So im building my first quad and after looking around, I have seen some people suggesting that you need a Power distribution board to give each motor even amount of power. Im using a brushless motors and 4 ESCs. One Arduino for controller and one for the drone. Can someone help me out on how to hook all this up together? im a little lost on how to do it.
Power Distribution Board VS ESC?
- Thread starter vortix
- Start date
RENOV8R
Well-Known Member
Correct. With your setup you'd need a PDB. The Matek FCHUB is a good economic choose and has 5v & 10V BECs to power all your peripherals
www.getfpv.com
MATEKSYS FCHUB-6S PDB
The FCHUB-6S PDB was designed to connect directly to the Matek F405-OSD flight controller, it can also be used with other flight controllers using the solder pads to connect to the flight controller.
www.getfpv.com
wafflejock
Well-Known Member
The flight controller is on the left. PDB takes voltage from battery that varies as it drains and regulates it to 5V/12V typically and has pads to split the battery power out to all the ESCs.
PDB doesn't actually control the current flow to coils in the motor that's the job of ESCs. The flight controller (FC) is the brains of the operation it has a inertial measurement unit (gyros/accelerometers) so can determine it's own angle and takes input from a receiver then does fancy math to figure out what speed to send to each of the four ESCs to keep the thing flying (or level or changing based on transmitter stick input)
PDB doesn't actually control the current flow to coils in the motor that's the job of ESCs. The flight controller (FC) is the brains of the operation it has a inertial measurement unit (gyros/accelerometers) so can determine it's own angle and takes input from a receiver then does fancy math to figure out what speed to send to each of the four ESCs to keep the thing flying (or level or changing based on transmitter stick input)
wafflejock
Well-Known Member
Everything needed:
Battery
PDB to regulate power for FC and VTX maybe other things, and to provide battery power to ESCs
FC to handle input from receiver and tell ESCs what to do.
ESCs get input signal from FC and change speed of motor rotation
Receiver gets signal from transmitter/controller passes along input to the FC
VTX video transmitter takes in analog signal from cam and broadcasts to ground station and/or goggles.
Battery
PDB to regulate power for FC and VTX maybe other things, and to provide battery power to ESCs
FC to handle input from receiver and tell ESCs what to do.
ESCs get input signal from FC and change speed of motor rotation
Receiver gets signal from transmitter/controller passes along input to the FC
VTX video transmitter takes in analog signal from cam and broadcasts to ground station and/or goggles.
So in my Case, since im using an Arduino For Flight controller, I would need to wire all the wires coming from the PDB to the Arduino? Im looking at the Camera connection above, and I cant help but wonder, where would the Cam connection go if i would connect it to an Arduino?
wafflejock
Well-Known Member
Gotcha so a few things to unpack...
In the case of an arduino as an FC you may be able to use the regulator on the arduino to step down the battery voltage for the actual MCU itself (ATMega 328 or 2560 or whatever depending on the board). That said the Atmel chips used on Arduinos are relatively speaking very low clock rate and have very limited resources. The APM boards are basically an arduino+components needed to make an FC that works so if you are dead set on having the Atmel chips as the brains then that may be the way to go.
For the camera question it can go directly to the VTX board to be transmitted, in the images they show an FC that adds an overlay with info about battery level and other user customized info on the video feed before transmission to a receiver.
The typical FCs you see for racing or acrobatic quadcopters are using a chip from STMicroelectronics usually something in the set of STM32F4 boards which are ARM architecture as opposed to the AVR architecture used on the ATMel chips and clock rates are something like a couple hundred megahertz instead of 16MHz.
I think really your best bet if you want to make something you can make work is one of two paths....
1. Use betaflight and modify it to do what you want to do beyond regular flying (it is open source you can reflash most flight controllers pretty easily now)
2. Use betaflight to fly the quad and as a receiver input use your arduino to act as a receiver (maybe have real receiver go into it so can abort with a switch still)
Sorry also I shouldn't leave out there are pixhawk boards and iNav software I've heard others discuss but have 0 knowledge of that might be worth exploring or waiting for others to chime in on.
In the case of an arduino as an FC you may be able to use the regulator on the arduino to step down the battery voltage for the actual MCU itself (ATMega 328 or 2560 or whatever depending on the board). That said the Atmel chips used on Arduinos are relatively speaking very low clock rate and have very limited resources. The APM boards are basically an arduino+components needed to make an FC that works so if you are dead set on having the Atmel chips as the brains then that may be the way to go.
For the camera question it can go directly to the VTX board to be transmitted, in the images they show an FC that adds an overlay with info about battery level and other user customized info on the video feed before transmission to a receiver.
The typical FCs you see for racing or acrobatic quadcopters are using a chip from STMicroelectronics usually something in the set of STM32F4 boards which are ARM architecture as opposed to the AVR architecture used on the ATMel chips and clock rates are something like a couple hundred megahertz instead of 16MHz.
I think really your best bet if you want to make something you can make work is one of two paths....
1. Use betaflight and modify it to do what you want to do beyond regular flying (it is open source you can reflash most flight controllers pretty easily now)
2. Use betaflight to fly the quad and as a receiver input use your arduino to act as a receiver (maybe have real receiver go into it so can abort with a switch still)
Sorry also I shouldn't leave out there are pixhawk boards and iNav software I've heard others discuss but have 0 knowledge of that might be worth exploring or waiting for others to chime in on.
Dugdog47
Well-Known Member
I'm not familiar with that flight controller but the basic operation of most quadcopters is the same.
Somewhere you'll have a flight control board with signal wires from the ESCs connected in either soldered or plugged.
The ESCs will be soldered into the PDB.
The battery plugs into the PDB.
A reciever will be connected to the flight control board receiving the signals from your transmitter.
