[AerialPerPlexity]

I have an eacine racer 250 and currently the ESC are 12a with simonk firmware. There are a bunch of how to flash blheli firmware all over the interweb. My question is would it be beneficial to flash all the esc's to the blheli? And what would I have to do? anything? to the flight controller cc3d to run everything correctly? Besides picking oneshot on the hardware tab of LibrePilot. I'm just trying to figure out risk verses reward and pros n con's. Because the back story I got the thing and it fell out of the sky on the first battery broke an a arm  and the battery slammed the fc and broke all the nylon things holding it down. And then I remounted with custom ace hardware hardware. And moved the vtx so the battery now  straps to the roof and flashed libre pilot set it up with a couple different settings but left pos3 default. Flew a 3s battery throught it and the default settings the best.i then tried a 4s and the thing doesnt want to stay in the air horrible occilations and if i try to give it more than %50 throttle at once like a punch out it wants to fall out of the sky or flip over  so after 2 or three close ones i called it a day... The next day i plugged it first battery and a motor went up in smoke and since everthing goes wrong I am Now  scared that anything I do to the quad will not work or take hour apon hours to figure it out. The valuable lessons I learned though where priceless. But I would like to thank the persons or people who made all of this and the manuals and how tos because all the bs vids on YouTube and everywhere else wasted my time. But reading everything I could here helped me get the cc3d connected after a day of frustration. Well sorry for ramblings but I figure this place has the best advice I have read on thee 'ol interweb. Thank you for your time and if you have any questions about eachine racer 250 don't hesitate to ask.

[TheOtherCliff]

It's my personal opinion that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.    The other side of that is that I do enjoy updating my stuff to try the latest new technologies.

For the quads I fly, and the way I fly, I don't see a reason to need faster ESC signal protocols than PWMSync or PWM490.  Do you really need to change the RPM more than twice per prop revolution?

You just found out the hard way that when you increase the number of cells in the battery, you must reduce the prop size to avoid over working everything and burning something out; and also retune PIDs.  For the typical motors I use, if you go from 3 cell to 4 cell, you need to reduce the prop size from 10 inch to 8 inch to avoid over amping.  The PIDs are like your foot on the accelerator pedal of a car you are familiar with.  Now suddenly the motor has 50% more power.  Starting off in a line of traffic you use the same amount of pedal you used to use and you hit the car ahead of you.

[AerialPerPlexity]

thank you for your input. i guess what i need to do i learn about ESC signal protocols. To figure out what i really do need in my multirotor.  i didnt include this info in the original post sorry. when the motor burnt up i had a 3s battery plugged in the battery that came with it. i have given up on 4s batterys for now. im just going to use the stock battery that it came with for now  until i can get the quad working on the normal. and fly around and not fall out of the sky and have confidence in the craft.

[TheOtherCliff]

Ahh...

Fall out of the sky can be caused by several things:
- loss of RC signal.  In this case it is what you want because your other option is to fly away with controls locked to last received command
- stock ESC firmware with Low Voltage Cutoff enabled (this is not the case if you are using SimonK).  One motors cuts off before the others see the low voltage due to manufacturing tolerances and the FC instantly tries to run the "cut motor" at full power and reduce the power of the other motors.
- a bad ESC / wiring / motor.  I personally have had a few bad factory solder joints on my bullet connectors.  I found them by trying to disconnect ESC from motor and wire came out of the bullet.  Same problem as LVC cutoff on one motor as described above.

Also, when one of the three wires to a motor is not connected at the start of the flight, the motor will stutter when you try to make it spin.  If it stutters, stop immediately, do NOT just increase power to make it work.  Increasing power with one wire disconnected makes the ESC send a lot of power, because it sees that the motor is not actually running and tries harder, and it burns up.

So it is possible that both your main issues are caused by a bad connection between the motor and the ESC.

[AerialPerPlexity]

I got a bunch of parts in the mail going to put a new ESC and new motor and then  going to tune the thing the old fashion way. I just downloaded librepilot2go and got a  mini to micro otg cable. And tune it with the 4sbattery cuz all the extra weight with it. Question?  calibrating the quad with libre after oncr in ready to go to the field. do I or should I need to callabrate the ESC throttle. By the full throttle the transmittter  then plug the battery and then  no throttle way? Or should I reflash the ESC to make sure they are set up to handle 4s. The manufactur says it can support 4s but I don't know if that's out of the box. And can you have too much battery? The stock one is 3s1500mah  25c and the 4s is tattu 1800 75c just a thought

[TheOtherCliff]

Reflashing the ESCs might be good just to make sure they are all using the same version of ESC firmware, but it is not required.

