[chromvis]

Does anyone has references to serious publications or materials about Electronic Speed Controllers and motors?
I suspect there should be something better than "This ... is crap and that is the best...".
I have one quad (nighthawk 380 clone) with MT2208 2000kv motors and DYS BLHeli 30A ESC, 1 kg with 4000 mAh 4s battery and 6x4.5 props. It was always run hot motors and ESCs. I tried Pixfalcon, Sparkey2 and now Revolution on it. No matter what PIDs - motors and ESC are very hot and it feel wobbly and underpowered.
Today I tried autotune on it and one ESC finally fail (no visible damage, just dead). I replaced them all with old (relatively) Platinum 30A ESCs. They are heavy (35 g each) and big.
To my surprise quad shoots to the air easy and hover at 25% throttle. ESCs and motors are nice and cold. I did not change anything in this quad, only ESCs and I got dramatic improvement in quads flyability.
I think, this is related to ESC-motor compatibility and ESC firmware.
Would be very interesting to read more technical materials about it.

[TheOtherCliff]

2000kv 2208 on 4s with 6x4.5 props is too much prop for the motor/4s.  It would be close to correct for 3s IMO.  Start by fixing that. 

I actually use 6x3.5 on a ~2000kv 26 or 28mm sized motor on 3s on an airplane which says to use a smaller prop on each fact (my cell count is smaller, my motor is bigger, it is an airplane).

[TheOtherCliff]

On 4s on that I would start by trying 5x3 (2 blade) props, but I am not an expert in that size of motor.

[12many]

Check out http://www.ecalc.ch/xcoptercalc.php

Just a thought - it would be totally awesome if someone implemented something like eCalc as open-source.  It could be as simple as a bunch of javascript that runs in the browser, & maybe a repository of json data files sitting on the server so it could be hosted statically from anywhere, even directly on github.  Crowd-source the performance data.

Another angle would be to integrate into a GCS plug-in, wouldn't that be cool?