First Run
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Two wires, one battery, and about five minutes.
This board's whole job is to make a motor spin. Everything below assumes you have already done these three things.
- Take the propeller off. Not "point it away". Off.
- Secure the motor. A motor that is not bolted to something becomes a thrown object at about 30 % throttle.
- Keep the ESC on its own battery. Do not try to power a motor from the board's 5 V pin.
The firmware helps, but it cannot help with any of the above:
- The throttle ceiling defaults to 20 %, so the first thing you do cannot be full throttle. Raise it once you know what is spinning.
- Arming takes a deliberate one-second hold, and the throttle must have been at zero throughout.
- Disarming is instant on press — the one control that does not wait for you to lift your finger.
- If nothing touches the screen for 30 seconds while armed, it disarms itself, counting down out loud for the last five.
- If the display firmware ever hangs, the second core stops believing the last throttle it was given within a quarter of a second and commands zero.
Two wires. Signal and ground.
| 2.0" board | 2.8" board | |
|---|---|---|
| Signal | GP4 — P2 header, pin 11 | GP29 — J4 pin 12 |
| Ground | GND — P2 header, pin 13 | GND on J4 |
Both are changeable later from CFG → SETUP on the board itself, and the choice is remembered.
Cut or de-pin the middle wire of the ESC lead first. The middle conductor of a standard three-wire servo plug is the ESC's +5 V BEC output. The RP2350's pins are not 5 V tolerant — anything above about 3.6 V is over absolute-maximum and damages the chip. The tester needs signal and ground and nothing else.
On the 2.0" you can solder a 3-pin male header onto P2 pins 11–13 and a servo plug drops straight on: signal on GP4, the (removed) middle wire over GP10, ground on pin 13.
Keep the signal wire short. Bidirectional DShot at 600 kBaud does not enjoy 30 cm of unshielded flapping servo lead — if telemetry is unreliable, drop the bitrate to 300 in SETUP before suspecting anything else.
Power the board over USB-C, and the ESC from its own battery. Order does not matter: the firmware keeps asking a newly-arrived ESC for telemetry, so connecting or power-cycling the ESC at any point is fine.
You will see the splash screen name the board it detected, then the tester screen.
NO TELEMETRY under the RPM readout and -- in every tile is the correct
display for "nothing is answering". The RPM digits sit dark rather than showing
a confident zero, because a zero would be a claim.
If the ESC is powered and wired and this does not change within a second or two, go to Troubleshooting.
- Check the propeller is off. Yes, again.
- Press and hold
HOLD TO ARMfor one second. A green bar fills across the badge as you hold. - The badge turns red and reads
ARMED, and the whole panel dips briefly — that flash is deliberate, so that arming registers in the corner of your eye while you are looking at the motor rather than the screen.
To stop: press DISARM. It acts the moment you touch it.
Two surfaces, and they feed the same value.
The bar at the bottom is a spring-loaded trigger. Where your finger is along the track is the throttle, and it snaps back to zero the instant you let go. The full width of the track is the ceiling, not full throttle — so at the default 20 % ceiling, dragging to the far right commands 20 %.
The big number area is a large relative throttle pad. Swipe up for more,
down for less. It is relative, so a tap does nothing and swipes accumulate:
you can build throttle over several short swipes without looking at the screen.
SWIPE ACTIVE appears once a swipe has passed the small dead zone and is
actually moving the motor.
HOLD changes the bar from spring-loaded to latching, so the throttle stays
where you put it instead of returning to zero. The bar grows a grab handle to
say so. Turning HOLD back off zeroes the throttle.
CFG opens the settings screen — and force-disarms on the way in, every time.
- MOTOR POLES — how the eRPM the ESC reports becomes the RPM shown. Almost every quadcopter motor is 14. Get this wrong and the RPM number is wrong by a fixed ratio while everything else stays correct.
-
THROTTLE CEILING — raise it when you know what is spinning. Hold
-or+to repeat, and it accelerates.
Both are remembered only once you save them, and the button that saves is on
SETUP. UNSAVED under the title says so.
- The Screens — the rest of the interface
- Telemetry — what the tiles are telling you
- SD Logging — recording a run and plotting it