Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Playing Games

Playing Games

I went to my favorite Hobby Shop and purchased an Eflite, 60A (Amp) ESC (Electronic Speed Control). If you know nothing about the Radio Control Hobby or are from the “Old School” where they only used “Glow Engines” be advised the hobby has been revolutionized by electric motors.

Now if you decide to install an electric, rather than a gas motor, there is a whole different technology involved. In a nutshell there is an electric motor, powered by two batteries and the speed of the motor is controlled by the ESC. When you move a little lever on the transmitter the motor accelerates or decelerates (brightens or fades) like a dimmer switch on an automobile dashboard.

Anyway I bought this motor, batteries and ESC from my local hobby shop, got home, installed them in the model and the motor wouldn’t work. In the instructions was an elaborate programming sequence for setting all kinds of internal switches in the ESC to conditions in the operating environment. The ESC gave off little chimes to tell “programmer” how to set the switches. My ESC was beeping five (5) times and the motor was locked up.

So I called the support center and they couldn’t help me and told me to send the ESC to the distributors technical support facility. I did this and this is what they told me when they sent the ESC back to me.

Inspected your Eflite 60A ESC sent in for service. Tested the ESC unit out with a Spectrum AR6115e, (Transmitter) Eflite Power 32, (Electric Motor) and Eflite 4s 33 30C 2800mAh battery. Plugged in the battery and the ESC did indicate that it was in 5 Cell power cutoff and the motor would not arm. Managed to program the ESC to a 4 Cell with no problem, but the motor would still not arm. At this point I just went through the programming and made sure it was in normal mode, standard timing advance, throttle rate was at .25 seconds, and selected 1.2ms-1.8ms for throttle input range. Unplugged the batter and plugged it back in and the motor armed. Everything seemed to be working normally again. Not sure what you had it set on but it is straightened out now. If you have any questions at all, please feel free to give our product support team a call and we can try to help as best we can….

This tells me “…Not sure what you had it set on…” that somebody (A prior customer) fooled around with the programming, messed things up, put it back in the package, returned it and said it didn’t work. The store then gave him a new ESC. I wound up with the “unset” one he fiddled around with. I wasted a lot of hours getting to the bottom of the matter and rectifying the situation. UGH! I wrote it off to another “lesson learned.” Next time I will make the Hobby Shop demonstrate that the three components work together before walking out of the store!