I bought two STEVAL-ESC001V1 a few years ago with the purpose of 1) studying the hardware architecture to make my own drone ESC, and 2) lear how to program it.
After 2.5 years of learning (this is part time on top of working a 40-72 hour work week) and development, I made my own custom ESC for a slightly larger motor; so bigger MOSFETs, smaller current shunt, and I added additional external OpAmps as voltage followers.
Anyway, I hooked up the STEVAL-ESC001V1 to my computer, and another smaller motor so I can run the profiler and try out MCWB. I have another board programmed to provide a PWM input to the ESC (5Vdc output, but the input pin on the STM32 MCU is supposed to be 5V tolerant.
For a short while on the first board everything worked fine with the MCWB interface, but the PWM didn't work. I then notice the 3.3V indicator was out, and the board was red hot. Something failed.
I hooked up the second board but only used MCWB as the UI, and everything worked fine, for a while. I then lost UART. I was able to reconnect, but then lost comms again. The last time the 3.3V indicator was out, the board got hot ... another failure.
On both boards I detected a short between 3.3V and common. Through the process of removing parts, I found that the issue is with the MCU. But why? Are UART comms with MCWB and PWM to be operated mutually exclusive? I cannot see how this would be a failure point, or is it? Has anyone else experienced this failure?
I also find it interesting that the STEVAL-ESC001V1 is marked as available on the ST website, but no one has stock, and there is now next to no support for this product.
The prototype I made was not cheap! It's 4 ESC's on one board, and the boards cost me a mint. It would be nice if the STSW-ESC001V1 firmware was still around and/or that it was properly supported in the current version of MCWB.
Anyway, feedback from the community would be nice.
