Troubleshooting Hardware

How do I know if my flight controller is fried?

If you are suspecting something is being weird in your electronics, don’t plug your battery in. The last thing you want is 22V running through an incomplete circuit because of a loose wire or a bridged connection. If you suspect your flight controller might be acting up, first thing to do is plug it via micro usb to betaflight. If your FC (flight controller) lights up, it means it is not fried. Test the gyro and move your quad around and see if it responses in betaflight. Good news if all those are working. However if you plug it in (via usb) and nothing lights up, something happened and your FC is fried.

Flight Controller is only beeping 3 times when plugging in.

When you first plug in your quad, it should make 5 beeps or start up tones. The first three indicating the flight controller is active and the last 2 is from the ESC. Typically this is a software problem but can also be a hardware problem. The hardware problem being your flight controller is not recognizing your ESC’s. There is only one thing I check for when making sure hardware is good and that’s to make sure the signal wires from the FC to the ESCs are hooked up correctly. If everything seems good, most likely you have the wrong ESC protocol setup in betaflight (make sure bidirecitional dshot is turned off and set your protocol to DSHOT150 in the configurations tab; this ofcourse is if your ESCs can’t run bidirectional dshot and DSHOT300 or higher). Save and reboot. Should work and if not flash your ESC firmware with BLHELIS or BLHELI32 (only one will work so if one doesn’t work try the other).

Are my motors broken or ESCs?

Something I struggled to figure out when one of my motors weren’t spinning. Super annoying and actually quite an easy diagnoses. My first idea when it comes to trouble shooting a motor not spinning is leaving it alone for a few hours. Chances are you probably crashed and some water got into the ESCs. Don’t plug in and just let it dry by itself. After 12 hours of drying it should spin up again. However, if that’s not the case you’ll need to get into step two. Majority of the time, motor damage is visible and can be physically seen. If you don’t smell or see anything it’s most likely the ESC. Step two to diagnosing a frozen motor is hoping into BLHELIS or BLHELI32. Make sure your quad is plugged into a battery at this point and click read setup. At this point the ESC controlling the frozen motor should error or not get detected. That’s when you’ll need to replace the ESC. If it’s detected, make sure the wiring is intact and there are no branches or grass poking at the ESC. Go into betaflight and go into the motors tab. Arm the motor and see if that one spins. If not then it’s time to replace the motor.