RC10Talk - The Net's Largest Vintage R/C Community

Can anyone tell me anything about this ESC? I got it with a NIB RC10T kit and I don't want to open it to read up about it. What year would it have been?

Those little nub type "hinges" should pop open fairly easily if you haven't thought about that. That way you could open it without damaging the sticker on the front. Sorry I can't help with any other information.

That may be an option, I'll have to look and see if the other side is taped up too, thanks.

It's probably not worth much anyways so opening it probably wouldn't matter anyways. It looks cheap compared to a Futaba so I'm curious. A 1440 Peak Amp Competition ESC from Hong Kong, ummmmmm. lol

.

Is there anything you don't know about old school electronics?

Well, it was easy to get out and it's actually a pretty cool little unit. It has six drives and one brake. The circuit board layout is clean and tidy and the crystal clear case is pretty neat.

Since there is little to no info out there I wonder how it would have compared to the Novaks and Tekins and what it would have cost BITD.

Would it have been classed as high end, mid level or buget/ pov spec?

RS Chris wrote:Is there anything you don't know about old school electronics?

Two thumbs up on this statement

Todd

Aristocraft became Hitec. All low end/entry level but a non reversing esc from them is pretty cool. I have a lot of nib electronics and that would be a good addition...but probably more than I would want to pay. My last nib aristocraft esc was like $25!

.

The clear case isn't very good for proprietary information

.

RC10th wrote:The clear case isn't very good for proprietary information

But it's cool and that accumulates points from shelf refs

klavy69 wrote:

RS Chris wrote:Is there anything you don't know about old school electronics?

Two thumbs up on this statement

Todd

Ahhahaha! Double entendre there!

I doubt that there is anything that Dan does not know about old school electronics concerning RC.

Ken only has one thumb as far as we all know.

(Sorry I could not add to the usefulness of this thread)

Regarding those FET transistors, Siliconix was one of the finest manufacturers for them. I personally made ESCs for more than 15 years in very limited numbers for me and some friends and Siliconix was my #1 choice at some point. Lowest on-resistance and highest reliability comparing with other manufacturers. Numbers are just numbers but I tested and matched FET-transistors and the Siliconix were much better than any other.
It seems to me SMP60N06 were A-grade and SMP60N05 maybe were B-grade production as the xxxN06 always got better readings when testing. You have to see a lot of electronic components are made in just one production process and tested and matched afterwards for their real readings, so the best performing samples will result in the more expensive final product and less performing samples will result in cheaper products with lower specs. This is old news but production of this stuff always goes like this. BTW at the FET transistor shown at one of the photos you can see a T8848 printing. Some companies use such numbers for their production batch, in this case this means year 1988, week 48. So this ESC was made in late 1988 or early 1989.

Amp-rating numbers are just marketing and mean nothing in real life. First, those numbers usually were generated by max. amp-rating for one FET and multiplied by numbers of FET as tamiyadan mentioned already. Some companies even enlarged those numbers by some factor. In reality no ESC can stand such ratings, it will burn or explode. Specs provided by FET-manufacturers are based on cooling the FET-transistors with very large heatsinks for a certain temperature, usually around or below room temperature. The tiny heatsinks provided by ESC manufacturers are just a fraction of the size needed for such high amps. Also you can´t pass 300, 500 or even more amps through a 12 or even 14 gauge wire.
Another fact you have to see is, the voltage drop of a ESC is depending on the specs of the FET, yes. But that´s just half of the truth, the type of PCB and the soldering is another difference. And most important, especially for older FET-ESCs is the circuitry driving the FET. At my personal testing when repairing ESCs for my friends I found most commercial ESCs were far from being perfect at this area. Most of them used a quite low voltage which results in bad real life numbers, much lower than specs. But you could tweak the FETs and therefore the whole ESC to a completely different level with the right circuitry. In the end such ESC could provide more speed, more acceleration and still running cooler with the same type of FET and the same battery.

So the Aristo Craft ESC used at least some quite good FET transistors, but without schematics or reverse-engineering you won´t know how good was the overall design. Also a very good ESC is not just power or straight line speed. Smooth power delivery or drivability is also important and most of the pre-highfrequency ESC sucked in this direction. But there was a way to tweak also the older ESCs for this task, it was up to the designer if he just followed common circuitry and specs sheets or had his own ideas ...

Cool info, thanks for sharing. You learn something new every day.