Motors won't spin up

J

Jonas Loekke

Member
Hey there.
Both motors and receiver work when i test them in betaflight. But when i unplug the drone from my pc and try to steer throttle with the transmitter, the motors don't spin.(I have followed a joshua bardwell betaflight setup guide but it still don't work) I hope that you guys can help me. Thanks a lot. :)
 
Do you have fpv setup? I ask because can be helpful to use the on screen display feature or OSD to show warnings about why it is not arming.

You may just need to configure your arm switch in the modes tab or it could be that it thinks throttle is above 0 when you try to arm or the quad thinks it's tipped too much (accelerometer calibration or board orientation being wrong would cause this), but in any case the osd with warnings on will give you a better hint as to what is wrong. If no fpv/osd then also seeing if the FC has a black box memory chip or card slot and can be used to get some logs that might include details about why not arming.

Show some screenshots of your receiver tab with sticks resting and ideally show aux changing when using a switch and how that is used in the modes tab for arming.
 
here is some screenshots of the setup and receiver tabs in betaflight. also in the reciver tab the preview drone moves slowly when i am not touching the transmitter at all. and i dont have an fpv setup yet.
 

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Cool that looks good your high low and mid values make sense (should be 1000-2000 with 1500 as mid). Drift in the receiver tab preview indicates stick center isn't perfect can either adjust deadband (make it bigger to ignore more of center stick) or can calibrate the tx possibly if things appear physically centered but a tiny amount of drift in that view isn't end of the world either.

When you flick switch on transmitter do you see aux channel value change in there?

Also go to modes tab and check out the aux channel chosen (make sure corresponds to thing you just saw changing) and make sure slider bar is around the little yellow tick mark when switch is in arm position.
 
Yup that looks good so with the little yellow tick sitting between the two handles it's in arm mode and when you flick switch it should go to disarm mode. You want it in disarm position when you plug in quad and sit it on the ground then use arm switch. So long as you didn't select motor stop option in configuration tab you should see motors spinning at idle once armed.
 
Make sure quad is pretty level on ground or in configuration tab can set the max arm angle to 180 and I think disables that check. Also make sure throttle is at 0 when you try to go from disarm to arm (flipping the switch)
 
Maybe get a little vid recording posted to YouTube and share here if not too difficult as well might be able to see between what you're doing with the quad and the transmitter what's going wrong. If you have fpv gear plan on hooking up probably worth doing to get the warnings on screen about what's wrong.

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Edit just read back and see you said no fpv stuff on hand yet so maybe see if blackbox logging is an option with your FC that might tell us something about why not arming (honestly not sure I've only used blackbox logging for getting flight data)
 
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Looked mostly fine to me in terms of procedure. I usually turn on my tx first so as soon as receiver gets power it sees the tx and is sending "normal" info along to the FC. Also startup tones indicated ESCs good and motors good and FC to ESCs good so that's all good like you said motors working from betaflight rules out any issues there as well.
 
Also so long as motor stop isn't enabled (think off by default) then just toggling the arm switch back and forth should be enough to go from spinning to not spinning and back.
 
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