Well, I’m stumped. My Basic ESC works fine when the Arduino is connected to a PC via USB. But when the Arduino is powered by batteries, the ESC gives the first four beeps but not the fifth, and it will not run the motor.
To be clear, here are the two setups:
Setup 1: Basic ESC and M200 motor, Arduino Nano 33 IOT, Bar30 pressure sensor, 2 Blue Robotics LEDS, RTC unit, MicroSD card reader, flow meter with a reed switch (set up as an interrupt). The motor is powered by a battery pack with 14 C cells. The Arduino is powered via its usb port connected to a laptop.
This works great. I power up the motor, then the Arduino and get the five beeps. Every component works.
Setup 2: Same as Setup 1, except I disconnected the laptop and now power the Arduino with 4 AA cells via the Arduino usb port after giving the ESC power.
With this setup I hear the fourth ESC beep, but not the fifth, and the motor doesn’t spin. All of the other components work as instructed (LEDs, Bar30, RTC, MicroSD). Oddly, if I shut down power to the Arduino, the ESC then gives the fifth beep.
I also tried this with a stripped-down sketch with only the ESC and none of the other components in it. But this yielded the same results.
So, apparently the ESC is not getting the 1500 microsecond signal, but I don’t understand why putting the Arduino on battery power is an issue. Would that affect the pwm signal? Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.