I need to solder my ESC to a PCB board. I am not sure if I should use a barrier strip, and wire the ESC to the strip, and then solder another wire from the strip to the PCB, or cut the U shaped spoons and solder the ESC directly to the PCB. What is the recommended method?
I am leaning towards cutting the wires and dropping the barrier strip, because then there is one less component to worry about.
ESC:
Barrier strip:
PCB:
Stupid question time … the ESC’s pull a rather large amount of current. If you plan on soldering any of the leads that pull power/provide power, you need to consider the trace size and weight of the copper on your board or you will turn it into a fuse.
If you want to hook up the PWM signals that is fair game, but I would highly suggest staying away from any high current lead. On the PCB that you have posted, I would assume that the large pad areas are for the leads that you wish to solder to. As long as that board is actually designed for the job … then you can solder the leads directly to the board by tinning them and laying them length wise on the pad and flow solder.
Now on the soldering, if you don’t know how to solder I recommend someone who actually has experience so you don’t damage the board from excessive heat. The solder job is pretty sticking easy, but then again I have been doing it for over 50 years. If you are close to Southeastern Virginia, I could do that real quick for you.
You make a very good point. The whole board together can take up to 120A, but I hadn’t considered if the pads on individual level would be able to handle the current from the ESC. I assume you recommend me to connect the ESCs directly to a battery, and only solder the signal wires to the PCB. I think it’s a good idea. And thanks for the offer btw. Really appreciate it. But I am not in the US.
One downside of connecting ESC directly to a battery, would be that the current used wont register on the power module on the pdb.
Understand that you won’t be able to monitor your current drain … but there is a sleezy way to monitor that hooked to the Battery. I don’t know if you have looked at low milliOhm resistors but they are used a lot for current detector circuits. You can use an Arduino etc. to monitor the voltage drop on the resistor and it is basic Ohms Law math after that.
If you have a 1 milliOhm resistor and you are pulling 100 amps through it, your voltage drop will be 0.1 volts. The only drawback with Arduino is the crappy ADC bit depth. Assuming you are using one that has a 5 Volt maximum level into an ADC port, at 12 bits for conversion depth your voltage resolution is going to be 5 divided by 4096. Since you are looking at a very small voltage based on a resistor etc. you have a very rough resolution of just over 0.002 volts.
Assume a scale of 0 - 50 for a range … and that would be maximum current (assuming what I have shown as an example) divided by 50. So your 100 Amp draw would have a 2 Amp reading resolution.
As simple stupid detector can be built and customized to whatever you need.
