Help with wiring Raspberry pi + Pixhawk + 6/8 ESCs

Hi @AthunestMB, welcome to the forum :slight_smile:

Please be aware that the maximum specified operating voltage for our T200 Thruster is 20 V, per the technical details, and a 6S LiPo battery is outside that range. You can check this comment for some extra context.

There are a few different things you could mean by this, which have varying design requirements:

  1. You want to support running all thrusters at full throttle for extended periods (e.g. diagonally downwards)
    • This can be challenging/expensive, and is not how ROVs are typically operated
    • Your battery and PDB would need to handle 6x36 = 216A of continuous current from all the thrusters simultaneously running at full throttle, which is well beyond the 60A rating of your PDB, and possibly outside what your battery can handle as well
  2. You want to support occasionally running some thrusters at full throttle for brief periods
    • This is reasonably typical for exploratory ROV operation, but is not appropriate for high speed long distance travel
    • If you have 4 horizontally oriented thrusters, and 2 vertically oriented thrusters (like on the standard BlueROV2) then to be able to run full throttle
      • vertically you’ll need a battery and PDB capable of handling 2x32 = 64 A of burst current
      • horizontally you’ll need 4x32 = 128 A of burst current capacity
  3. You want something in between
    • What kind of performance you need is up to you, with the corresponding costs
    • You may need to employ one or more of these mitigation strategies, to avoid under-powering your control electronics and losing communication with / control over your vehicle

Note that the ESCs also need to be able to handle your desired current. For reference, our Basic ESC is only rated to continuously supply 30A, and that’s with cooling measures in place to stop it from overheating.

Ideally you would have a completely isolated power supply for it, but that’s generally annoying enough to manage that it’s more common to use a 5V voltage regulator that can draw power from the main battery.

That does come with the added risk of excess current draw restarting your electronics though, which it’s advisable to mitigate automatically (in software configuration) rather than attempting to avoid pushing too far on a joystick.