ESC to Motor Conntections

Other Hardware Motors, Mechanics, Power and CNC
1

I am creating a robot similar to the Cubli which uses reaction wheels to balance, but am doing it on a budget for a project for school. So i chose an ESC and quadcopter motor that were relatively cheap but still produced the speed I wanted. Anyway, my ESC doesn't have the connections to the motor color coated, and I can not find anything on how they match up with the motor. Think any one can help me solve this? Thank you.

P.s. I have uploaded an image of the motor and ESC for convenience.

Snapchat--2162917326717603312.jpg
Snapchat--2162917326717603312.jpg1080×1920 334 KB

2

  1. IIRC, the way you do it is just hook the wires up, then if you get no movement (or erratic movement) from the motor, swap a pair of the wires around.

  2. You will have a gearbox hooked up to that motor - right? Because that thing's going to spin 10+ K RPM - you can't connect it directly to a wheel...

3

They are 3-phase motors, connect how you like, if it turns the wrong way, swap a pair. Never
disconnect/reconnect the motor with the ESC powered up, that can destroy the ESC and/or motor very quickly
indeed.

4

There might be times when it's important to use a specific ESC wire with a specific motor wire, but I don't think it matters with most of these inexpensive quadcopter motors ESCs.

Since quads require two of the motors to spin opposite the other two there isn't a specific order since they can't all be hooked up the same.

Just join the wire together and test it. If it spins the wrong direction switch any two wires.

I like to use bullet connectors between my ESC and motor but there are a few times I've soldered the wires together.

Does your ESC capable of reversing direction? If not, it should be possible to use a DPDT relay to switch two of the lines to the motor. This would switch direction. I imagine the ESC won't like this much particularly if you reverse while the motor is still spinning.

Your ESC and motor are unlikely to be happy much of the time anyway if you are directly driving a reaction wheel.

BTW, there are brushless camera gimbals which directly drive the various axes. I don't know what the difference between the motors used in gimbals and the motors used in quadcopters are but the kind used in gimbals might be a better option for this application (though this is just a guess).

Edit: MarkT types faster. MarkT thinks the DPDT idea will likely destroy the ESC and he knows a lot more about this stuff than I do. (I still think you should try it.) On second thought, I won't suggest it.