Calibrating ESCs and setting motor neutrals is a good idea, but it will usually fly without it if you are in a hurry and want to put it off for a little while.
https://librepilot.atlassian.net/wiki/display/LPDOC/ESC+Calibration

I do both of these if there is a change, like replacing a motor or ESC.

When you go from 3 cell battery to 4 cell battery, you should reduce the prop size to avoid over amping and over heating motor and ESC.  More cells turns the motor into a high RPM motor, and using the same prop as 3 cell loads the motor down too much.  You still get more thrust and power with the smaller prop on 4 cells than with the bigger prop on 3 cells.

Lets say that 10A is max current for ESC and motor, and that the prop and 3s battery you have pulls 10A at full throttle.  If you go to 4s battery without changing the prop, it will pull 13.3 amps or more.  Bad.  Reduce the prop size so that the max current is 10A again.

[AerialPerPlexity]

You always have good info. Great knowledge and many years of the hobby I'm sure. Thank you... But any who. What device do you use to do your ESC flashing? I'm doing research and have seen a Skywalker stick do the job on the ESC I currently use. But I would eventually like to build more craft. I have started reading into arduino uno or r3 or nano aswell. The only thing that keeps happing is that I think its just another little easy thing to fix and it turn out it everything is a whole huge deal that takes me days weeks to do research , try to fix it, more research, swearing off YouTube. And finally some how by the grace of god everything falls into order and click the right sequence and it works and the heaven opens and the angles sing. At least that's how the last two months have been. I sometimes wish I never bought that sky viper nano m500 that got me hook. But as much as I have learned I thought I had went back to school. Lol

[TheOtherCliff]

What device do you use to do your ESC flashing?

In the old days (just a few years ago) ESCs "all" had Atmel processors.  There was stock ESC firmware and there was SimonK firmware.  You could make your own flashing clip to connect to the circuit board flashing pads or hand solder each ESC, but each brand needed a different clip.  The solution was an adapter that connects directly to the processor.  You still had to remove or cut the heat shrink tubing though.

Then there came additionally Silabs processors and yet a different kind of circuit board clip.  Neither the circuit board clip nor the firmware are compatible with Atmel.  BLHeli firmware came about to give us good firmware on Silabs processors.  Then BLHeli firmware made a version for Atmel processors.

Now days by default these two firmwares have bootloaders that allow you to flash new firmware through the servo / signal wires so you don't need to cut off the heat shrink any more.

One setting that is important to us is that the ESC needs to use active braking to slow down the props quickly.  This gives quicker response and more stable flight.  For instance, you can run higher PIDs and falling through your own downwash is more stable.  This is called COMP_PWM (+MOTOR_BRAKE?) in SimonK and "Light Damping" in BLHeli.

To make a change in settings, with SimonK, you make a simple change to a source code configuration file and so you build and flash a different version of firmware.  With BLHeli, you change settings stored in the ESC without changing firmware.  There isn't much difference for the end user since both require using the servo/signal wire be connected through a dongle to your PC.

In addition, you can cut heat shrink and add another servo connector to use for flashing.

To make matters more confusing, you can actually run this firmware with that bootloader.  IIRC the SimonK bootloader allows flashing new firmware (including BLHeli), but the BLHeli only allows settings changes to BLHeli.

To add another twist, modern Flight Controller firmwares have a flashing mode that allows you to make changes to your ESCs without disconnecting them from the FC.  IIRC, the next LP firmware will have this?  And some other firmwares (BetaFlight?) already have this.

So buy ESCs that already have a modern version of SimonK or BLHeli firmware.  Then all you need is a SimonK or BLHeli USB dongle to do your flashing.

For dongles, I have two small, cheap Arduinos, one with SimonK flashing code in it and the other with BLHeli flashing code in it.

BLHeliSuite is one of the programs you can use to change settings or flash firmware.

If you think that reading this was confusing, just imagine what we went through to find all this stuff out and learn to use it. 

I think its just another little easy thing to fix and it turn out it everything is a whole huge deal that takes me days weeks to do research , try to fix it, more research, swearing off YouTube. And finally some how by the grace of god everything falls into order and click the right sequence and it works and the heaven opens and the angles sing.

That sounds about right.  To some extent or other, we all beat our heads against that wall.     My head is just flatter than yours since I have been beating the wall with it longer.

[ggrif]

I think its just another little easy thing to fix and it turn out it everything is a whole huge deal that takes me days weeks to do research , try to fix it, more research, swearing off YouTube. And finally some how by the grace of god everything falls into order and click the right sequence and it works and the heaven opens and the angles sing.

That sounds about right.  To some extent or other, we all beat our heads against that wall.     My head is just flatter than yours since I have been beating the wall with it longer.
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HaHa, cheers to that TheOtherCliff.
After 4 years of head-banging so much blood was running into my eyes I'm still 😐 confused.  It's fun though 😃!