First venture into RC anything

B

Brady Nelson

Member
Hello everyone! I am a college student and for a project we are working on building a quadcopter. Eventually the goal of the project is to take off the flight controller and build our own. But for now we are just learning about them in general. We are trying to build our first quadcopter and are having problems. Right now I am so confused I'm not even sure what our problem is!

Here is the equipment we are trying to use:

Flysky FS-I6 with FS-IA6B receiver.
F4 Flame Race Spec STM32F405 Flight Controller.
Racestar RS20Ax4 20A 4in1 ESC
And a power distribution board.

I'm not even sure where to start with how lost we are....

With my setup, should I be doing PPM or iBus?

Does anyone know how to calibrate these ESC's and gotten it to work? I have the manual for the BLheli firmware, and it is supposed to beep a certain pattern, but we can't get it to follow the pattern in the manual.

My tx says I'm bound to my rx, but my ESC never sees any throttle.

I could really use any help we can find. Thank you so much.
 
The first thing I'd suggest is to ignore most of the manuals, they're usually translated from Chinese and end up being what we call Chenglish. Youtube is a wealth of information and all your questions can easily be answered with a little research. For example, your ESCs: Just do a google search for "simple ESC calibration", it's easy and quick. Same for protocol, just type in "PPM vs iBus". Research the tutorials by Oscar Liang, Joshua Bardwell and Blue Falcon, there's a lot to learn in this hobby. BTW as this is your first experience with quadcopters, be prepared as with the parts you've listed, this thing will be insanely powerful
 
Thank you for the replies!

Yes, I already have motors, batteries and props.

I'm trying to figure out the ESC calibration. I have the data sheet which gives a beep pattern based on with it is armed or in calibration mode. I've never been able to get it to arm or respond to my calibration attempts. As I've been reading more, I think it might be because I haven't armed my Transmitter properly??? I have the FS-I6 and I am trying to figure out if I need to do "Switch-arming" or "Stick-arming" before I calibrate the ESC??? Also, if I use cleanflight and set the ESC type to Dshot, can I just skip the ESC calibration???
 
I think some of my problem might be wiring or some configuration setting I can't find. I realized today in Betaflight that under the Receiver tab that my AERT and Aux values never change when I move the sticks on my TX.

I'm trying to use PPM for now, since I figured 1 wire would be easier for me right now. I have 5v going from my flight controller to my RX, and a wire from the the PPM port on my Flight controller to the PPM pin on my RX. Am I missing anything? Also, in betaflight I changed the RX type to PPM. And my TX and RX are bound.
 
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