Here’s a rundown of the benefits, please also comment below in the thread to add your thoughts:
For a F450-F550 sized quadcopter the Kotleta ESCs provide a bit of “fresh air” at an affordable price.
Analog PWM control is outdated, you basically work “open-loop” with your actuators; if something is wrong you will have hard times understanding the root-cause because the actuators does not provide any feedback data. Kotleta ESCs are able to talk UAVCAN, which means you can have feedback status (voltage, current, rpm,…) from them!
This translates to these advantages:
You can develop new safety features based on the ESCs status
Less wires in your build (you have one single BUS for connecting all your ESCs… no more star configuration as in common PWM-only ESCs)
Easier vehicle setup (you set the ESCs numbering by spinning each motor)
Glad to see the partnership between Zubax and Holybro.
Thank you for this good news.
Do you have any flight review logs from the flights before and after installing Kotleta ESCs? It’s interesting to see a difference.
I did a rough comparison of the Kotleta ESC against the Hobbywing Xrotor 40A ESC.
Performances are quite the same in terms of power consumed and obtained thrust.
If you are interested in further looking into the data checkout this dropbox folder with the csv files of the tests.
Bench setup:
Propeller: APC 10x5.5
Motor: Scorpion M-2212-930KV
I find this to be a very interesting development. I would be interested to better understand how the Regenerative braking and active freewheeling (which I understand as being the same?) can be safely integrated to a typical pixhawk system?
For example, I’m using the following drotek power brick with a simple lipo battery. Can swap esc safely?
Hi @AlexandreBorowczyk,
The bottle-neck I would see is if you are using a directional current sensor.
In this scenario the reverse current generated during the regenerative braking would damage the sensor.
The device you linked in the example has a bidirectional hall-effect current sensor (depending on the version 100A or 200A maximum current). In this case i would not see any problem integrating those ESCs.
For reference, there is also a chapter related to regenerative braking in the Sapog datasheet.
@JingerZ, @cmic0 Does anyone know where the capacitors need to be installed common sense would have me adding them to the power side but that makes these esc’s very clunky, does anyone have any photos of these installed with capacitors? thanks for your help!
Are they soldered onto the C35 pad that looks like its missing a part?
