Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Maker Hangar: Episode 3 – Electric Speed Controllers”.
Hello and welcome to maker hanger, my name is Lukas weekly and today we’re going to be talking about electric speed, controls or ESC s. These convert DC power. They also vary the amount power going to the motor, so you can control it and they do a bunch of other things. So, let’s get started an ESC, also known as an electric speed control converts DC power coming from the battery to AC power going to the motor, because there’s so much power being regulated through them.
Es es do get hot. So that’s why it’s important to have air cooling in your airplane es es also vary the amount of power going to a motor by taking the signal coming from your controller. This is how you control the speed of the motor. There are several wires on an ESC. The three on one side go to the three wires coming off of the motor.
On the other side, there’s two main wires are read into black. These connect to the positive and negative wires on your battery, and then you have the servo lead which goes to the receiver and gives it power and also allows you to control the motor ESC. S come in all different shapes and sizes and they’re categorized on how many apps they can support. Last week we talked about different amp draws with motor and prop combinations.
Well, once you find how many amps a certain motor and propeller draws, then you can choose a proper ESC to go with it. So say we have a motor and prop that draw 25 amps at full throttle. Well, you wouldn’t want to choose a 20th ESC, because then the motor would be pulling so much power from it. The ESC would get so hot that it would actually burn up.
You also wouldn’t want to choose a 25 amp is no no you’re thinking, you’re thinking. Why wouldn’t I choose an ESC, that’s rated for the exact amount of power that I’m going to be pulling at full throttle. Well, that’s because there’s a margin of error with these motors those prop tests coming from your manufacturer, we’re done on a workbench where the motor was not moving when the plane is in the air. The prop can spin faster drawing more power. For this reason, I would recommend a 30 to 35 fps see for a plane, that’s drawing 25 amps, and this is going to be the same with all motors, so try to choose an ESC, that’s about 5 to 10 apps more than what your motor will be.
Drawing this will also let your plane run cooler. Another thing es es do is supply power, gear receivers and servos on the plane. They do this with something called a VEC or a battery elimination circuit, and the reason why es es have these in them today is because back when gas RC planes were the only thing out there, you had a battery that powered your receiver and your servos and The fuel would power the motor well when electric plane started to come into the picture.
They kept the battery to power the receiver and had a separate battery to power the motor well, this was heavy, so the battery elimination circuit was invented. Now, today, they’re integrated into almost every ESC on the market and all they do is convert the high-voltage power coming off the flight battery into a 5 volt constant current supply, and that can power the receiver and servos without any glitches. We’Ve been talking about batteries a lot in this episode and the batteries are used in the RC Hobby are called the lithium polymer or lipo batteries, and we’ll talk about those next time.
Thanks for watching .