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An Arduino Nano Electronic Speed Controller (ESC) — Part 7
Our new prototype boards from PCBWay look fantastic! We have changed some components as explained in Part 6, and altered the board layout. Assembly is straight forward when all the parts fit.
In Part 7, we continue development of the ESC firmware, starting with voltage and current monitoring. There is also one more hardware issue we need to fix.
Powering the Nano via USB worked as expected (Figure 1), although we do keep forgetting to switch between OLED and serial, when we upload a new sketch. Pin D1 is now shared between the UART transmit function and the SPI DC pin when controlling the OLED display (Figure 8). Thanks to this change, we can now use hardware SPI which is 50% faster than software emulation.
Our problem occurred when plugging in the 3S LiPo battery. This burnt out the voltage regulator on our Nano board and it took a bit of investigating to determine the reason.
