ORIGINAL: OhD
I breadboarded the no-spark set-up on the Hacker and it looks good to me. I measured the voltage on the input to the ESC, after the 100 ohms and the wattmeter. First I tested without the resistor, got the spark, and measured 41.7 volts. I'm not sure I had the wattmeter in the circuit on this test. With the 100 ohm resistor and wattmeter, no spark, and 39.5 volts. In both cases the voltage was at its peak almost instantly. I can't see that the ESC should care if the voltage is 2.2 volts lower.
It looks like the idle current is 10 to 20 milliamps so it is not a big deal if you connect everything and sit around for 20 minutes before flying.
I'm going to build the real thing next.
Jim O
Jim,
The reason Schulze cares about the input voltage is that its used to setup the cutoff. The algorithm they use for that is somewhat useless for lipos (modern ones at least) and more geared for round cells so it should not really matter.
That being said, in some 450+ connections to my ESC over the course of a year...my connectors (Deans) were pretty much destroyed, with the tips nearly totally gone. My ESC never once complained and still works great. I switched connectors and didnt notice any difference in performance so the old ones were probably still ok. I am fairly convinced that other than being a nuisance the spark is not causing any problems.