Author Topic: What is responsible for a drone or ESC's startup jingle?  (Read 812 times)

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Offline MarkMLlTopic starter

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What is responsible for a drone or ESC's startup jingle?
« on: September 29, 2023, 08:13:43 am »
This video https://youtu.be/3sb7GCFheK4?t=305 (at 05:05 from the start) has something playing a distinctive startup jingle, which in its entirety is five notes. I suspect that this is from the "ODrive" board, which I believe controls ESC (Electronic Speed Control) boards.

I hear the same jingle from various cheap drones on YouTube etc., even if their (proprietary) firmware doesn't acknowledge ODrive as a component. For example

Where is this coming from? The ESCs themselves don't appear to have the smarts to store a jingle, so is this a characteristic of a PixHawk derivative, of Ardupilot, or basically... what?

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Online Psi

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Re: What is responsible for a drone or ESC's startup jingle?
« Reply #1 on: September 29, 2023, 08:25:49 am »
Dunno who came up with it, probably someone in china.
but some ECSs will play the tune, then beep a number of times to indicate what battery was detected based on voltage.  eg 3 beeps for 3S
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Online Alex Eisenhut

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Re: What is responsible for a drone or ESC's startup jingle?
« Reply #2 on: September 29, 2023, 10:35:45 am »
The ESC definitely has the smarts to run a jingle, they wiggle the motor to make the tones. Like how they make floppy drive music.
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Offline MarkMLlTopic starter

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Re: What is responsible for a drone or ESC's startup jingle?
« Reply #3 on: September 29, 2023, 11:20:09 am »
The photos at https://fccid.io/2AG45-XT200/Internal-Photos/Internal-Photos-3411203.html appear to confirm that the ESC boards in the drone I cited do have controller chips as well as FETs.

So the big question here is whether ODrive originated this jingle, or borrowed it as "a good idea" from somebody else. In any event ODrive https://github.com/odriverobotics/ODrive appears to be MIT-licensed, so even if various drone manufacturers have used it without attribution they can't really be criticised: which would not be the case if they'd borrowed from Ardupilot (GPL) or PX4 (BSD), hence my question.

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Online Psi

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Re: What is responsible for a drone or ESC's startup jingle?
« Reply #4 on: September 29, 2023, 11:40:02 am »
Most china ESCs are based on either ATMega or STM32 mcus.
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Offline tom66

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Re: What is responsible for a drone or ESC's startup jingle?
« Reply #5 on: September 29, 2023, 01:16:02 pm »
I used to fly model aircraft, I have some ESCs way back from 2011 or so which did this.  So it's been around for a long time.

If I recall correctly it's implemented by just driving 2 out of the 3 phases so the motor doesn't commutate.  You don't normally notice the motor whine when a prop is attached on account of the prop making a lot more noise.

Even the prosumer DJI drones do the same thing with their motors, they don't have beepers built in, signals all sorts of things like ready to fly.
 
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Offline MarkMLlTopic starter

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Re: What is responsible for a drone or ESC's startup jingle?
« Reply #6 on: September 29, 2023, 01:23:01 pm »
Thanks for that Tom. Yes, I noticed DJI's fancy tunes etc. when I went looking after seeing the NERF-gun video with the standard jingle.

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