that's funny I hit your Amazon link and bought the smoke stopper and 2 minutes later that one blew up on you... should I return it and wait for a better version?
From one genius in youtube if esc for 1 motor if died on your 4 in 1 ,you can make 3in1 and 1 , buy separate esc control and sold it direct con power of battery line, and with testing in betaflight in pc(motor testing) find a control signal cable for motor what you need. I repaired my emax hawk pro with this idea.
The number of posts where the person’s motor isn’t spinning or is twitching with PROPS ON INDOORS on the multirotor subreddit the last few days has been insanely high. Now I can link this video along with telling them they’re kinda dumb for arming inside with props on with a known issue on top of it
Dang that was helpful. Its hard to get such clear, concise information in the world of electronics for those of us without electronics degrees. Thank you.
Josh from the past, you should have done this video 5 years ago. In the past 4 years I figured out how to troubleshoot but this video makes it very easy. You've got some amazing points.. thank you so much for all your hard work
Hey JB, I'm not sure if you remember or not but about a week ago you showed a video of mine with a motor issue, where one motor would run for a few seconds than 'reset' in a perfectly rhythmic way... I replaced the ESC and that cured it 👍 Just wanted to let you know as it's relevant to this video.
Just want to add in you can still get your motor tones for all motors. Had a ground short on my brand new AIO and all motors still toned so be careful because if you keep the unit armed it could send that stinky smoke from the motor or blown fet. Still researching my recent and years of these issues but recently watched this one. It will probably lead to me changing the fet or spare part pile.Thanks JB for all your time researching and assisting all the hobbiest.
There is always a point with his amazing videos that I get lost and it's exhausting to keep up. This hobby is wonderful, but taxing at times. Thanks Joshua!
Solid video. You went over everything really clearly. One thing I’ve rarely run into is having just the first 3 beeps and missing the last 2 FC beeps intermittently. 75% of the time it works and flies fine. Sometimes I don’t get the beeps. I think it’s a delay on my FC initializing and sending throttle signal in time. Only had it happen with a particular FC/ESC combo
LOL where was this video a week ago when I had this exact problem? Thank goodness for the multicopter subreddit for pointing me in the right direction.
Awesome Video !! Love the way, you explain things on your RU-vid channel. There is a lot of usefull information (data) on your channel. I'm from Spain (Valencia), here is 03:32 in the morning & I'm watching your video. Can't stop watching your videos. Hello to everyone !!! 😎 THANK YOU FOR SHARING YOUR KNOWLEDGE WITH US!! 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻😎
I just went through these steps yesterday. Glad to see i checked everything how the master does it. In my case. One motor would idle fine (props off) and rev to about 20% throttle then cut out. Props on, the motor would begin to idle then twitch out and stop. Turned out damaged/broken wire to motor and I suspect this limited the current that could be delivered.
wow that actually filled me with joy and surprise to know that the motor makes those beeps. Always thought the sound stage was a little wide to be a speaker in the FC.
Thank you so much JB I can finally just send people to this video. This is the most common question I get. haven to go back and forth with questions to fix the problem no more. Lol 🤣
Always keep your guard up. I recently had a motor on a little 3D printed Cub that I built and with the prop on I noticed it seemed to be turning backwards. So with the throttle fully closed I came up with this brain fart idea that maybe I needed to reverse the throttle channel on the transmitter. Well the second I did that it instantly went to full throttle (still in the same reversed direction) and the entire nose of my model virtually exploded into a million pieces right next to me. Luckily I was uninjured but after cleaning up the mess I noticed the motor no longer worked. The wiring looked okay but it just wouldn't turn. So I bought a new motor and guess what - same thing. I bought a new ESC and still no joy. The throttle channel was in Normal (not reversed) but when trying to calibrate the ESC I noticed it was working backwards. In order to get it to calibrate I had to start with throttle lever fully closed then move it to fully open and then it worked but the throttle channel was operating reversed even though it was in normal mode. I finally had to again hot switch from normal to reverse (this time with no prop) to get everything back in sync. It had me scratching my head for about a week. Motto is - BE CAREFUL
JB, great video. Simple troubleshooting with explanation along the way. I've always wondered how to check those hard to turn motors. Way to have Joshua from the future show the humanity and confusion troubleshooting sometimes brings. Nicely done.
Thanks for the knowledge, I really appreciate it. Hopefully it can continue to provide useful lessons for all of us. Hope you are always healthy, thank you JB, have a great day.. 😊👍
Very good explanation. I wish I would have seen it two years ago when I started with brushless motors and ESC s. I have to learn this lesson by myself. I don't need it before with nitro motors. ;-)
Turns out my twitching problem in flight was simply a de-soldered capacitor. The negative side had broken lose from the ESC negative Vbat pad. In flight the broken leg of the capacitor would tap the vbat pad and release its energy causing the twitch. Hope this helps someone. Cheers Barry
Super useful video.. My newest drone just did something like this, so now it's time to troubleshoot. Perfect timing for this video :D Many thanks from Denmark.
