No reverse on Brushless ESC

This has been a puzzle for several months and has now been solved.

I have been unable to get reverse even though the ESCs have been carefully setup usually using the programming card (e.g the ZTW Shark)

I would occasionally get reverse but the next time I switched on - forward only.

Very puzzling!

A recent very interesting conversation at our Lake side (Thank you Neil and Peter!) suggested a solution. Was I using a standard transmitter stick with spring centring?

No, I wasn't.

Over the years I have usually been putting throttle on non-centring sticks or rotary knobs.

I went home and put the spring back on my transmitter stick and connected up a 40 MHz receiver rather than anything more exotic.

Switch on, Wait 3 seconds. Allow stick to go into neutral position.

It worked - every time! (The ESC seems to need a very closely defined neutral zone to work.)

Thank you my fellow Club members!

The KISS principle is a good one.

David

david f wrote:This has been a puzzle for several months and has now been solved.

I have been unable to get reverse even though the ESCs have been carefully setup usually using the programming card (e.g the ZTW Shark)

I would occasionally get reverse but the next time I switched on - forward only.

Very puzzling!

A recent very interesting conversation at our Lake side (Thank you Neil and Peter!) suggested a solution. Was I using a standard transmitter stick with spring centring?

No, I wasn't.

Over the years I have usually been putting throttle on non-centring sticks or rotary knobs.

I went home and put the spring back on my transmitter stick and connected up a 40 MHz receiver rather than anything more exotic.

Switch on, Wait 3 seconds. Allow stick to go into neutral position.

It worked - every time! (The ESC seems to need a very closely defined neutral zone to work.)

Thank you my fellow Club members!

The KISS principle is a good one.

David

I have found on some ESCs they have a automatic centering function where they will set centre throttle to whatever value the throttle is at startup within a set range. probably to account for all the different radios centre positions, I ended up having to change them out on a few boats that used flight controllers since they wouldnt initialise properly unless I had the flight controller powered up first.

I would recommend blheli32 escs with current sensing. you can get a cheap dongle to set motor direction to bidirectional mode. you can use any blheli esc with bidirectional mode but the blheli32 with current sensing giving you FOC mode for much smoother low speed control and the current limiting will stop you smoking a motor if you ever got something wrapped around the propeller. i have it set to 5A per motor for my boats, its more than enough.



https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000576967026.html

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006878972623.html