If you’re here, you are probably have, or want to have a Brushless Blaster. And that’s great! Now in the middle of one of these awesome bits of kit is the ubiquitous ESC – or electronic speed controller.
Now before we talk about the developments in the world of ESC’s, it’s important to know a few things about them:
- All BLDC (i.e. brushless) motors require an ESC
- You can’t really share an ESC between motors
- ESC’s use a variety of techniques in order to track the motor position – Hall sensors (like in power tools); BEMF detection (like blasters, FPV drones, etc); FOC (like skateboards).
- An ESC is much more than a piece of hardware, the software plays in integral role in it’s performance.
Now that’s out of the way, there are 3 overarching developments in the field of ESC’s in respect to Brushless Nerf..
Dyno Characterisation
Ultrasonic2 has embarked on a project to build a working dyno for the purposes of understanding ESC’s better. He’s asking questions such as the impact of all the blheli32 settings in a blaster context, and just how do ESC’s stack up against each other in terms of raw performance.
You can find out more info from the first video in his new series: On YouTube
SimonK supply and behaviour modifications
TorukMakto4 has been plugging away addressing a few issues with the SimonK line of ESC’s..
Firstly that you can’t really buy them anymore. He’s addressed that simply by designing some modern, open source PCB’s and released them for the world to have. He has a few designs made, and a few in the pipeline to address a few different market segments. I’m sure he’ll start making them for sale at some point.
Secondly to enhance the characteristics of SimonK in respect to Nerf. In addition to just tuning the firmware for Nerf use, he has also devised an additional governor protocol in the PWM to take a lot of the headache out of his SimonK’s closed loop mod.
Find out more here: On Reddit
Ground-up ESC design specifically for Nerf
This is more of the start of a -very- long journey, but when people say to not reinvent the wheel, I’ll scoff and do it anyway. And so I have started a bit of a part time project to develop a working ESC that may have a home in Nerf space… One day.
Find out more here: On Reddit
3 different guys, 3 different projects, 1 outcome: better brushless blasters.
