A friend of mine has the exact same behaviour on his miniTitan. Although my crash may have caused some damage, his heli started this behaviour after a regular flight. I guess this is an additional indication against the ESC. So I bought a new ESC.
I decided to upgrade to a more advanced ESC: the Castle Creations Phoenix Ice 50. In comparison with the original one, it has:
- a switching BEC instead of a linear one
- can switch more current (50A vs 40A)
- has data-logging capabilities
I didn’t really care about the current, since my motor can only handle 20A (30A peak). The data-logging was something I wanted from the beginning, but I didn’t want to put yet another box onto my heli. I bought the Castle Link and the QuickConnect as well, so I could access the data easily. Total price: €102 (including shipping).
For future reference: this is the configuration of the ESC when first connected. Out of the box, my motor turned “backwards”. I know you can switch any two cables to fix this, but that would ruin the color-coding of the cables. I also enabled governor mode, and tweaked some other settings to my taste. Here are my current settings on firmware v3.20.
I needed to change my Tx as well. Apparently Futaba’s zero-throttle position isn’t low enough to be recognized. I needed to extend the end-points (ATV’s) up to 130. My Throttle-Hold switch is configured to be at +10%, which is recognized as “autorotation mode” by the ESC. Basically this cuts the engine, but bypasses the slow-start-up phase when you switch out of it. The old throttle curves (60%) gave me roughly 2200rpm headspeed, so I left them unchanged.
