How to remove the "beeps" of my motor (with ESC)

Blue Robotics Products Speed Controllers (ESCs)
1

Hi, we are working on the design of an underwater observation camera that should be silent, via a robotics project using a Raspberry pi.

We are using a brushless motor model F2838 which emits “beeps” when it does not receive any signal.

(In order to preserve our battery consumption, we are looking for a way to cut the signal to the motor when it should not be used)

We are therefore looking for a way to eliminate these regular “beeps”.

The problem comes from the ESC we are using. On the oscilloscope we could observe that it is the one that sends a signal to the motor.

So we need your help to answer the following questions:

Is there a way to set up the ESC so that it no longer beeps?

(We have not been able to connect our ESCs to BLHeli)

Is there a particular type of ESC that will not beep?

Can the beeper be removed directly from the engine?

Can we control the beeping of the motor from our Raspberry pi?

Details:

We have already tested the “Air20A” and “E series420lite” ESCs which emit the famous regular “beeps”.

The “Pro-Tronik BF 20A” ESC does not beep but does not run the motor.

Thank you kindly for your response…

The KOSMOS project

https://wikifactory.com/@konkarlab/kosmos30

2

Hi @KOSMOSproject,

To clarify, there is no “beeper” inside the motor, the motor itself is being used as a speaker by the ESC to emit tones. Both speakers and motors use modulated electric currents to move other parts of them, there isn’t much a difference mechanically.

The startup tones are intended as a critical diagnostic tool to check the connections between the motor and ESC. Each of the three initial tones indicated a connection for each phase, with the other two usually indicating “ready” and “armed” when initialized with a valid signal. It’s not a common use case to disable them altogether given the information they convey, so it may be tricky.

The beeping is something purely controlled by the ESC firmware for the ESCs I am aware of, it is not possible to control without directly modifying the ESC firmware. Though BlHeli_32 has some options for custom startup tones, I’m not sure if it’s possible to disable them entirely.

There are two options I suggest:

  1. Modifying the BlHeli source directly the remove the startup tones and compiling a custom firmware. There may be some developers on the project that could help you with this.

  2. Using something other than a commodity “hobby grade” ESC. More commercial/industrial focused ESCs may not have the same startup tones. Off the top of my head, I believe VESC based ESC may not have startup tones enabled by default. These may be a fair bit more expensive.

I hope this helps!

-Adam

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3

The BLHeli32 configurator has a setting for Startup Beep volume. I assume it goes to zero, though I’ve never actually verified this. Of course, you’ll need to get a BLHeli32 ESC to make this work.

-W

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