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I am fairly new to electronics and am trying to build a drone from scratch as a hobby project. I want a setup where I can control all the motors individually through the software. Through some research I found that ESCs are the way to go for BLDC motors, and I am planning on getting this one. I also came across this post which is almost identical to the thing that I am trying to do, except that I am using a Raspberry Pi. After multiple failed purchases due to not knowing what would work with my setup, I am reluctant to buy this and want to know how to connect it before the purchase.

This is the diagram of the ESC: diagram

My biggest worry is that the raspberry pi's diagram only has 2 PWM (pulse width modulation) pins (32, 33): raspberry pi pin diagram

How would I connect these 2 to have access to the speeds of all the motors individually?

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I work with RaspPi a lot. I will keep it short, 2 big problems:

1- PI is slow AF! Way too slow to use for the drone feedback loop (runtime)

2- And where is the 5kloc+ of C lang code coming from? The software in use is very complex. We have not seen ANY new FC firmware in 10+ years (correct if wrong). BetaFlight is the same code base from BaseFlight (2010 era) that was forked from another project. KISS/FETTEC has been around for 10+ years as well. No one is writing new firmware, many have tried.

Fianlly, the LINGYUN ESC should be skipped. If you actually are going to dedicate all this time in a total scratch build, at least get good parts and things that you can replace in a month or year.

The difference between Arduino's is grand, but many are fast little units and serve as the base for all flight controllers. PI's don't have the dedicated C lang/asm potential you need. They will compile and run, but I don't think the perfomance will be any good.

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  • $\begingroup$ I'm sorry I don't understand what you mean by 5kloc+ C lang code. Could you elaborate on that? $\endgroup$
    – ArjunSahlot
    Commented Jul 15, 2023 at 23:27
  • $\begingroup$ KLOC = thousand(s) of lines of code. I am commenting on the workload regarding the code - size of the code base and complexity. Most controllers are small ARM-like chips (no OS). You need C lang (C language ) or similar (C++, Rust, compiled/micro python) to get the IO speed to make micro-adjustments for flight. As for kloc, I don't know the exact count - but betaflight is huge. github.com/betaflight/betaflight/tree/master -- I know a few people who did use a Pi for flight, it was more like a "Pi was on board while another pcb did the actual flying: $\endgroup$
    – FunHog.me
    Commented Jul 17, 2023 at 18:18

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