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This post may be similar to other ones, but they didn't solve my problem: I've got four Hobbywing Skywalker 40 A electronic speed controls (ESC), to control four brushless motors (these ones) to make a quadcopter. I plugged a LiPo 3S 3000 mAh 10C battery to the ESC, then the motor to the ESC, and finally the Raspberry Pi to the ESC, without the 5 V 3 A battery eliminator circuit (BEC).

Here is what it looks like picture.

I know the Raspberry Pi isn't powered, it's just to show ;) And then... I have no idea what to do.

There's a nice melody comming from the ESC when I plug it, and then "beep"s every two seconds, and the motor nods!

I know that an ESC is controlled by a PWM signal just like a servo, but I'm new to Python, and I haven't deal with servos before.

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    Which posts didn't solve your problem and what have you tried?
    – joan
    May 2, 2015 at 21:40
  • What I saw on other posts is that I need to calibrate my ESCs, but I have no idea how to do that... link This post talk about buttons and led on the ESC, but mine don't have one. Moreover, he says that I need that kind of card, but on this says I don't need them (sorry it's french).
    – Thomas
    May 3, 2015 at 8:07

1 Answer 1

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The Raspberry Pi can provide accurate servo signals on all the GPIOs without the need to buy additional hardware. There is an awful lot of out-of-date information on the web. Nobody has time to trawl through and correct all the misinformation on the web.

I suggest my pigpio or servoblaster as the best choice for the Raspberry Pi.

I suggest you download, make, and install pigpio and try a quick experiment.

sudo pigpiod # Start the pigpio daemon

pigs servo **esc** 2000 mils 2000 servo **esc** 1000 mils 2000 # Arm the ESC

pigs servo **esc** 1200 # Open throttle slightly

where esc is the (Broadcom) number of a GPIO you have connected to an ESC control wire.

pigs is the name of a utility which sends commands to the pigpio daemon.

servo g pw starts servo pulses with width pw on (Broadcom) GPIO g.

mils ms pauses for ms milliseconds.

man pigs # For fuller information

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