I have a flier ESC and i expect it to work but that's probably because i have been down the road so many times with Brushless ESC and and motors.. I have box loads of both.. and built my self a brushless dyno to test Motors and ESC's to get the real truth as to how they perform as opposed to what we are told or want to believe.
Here is one of my random videos on input PWM frequency's and startup delays
I needed to know these kind of things for my Brushless "Nerf" Blaster, which you can see here. The whole point of the Brushless Nerf blaster is to spin the motors up as as fast as possible. This is the same as what we are trying to do here while not blowing up stuff.
The Flier is "cheap" so you'll need to play by the Rules as opposed to getting a more expensive ESC that might beable to deal with the following challengers through better design ( But more expensive )
1) It is clear that the ESC must be close to the Motor not remote from the motors. This can also be seen by the fact that the torque amp has an external controller that must be close to the motor. If it could have been remote they would have put it in the "Box" with the rest of there electronics. If it was in the box it would have been cheaper and simpler for their customers to buy and install.. So the ESC must be close.. But this is not to say that the APD couldn't be much further away than a "cheaper" ESC. From my personal experience with drone motors and ESC's i have never increased the length of wires that go between the ESC and Motors.
Sensorless Brushless motors are a but simplistic and to make up for that the ESC has to do alot of work (guessing). There is no way for the ESC to know Mechanically (like a brushed motor) or electrically (like a Sensored brushless motor) if the motor has actually rotated once power has been applied to it.. The ESC applies power then tries to read back Back EMFI ( i think) over the same wires that sends the power to rotate the motor... This system is extremely susceptible to electrical interference so short wires are important.. This process also explains why cheap processors that are to slow can not achieve high motor rpms because this takes a lot of processing power to work out. I believe the APD has a great processor and has 1million ERPM.. If you actually need that much is a different debate.
2)In an ideal world when something makes a claim you could rely on that being a fact. However we have not lived in that world for some time, Well i dont know if china has ever lived there (LOL) SO when a ESC makes a claim of X current it probably means much less than that so that needs to be taken into account. In saying that it's clear (i have brought his up many times before) that people are exceeding the current limits on the Flier ESC so im not at all surprised that they are blowing up.. Frankly i don't expect them to last in the way they have been implemented thus far.
If you have a motor that after a few seconds of running at load is pulling say 300amp that means that at startup and getting up to speed the current can be countless times higher than this easily exceeding the max recommended current of the ESC. ESC's have a Limit of X but this does not mean there is an active limiter preventing more than X current being pulled. it just means that you should pull more current than X and it's up to you to ensure that doesn't happen some how... Now it's important to say that expensive ESC's CAN have active current limiters preventing more than X being pulled from the ESC and i assume the APD does for the money.
Now you may say that even cheap ESC's like the Fliers have settings to delay / slow the motor sinning up and thus reduce the current draw.. this is true but they were not implemented as Limiters.
It's actually hard to tell how much current is being pulled instantaneously because current sensors do not provide update times as fast 1ms or less... The way I do it is to watch the voltage drop at startup with an oscilloscope and then you can work out where you're at.
So what are going to do about it.... Well the reality is that you'll have to apply the power Slowly via something like an ardunio .. how slowly well that will depend on a lot things.. but the answer would be to test it with a scope at the time and adjust the speed at which the power is applied..
I have previously provided code to do just that but i personally wouldn't use it because it's to simplistic because it does not include the initial dead time that it takes the Motor to get computation. There is also other issues that arises like in the Nerf blaster that there is no RPM feed back to the ardunio so the ardunio doesn't know where in the spin up process it's currently in... This is less than ideal say... when changing gears where the motor is going flat out but once you remove your foot from the pedal ( manual gear box ) and re apply it the Ardunio will then slowly ramp power back up despite the fact that the motor is already up to speed... How I dealt with this in my blaster was to estimate the current rpm based on the time the power has been applied ( roughly a constant ) and to do the same for rev down. So i could estimate the rpm and thus where in the amount of spinup power and time required was required to get it back up to speed.
There is 2 ways to look at this...
1)Buy the APD .. it's proven to work but costs alot.. so just buy this.
2)Because the Flier is cheaper and dumber we'll have to add smartness to it.. This will take effort but will ultimately be cheaper... But it may not be enough and it still might blow up.. i already have one so will see how i eventually get on..
