figure out what was wrong.
You are right about the location of the APM, it was moved after this video and is now in the middle, you can see this in other videos of mine and comments on this video further down.
Happy flying!
good info.
Hey guys, you can do this in the optional hardware menu now under motor test
Hi Ste, check you inbox on RUclips - I've messaged you with a private email so you can download it. Let me know when you've got it and I'll delete the file. It would be great to meet up and share fleets.. Let me know if the files help.
Thanks for the comment, i tries to mount the board as close to the middle of the model as possible but I needed to work the space on the frame.
It seems to fly fine, but I am planning to move a few of the pieces about when I rewire the model for the new motors and ESCs and use a hard case for the APM to allow me to secure it.
I plan to move the APM2.5 to the centre a you suggested and move the Rx and satellite to the back when I get the bits. Watch this space!
Happy flying