Flashing Turnigy Plush 25A Silabs ESC with the BLHeli Firmware

29 January 2015

This is how I flashed my Turnigy Plush 25A (Silabs) ESCs with the BLHeli firmware. BLHeli Firmware is the alternative of SimonK to the ESCs with a Silabs chip, and offers higher response of the motors from the stock firmware. It also offers a GUI to program the ESC and lots of features to tweak from.

Required tools/materials/software

1. Soldering iron
2. Arduino UNO
3. Turnigy Plush (Silabs) 25A ESC
4. Jumper cables (3 for each ESC)
5. BlHeliSuite

Instructions:

• Solder the 3 jumper cables to the pins as shown in the following picture. Purple is the C2D and goes to the MISO pin of the ICSP port of Arduino – Green is the C2CK and goes to the MOSI pin and the Red is the Ground.

Flashing a Turnigy Plush 25A ESc with tha BlHeli firmware – Purple is the C2D and goes to the MISO – Green is the C2CK and goes to the MOSI pin and the Red is the Ground.

• Connect the plugs to the Arduino Uno

image from www.olliw.eu

• Connect the Arduino to your computer
• Connect your lipo to the ESC
• Download and Start BlHeliSuite.exe
• Menu “ATMEL/SILABS” -> “SILABS Serial Interface”.
• Tab “Interfaces for Silabs” will show up. Select the port that the Arduino is connected to.
• Select “ATMega328P” and click “Make Arduino General”.
• Select “Arduino_m328P_16_MULTI8v12100.hex” from the new windows.
• Hopefully the Arduino Firmware is uploaded to the Arduino.
• Tab “Silabs BESC Setup” Choose the port that the Arduino is on and press connect.
• Then press Flash BLHeli –> Choose your ESC. I chose the Turnigy Plush 25A Multi hex 12.2 version hex.
• Now by pressing the “Read setup” you get your ESC’s settings.

After flashing all of the ESCs with the BLHeli firmware I did a throttle calibration through my APM 2.6 and everything worked flawlessly. And the difference from the stock firmware was huge