New Measurement Capabilities
We are very happy to announce that the new high voltage motor test system is finally ready to roll! Thank you very much to Catalyst Machineworks and T-Motor for supporting this project. Without their contributions this would not have been possible.
The new system was built by Ryan Evens as a near duplicate of the thrust test system Ryan Harrell developed. The main difference is a new 30V 80A power supply, capable of supplying the voltage for 6S testing and handling larger voltage and current spikes without entering protection modes.
To qualify the new thrust stand, we tested multiple motor and prop combinations on both thrust stands. The results are best viewed in the following isoplots, with Ryan Evens’ system on the X-axis and Ryan Harrell’s system on the Y-axis. Each data point represents the average from each of the sustained thrust portions of the test sequence at 50%, 75% and 100% throttle.
There is a strong linear correlation between the two systems with a reasonable amount of noise. This step required significant time and effort, including several revisions to our calibration methods. That effort was definitely worthwhile, and we are very happy with the results.
Since absolute values are much less useful than relative comparisons when it comes to static thrust data, we decided to take this a step further and calibrate the Evens system against the Harrell system, using these transfer functions. We are very pleased with the results shown below. Nearly a one to one correlation across the full range of data, with a small and consistent amount of noise. This means direct comparisons can be made between data from both systems using average values from the sustained thrust portions of the test sequence, and when comparing trends in data explorer. However, please be a little careful comparing individual data points from data explorer, because some metrics have quite a bit of noise.
Thanks again to Catalyst Machineworks and T-Motor for helping to fund this project. Also, thank you to all the companies who have already donated motors for testing. There is already a pretty long list of motors in the queue, so you can expect to see a lot of 6S motor data being added to Data Explorer soon.
