My Hobbywing Platinum 50A V3 Governor Experience

[FrankFuss]

I have an Align 450L Dominator using a Hobbywing Platinum-50A-V3 ESC, Skookum SK-720 FBL system, and Scorpion HK-2221-2010 motor. I tried to use the SK-720’s governor without luck, because it would not work with the low head speeds that I wanted to use. However, my experience using the Hobbywing ESC’s governor was a good one. Below are Main Rotor RPM recordings from two flights.

On the first flight I had the throttle curves set to 50%, 60% and 70% for the three different flight modes. I performed the RPM standardization at 50% and during the flight switched to 60% and 70% as shows in the graph. The resulting RPMs where about 2170, 2560 and 2915, giving about a 40 RPM step for each 1% change. This flight I mostly just hovered around and did a few climb outs.

On the second flight I set the throttle curves to 56%, 61% and 66% in order to get RPMs of approximately 2400, 2600 and 2800. The resulting recorded RPMs were close. This flight was spent in forward flight, figure eights and a few climb outs.

As you can see from the RPM graphs, the Hobbywing ESC kept the Main Rotor RPM fairly constant. The squiggles that you can see in the graphs are where I did some full collective climb outs.

[ragge1]

thats cool

[Pionwave]

There is a good write up on rcgroups showing the rpm variance from target compared to kontronic.

Kontronic managed 50rpm variance with 32pwm and hobbywing v3 80rpm variance at 32pwm.

That put the hobbywing v3 between kontronic and yge (better than yge gov store). I'm sure someone around here will have the link in their bookmarks...

[cyclo]

Nice findings Frank! What is your PWM setting? The reason I ask is in the HW manual I recall reading a suggested 32 PWM for good governor performance. Scorpion OTH suggests 8 PWM which I used. I wonder if this will result in suboptimal governor performance.

[FrankFuss]

I am using the HobbyWing's recommended 32KHz PWM frequency setting. From what I understand the only problem with higher PWM settings is that it can cause higher ESC temperatures because of the higher switching frequency. However, since HobbyWing is recommending this for their ESC, they must know that it will not be a problem. I do plan on keeping track of the ESC temperatures to make sure.

I am also using the default 15 deg Timing, even though Scorpion suggests 5 deg for my motor. I will also be checking on the motor temperatures in case this is a problem.

[cyclo]

Thanks for your response Frank! I decided to use Scorpion's suggested 8 PWM and 5 degrees timing. However, I did not detect bogging during my flights but will continue monitoring the ESC in the next couple of flights.