PiPWM (Pi Pulse Width Modulation): Arm & Calibrate your ESC

This tutorial / example shows how to use a Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins to control an Electronic Speed Controller (ESC). Specifically, the manufacturer specific arming and calibration procedures (there are many other tutorials on controlling servos, etc. with pigpio, Pis, and Python).

Project Goals:

Collect the ESC manufacture specific procedures for:

• arming
• calibration (throttle)
• modes switching (braking, response-rate, music-tunes (!), etc).

Currently supported ESCs:

• Turnigy:
  • Plush (6A, 10A, 12A, 18A, 25A, 30A, 40A, 60A, 80A)
  • Basic (18A, 25A))

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Warning: Remove propellers, etc. before testing, and don't chop off anything important.

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Everybody loves a code example:

Calibrating a Turnigy ESC for full scale throttle/controller throws:

self.pwm(width=self.MAX_WIDTH)
input("Connect power and press Enter to continue...")
self.pwm(width=self.MAX_WIDTH, snooze=2)   # Official docs: "about 2 seconds".
self.pwm(width=self.MIN_WIDTH, snooze=4)   # Time enough for the cell count, etc. beeps to play.

Requirements:

• pigpio

Installation:

sudo apt install python3-pigpio
# if you want it to start on boot.
sudo systemctl enable pigpiod
# in this directory.
pipenv sync

Setup:

Components:

GPIO:

The red ESC 5 volt Vcc is not connected. The white signal wire is here connected to GPIO4, or pin number 7.

Video description:

Usage:

• Read the code,
• Disconnect propellers, etc.
• python3 esc_demo.py

Turnigy ESC

Calibration

A demonstration of calibrating the ESC's maximum and minimum throttle range can be seen here:

Arming and Running

A demonstration of arming an ESC, and a subsequent full power range test can be seen here:

Contributing:

Please open and issue or create a merge request if you can contribute more working devices or timings. Thanks!