After five weeks of waiting, I received my HobbyWing Platinum 40A PRO ESCs from Banggood😀 When I purchased mine, they were on special from the China warehouse for $31.46 USD, they are now $40.16 from the China warehouse and on offer until 28 Feb 2018 for $21.59 from the Banggood US warehouse. Thanks Banggood😒 😉
I will be comparing it a lot to my current favorite ESC the Turnigy Plush 40A ESC from Hobby King, so from this point I will just refer to them as the HobbyWing and Plush ESCs when comparing. Here it is out of the package, it comes with 3.5mm bullet connectors already attached and two pieces of pre cut heat shrink to use on the battery leads which I though was a nice touch.
A closeup of the label. Please note where it says "USB supported" in orange as this will be discussed later in the post.
Close up of my current Turnigy Plush 40A ESC which I think is new to me, but I bought it a couple years ago as the BEC available on the new Turnigy Plush according to the link above now has a 5A BEC. It sells for $23.91 USD currently, I think I paid less than $20 the last time I bought one from HobbyKing as they have been so durable.
The HobbyWing comes with a very large set of instructions, it definitely has more programmable features than the Plush and can be far better optimized for helicopters reading through it briefly.
After soldering on the XT60 connector and heat shrink, I weighed both ESCs, all the wires are the same guage and same length, so no surprise they ended up the same weight.
As you can see in the following two pictures, they are pretty much identical in size and look identical other than the color of wires and heat shrink.
The HobbyWing is rated to have a 10 second burst of up to 60A, the Plush 55A I assume for 10 seconds as well, I couldn't find a number on the website or in the manual. Setting the throttle points is the same for both. Turn on the transmitter, advance the throttle to full, connect the battery, wait for the two solid beeps, place the throttle at zero, then the ESC arms as normal.
Programming
This is where things get a bit interesting😐 The manual for the Hobbywing says "Several kinds of Program Cards are supported", unfortunately, it doesn't support the two cards I have, including the one made by HobbyWing...hmmmm😞 As you can see in these pictures, it does light up the card, but when I tried to make any changes to see if the card would work, it failed to work with both cards even though it indicated it had taken the change😲. That actually doesn't matter that much to me as the factory defaults are what I want anyway😀
As I mentioned earlier, it can be programmed using a different interface unit available from Banggood for $29.45 USD. I will probably pass on that for now😉
So I was doing a bit of bench testing anyway, so I had to see if there was any difference between the HobbyWing and Plush ESCs. I used the same Banggood 2212/6 2200 Kv motor as I have been using for all tests and the same 6x4 APC gas prop and Gens Ace 2200 3S 45C battery (Links to those are available on this test spreadsheet) Here are the numbers.
Plush ESC
50% throttle - 10.6A/129.1W producing 440 gr/15.5 oz of thrust;
100% throttle - 26.2A/307.5W producing 885 gr/31.2 oz of thrust.
Hobbywing ESC
50% throttle - 9.9A/123.4W producing 433 gr/15.3 oz of thrust;
100% throttle - 28.1A/326W producing 912 gr/32.2 oz of thrust.
So mid range not a whole lot of difference, the HobbyWing certainly did allow the motor to wind up a bit more at full throttle although drawing more amps, however another full oz of thrust is interesting😉. What was noticeable was throttle response, when I advanced to full throttle from zero, it wound up almost immediately, noticeably faster than the Plush. It certainly took me by surprise, in a good way😏 Although as I mentioned, the Plush is an older version, it is brand new out of the package in the last month since I got my new thrust stand, so it has not had much use.
So I am pretty excited now to get this into a plane and see how it performs under some stress at the field.😉
Park Jet noise...the "other" sound of freedom😎
Cheers,
Scott
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