A camera and vtx aren't required for flight, only for FPV.
Somewhere you'll have a flight control board with signal wires from the ESCs connected in either soldered or plugged.
The ESCs will be soldered into the PDB.
The battery plugs into the PDB.
A reciever will be connected to the flight control board receiving the signals from your transmitter.
A camera and vtx aren't required for flight, only for FPV.
wafflejock
Well-Known Member
Sorry I totally missed the part of your original post about using arduinos as well. I'm curious why you want to use an arduino in this case. I use them for my transmitter/receiver for an electric skateboard and have nothing against them but there are good off the shelf solutions so wonder what you're looking to achieve here in particular.
thank you, i have never worked with APM boards so i have no idea how to program it or how to use it. This is a Project for school so i try to make as much of the Programing and software and try to stay away from anything that is premade. Since Arduino is something i worked with before, it seems easier. Even though quad flights are the same, im pretty much trying to make my quad fly using Code that i wrote or it probably wont be enough to pass as a Project.
Last edited:
wafflejock
Well-Known Member
No problem if you couldn't tell I like to nerd out about these things
So for a school project I'd say this is going to be ambitious just to get something to fly stably, because I know people worked on cleanflight (predecessor to betaflight) for quite a while and took hardware improvements as well to get it where it is today for quadcopters.
That said if you do this safely it's still probably a good introduction to ESCs and sending control signals around between boards so I don't know if I'd ditch the project entirely but depends on your timeline and how dependent your grade is on it actually flying
GitHub - betaflight/betaflight: Open Source Flight Controller Firmware
Open Source Flight Controller Firmware. Contribute to betaflight/betaflight development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
^^ can take a look in the src/main folder here can get some high level idea of what's in there... some things are add-ons like OSD (on screen display for overlays on video) but think things in like the sensors folder and flight folder are all pretty mandatory (granted looking through the code lots of conditional stuff to support different hardware your code could be more concise, but still lots of good info just trawling through here)
Last edited:
wafflejock
Well-Known Member
As an alternative to going the quadcopter route maybe consider also doing some kind of autonomous ground vehicle it will be much cheaper to get parts for experimenting with and ultimately more achievable, otherwise I'd go back to the suggestion of getting an off the shelf FC and using the arduino as a receiver to input control signals to the FC and let it handle the lower level stabilization.
No problem if you couldn't tell I like to nerd out about these things
So for a school project I'd say this is going to be ambitious just to get something to fly stably, because I know people worked on cleanflight (predecessor to betaflight) for quite a while and took hardware improvements as well to get it where it is today for quadcopters.
That said if you do this safely it's still probably a good introduction to ESCs and sending control signals around between boards so I don't know if I'd ditch the project entirely but depends on your timeline and how dependent your grade is on it actually flying
GitHub - betaflight/betaflight: Open Source Flight Controller Firmware
Open Source Flight Controller Firmware. Contribute to betaflight/betaflight development by creating an account on GitHub.
^^ can take a look in the src/main folder here can get some high level idea of what's in there... some things are add-ons like OSD (on screen display for overlays on video) but think things in like the sensors folder and flight folder are all pretty mandatory (granted looking through the code lots of conditional stuff to support different hardware your code could be more concise, but still lots of good info just trawling through here)
hmm, i don't know but i think ill be alright as long as i can get it to take off a little. it might crash but getting it to fly up and down should be alright.
wafflejock
Well-Known Member
Couple ways to go really. The 5V pin on Arduino needs to have regulated 5V whereas the the VIN pin can take a larger range of voltage(believe up to 19V but can check arduino.cc or look up datasheet for regulator on your board) since the line goes through a regulator before going to the MCU (ATMega chip)
So either you'd want to connect the 5V pin to 5V output from the PDB or feed the VIN pin on the Arduino from the 12V of the PDB so the Arduinos voltage regulator can step the voltage down for the MCU (micro control unit, not to be confused with marvel cinematic universe)
Believe the 5V pin has lower current capabilities but so long as the Arduino is just sending around control signals I don't think this will be an issue. Anything for powering motors etc. you wouldn't want the power going through the Arduino itself anyways.
All GND pads on the PDB should be connected some are just bigger like battery input and output sections to ESCs/motors to handle more current.
So either you'd want to connect the 5V pin to 5V output from the PDB or feed the VIN pin on the Arduino from the 12V of the PDB so the Arduinos voltage regulator can step the voltage down for the MCU (micro control unit, not to be confused with marvel cinematic universe)
Believe the 5V pin has lower current capabilities but so long as the Arduino is just sending around control signals I don't think this will be an issue. Anything for powering motors etc. you wouldn't want the power going through the Arduino itself anyways.
All GND pads on the PDB should be connected some are just bigger like battery input and output sections to ESCs/motors to handle more current.
wafflejock
Well-Known Member
Also if you don't have one already strongly suggest picking up multimeter can easily check continuity and voltage before connecting things.
is it possible to skip the VIN and connect ground and the PDB 12v to the arduino power input that the Mega/Uno arduinos have? would that be different at all?
wafflejock
Well-Known Member
Yup no problem with that basically the same really the barrel connector should be able to carry some more current but that's effectively the same as going into a VIN pin just on the smaller nano micro versions you don't have the option of barrel jack.
wafflejock
Well-Known Member
Really if the battery voltage isn't above the max voltage for the regulator on the Arduino which anything up to 4S (16.8V max when charged) then you could feed Arduino VIN or barrel jack with power but depending on the PDB vs Arduino one or the other might have a higher amp regulator, but in any case nice to have a PDB to not need a bunch of parallel connections between wires to the battery plug for powering each ESC, so usually still worth having just for splitting power to ESCs.