Fried an ESC on Sunday and it took one of the motor into the grave. Gonna do some rapairs this weekend. RIP P.S. Seems you did not mentioned to check the continuity between the positive and the single pads of your ESC, in my case I saw there was a short on the positive and one of the pads so if I would have connected another motor to test I would have killed another motor.
@@mikebergman1817 Yeah, I am still today seeing the cost of the repair lol. It was a Mamba 40Amps not soft mounted and died in full acceleration so maybe all the factors combined took to this point. I also have to mention that it died from the side I took the first and last hard hit back in January.
So I fried a motor months ago ordered a few motors and installed the motor and plugged it in and no smoke then I spun the motor up and the motor started smoking again on the new one:/ so I’m assuming it’s a fried ESC? It’s a Diatone Roma F5 Any help would be awesome!
Agreed! Even though it takes 10 minutes to completely redo a motor I don’t think most people bother, among my flying buddies, it’s just me and one other person that rewind our motors. We are the FPV nerds among the group :p I like how I can change/customize the KV and I try to be wise with my use of resources on this planet. That being said I am lazy and don’t fix them right away if I have a spare on hand, I usually collect a bunch (4-6 usually) and then I do them all at once.
in my case stator was unglued from the base and moved about 15 degrees forward and backward. Thar caused motor lost sync in air and quad fall from sky. Works prefectly on the ground - takeoff - crash. Well. I replaced ESC - guess - didnt worked. then at the next turn stator just ripped wires off, shorted it and burned ESC.
Those motor screws look too long. There’s maybe a millimeter or two of clearance. Ideally the motor screws would be flush with the top of the mount holes. Although there seemed to be some clearance, the inbound motor screws might be touching the wires. The threads could cut through and cause a short. Watch the part of the video where you zoom in on the motor.
Something that often occures when testing with a smoke stopper is that it detects a short once or twice in a row and then it works as expected, it is related to the capacitor(s) which are getting charged. Another topic that would be very interesting : these last months I got into too many bad gyros (much more than before). Do you know an effective way to troubleshoot a gyro on the bench ? I had bad gyros that induced "grinding noise" from the motors, even with no props, that was easy. But I had other bad gyros which were terrible on one or 2 axis, but only a flight with BlackBox could highlight the issue. Thanks Joshua.
If the 4-1 esc is not working, the motors tab in BF, or BlHeli will show which esc(s) is bad, motor will show 100% error rate. To check that it isn’t the motor, rewire a different motor to that esc, and check again. I recently had 1 out of 4 esc(s) fail, after a hard smack into wet grass.
Error of 100% means the FC cannot talk to the ESC. It has no bearing on whether the motor works. You can connect FC to ESC with no motor at all and it will read 0%.
As soon as you said Ken Herron I was immediately turned off. Ive found that guys personality exceedingly annoying. Just my personal opinion though and I’m only some guy on the Internet so… With that being said this is the video we all needed so great job 🤙🏻
I have a motor twitching but it runs on higher RPM. But if it doesn't rotate initially it will not spin at night RPM as well. So higher RPM just runs it and can go to lower rpm from there
Wow JB I literally just got this problem, I was out flying and when I switched to the Skyeliner, exactly the same kwad you are showing I had a problem with one of the motors, I don't know yet what it is but I noticed the color in that one is more yellowish as the one in your video. Thank you for posting, I have to figure it out and I should order a new motor. Question, would this motors be affected if flying the quad with a 5s lipo?
Hello Joshua, can you help me ? I just bought Darwin FPV Baby Ape, when I connected receiver (ELRS EP2) and when I connected the battery (it was 2S and drone was 2-3S) it smoked. ESC's circuit (FET) smoked. I measured motor - it has much lower impedance than other 3 and when I spin it (with motor screw driver) I get 1/3 of voltage of others. Could motor cause ESC to burn ? The whole setup is stock from DarwinFPV (1104 $3 cheap motors). Could motor be bad from factory ? Or ESC ? FC+Esc's not cheap on those copters. THANKS ! Love your channel. Petr
I'm going through this problem right now with my skyliner and it's driving me crazy. Actually I've had this problem for about 6 months and I've just been dealing with it
hey JB,ive found the vicky short saver to be abit too sensitive - plug the quad into your bench top power supply as that will act the same as the short saver but will also tell you how much current your drawing etc. i replaced a motor just recently and then used the short saver for first power on and it was tripping on both 1 and 2 amp, plugged it in to power supply and it was drawing just over 2 amp but wasn't anything wrong with it it was just the short saver being so sensitive
Awesome video. I have a similar situation with a tinywhoop. I swapped the "faulty" motor and it works fine when I plug it into a different location. So that either points to a short circuit or a bad ESC. How do you go from there?
