When building a quadcopter, you should test motor spin direction after connecting it to an ESC. If motors on your quadcopter rotate in the wrong direction, it will flip over when you try to take off.
Table of Content
- Checking Motor Direction Using Betaflight Motor Tab
- Arm and Check
- Using Servo Tester
- How to Reverse Motor Direction
Using the Motor Tab in Betaflight
The easiest way is to test your motors using the motor tab in Betaflight. Many other flight software offer similar “motor testing” feature including KISS, FlightOne, Cleanflight and Butterflight. This is also available in ESC configurator – BLHeliSuite too.
Enable the checkbox “I understand…”, and increase the slider just a tiny bit (e.g. 1100) to spin up the motor. Don’t drag the slider all the way up, spinning the motor at full speed without propeller for too long can damage the motor.
Here is a useful trick to tell which direction the motor is spinning.
Touch the motor bell lightly with a finger when it’s spinning, and let your finger drag across the bell. You can tell which way the motor is turning as you should feel more resistance if the bell is spinning the opposite direction.
Arm and Check
If you don’t have access to motor testing function for some reasons, you can just try to arm the quad using your transmitter without props on. (Assuming you have finished building your quad, and you have the “motor stop” feature disabled)
Servo Tester or Radio Receiver
You could connect your ESC to a servo tester, or a radio receiver with PWM output. The motor spins as you increase PWM signal. This used to be a very convenient way to check if ESC and motors are working correctly.
However most ESC’s for racing drones these days don’t have a built-in 5V BEC anymore, so you have to somehow supply 5V to the servo tester or radio receiver. Anyway if you find this the easier solution, here is how to do it.
Connect the your ESC to the servo tester or RX (throttle channel).
The receiver or servo tester should be powered by the ESC. If it doesn’t have a 5V BEC, you can get 5V from a spare flight controller. Make sure ground is connected between these components.
Plug in the battery to your ESC and and increase throttle, you should now see the motor begin to spin.
What if my motors are spinning the wrong way?
It’s easy to change motor spin direction, so don’t worry about it when you are building your quadcopter. Just solder the wires up and finish the build, then check motor direction when you are done.
You can either reverse motor spin direction in the ESC settings, or simply swap two of the three motor wires. Check out this guide for more detail.
2 comments
Here is a first for me. I have built dozens of quads and have never seen this. I test the motors in Betaflight, and they all spin in the proper direction. I arm the quad and when I push up on the throttle, the motors are all spinning in the opposite direction of what is shown in Betaflight. I reverse the direction in BLHeli and the quad jumps into the air and spins half a turn before shutting down. I have a iFlight SucceX-E F4 V2.1 Flight Controller, and matching AIO ESC. I have checked the connections and all appear to be correct using the pinout diagrahm. The flight controller is oriented in the correct direction. The radio mapping is correct at AETR1234. The reverse motors checkbox is unchecked in Betaflight. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Have you tried resetting the flight controller? Make a CLI backup first, and setup the FC from scratch see if that works?