October 2016
Intermediate to advanced
222 pages
5h 26m
English
Content preview from Make: Drones
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Chapter 16. Brushless Motors and Their ESCs
Aside from its size, what really sets this bigger drone apart from the other projects we’ve done are the brushless motors and the electronic speed controllers (ESCs) that it takes to run them. Technically, the single FET, fed by a single resistor, that we used to drive each motor in the Visible Drone counts as an electronic speed controller, but our brushless motors need much more.
Brushes, as contained in the small coreless motors we used previously, fail very quickly at the high speeds these motors turn. Eliminating them adds a great deal to the long-term reliability of brushless motors, but it means we need a more complex speed controller.
ESCs take the current from the battery and switch it to ...