Beware BLHeli 16.7 official

[HighTechPauper]

You may want to hold off upgrading your esc's with this latest official release, it's giving me a bunch of trouble with certain esc's. Once the new rev is loaded they can no longer be seen with BLH configurator and cannot be reflashed with BLH Suite either. What is worse is that if you try to reflash with the BLH Suite they may erase but not program (write failure) which leaves you with a dead esc. My E-Max Bullets work fine with 16.7 but the Eachine 20A esc's are pretty much toast now. There are a number of people reporting the same thing on the Github pages about other esc brands too.

 

[Wayno52]

Great heads up Randy, bad news though. How’s the flying going mate? I haven’t been on here much lately.

 

[HighTechPauper]

Thanks for the condolences buddy, it only took 1 bird out of commission, danged esc failure.
If you upgrade and just leave them alone they fly fine but they may be stuck at this rev and it sure makes esc config changes impossible.
I am hopeful that they will figure out what's up and find a way for us to get these esc's back.

Hasn't stopped me from flying everyday though, the 12 batts I have are just enough and I am having a ball but not pushing too hard.

I think something must be up with my alerts for this site because I am not getting updates on threads I am watching, and my alerts page doesn't get updates when somebody comments on something.
Makes it hard for me to quickly keep up with things and when I look at the site it looks like nothing is going on when it really is I am just not seeing it.
Will have to look into it later.

How's the flying going for you Wayne? It sounds like this season is going to be epic for you!

 

[Wayno52]

Hmm not sure what is going on with your updates there but hope it gets sorted. Yeah mate heading into summer now with temperatures up to 40 odd degrees c. Light at 5am and not dark till about 8.30 soon. Light offshore winds and packs getting burned day after day. Really looking forward to being able to at least get a few packs each and every day. My confidence is now at a level where I just strap on a pack and go for it. Still taking it a bit easy but I am pleased with my progress so far. Heck of a long way to go but I feel each 6 or so packs I try something new. Still waiting on my vid cam though. Grrrr
Looking forward to be able to watch flights back. Make the most of the weather while you can mate, Rip those packs Randy

 

[HighTechPauper]

I seem to have stumbled upon the issue with my esc's. When I started looking for differences in the indications I was getting from the BLH configurator I realized that the 2 birds having issues not only had the Eachine 20A esc's but they also happened to be the birds I was running my RunCam Splits in. Once that dawned on me I realized that my control for the camera on SoftSerial 1 was a difference in the configs between those I had trouble with and the one I didn't. Once I disabled the RunCam Split control in Peripherals for SoftSerial 1 I am able to read and write my esc's with almost 100% reliability again. So it looks like enabling RunCam Split control on the SoftSerial was interfering with my FC pass through to the esc's. Since the only function that RunCam Split control had that was even a little useful was the ability to start/stop recording, I will either abandon using it (leave it unconfigured in my ports setup) or just remember to disable it before I try to do any esc work.

Lesson learned, sorry for the false alarm.

Randy