If your motors are spinning in the wrong places on your drone, there’s a much easier fix than unsoldering all your motors and wiring them to the correct ESC’s.
Here’s how to fix your out of order motors using Betaflight’s motor remapping!
Why your Motors aren’t Spinning in their Correct Locations
Most of the time, a wrong motor order is due to the 4 in 1 ESC on your drone being oriented the wrong way, so when you solder all the motors on, they’re being controlled by the wrong ESC.
As you can see from the image, if the ESC gets rotated 90 degrees, the number 2 ESC is now controlling motor 1.
This obviously messes the flight controller up, and the drone won’t be able to fly or will even be dangerous.
For people using individual ESC’s, if you have an incorrect motor order your ESC’s signal wire is probably just connected to the wrong input on your flight controller, which is an easy fix.
Motor Rewiring Fix
If you don’t like using Betaflight, you can fix your motor order by just rewiring your motors to the correct ESC
This method’s but a lot of work, causes a messy build with wires running all over the place, and the motor remapping method is a lot easier.
How to Use Betaflight Pin Remapping to fix Motor Order
Each of the ESC’s get a signal from a certain pin on the flight controller. Thankfully, Betaflight allows you to just reassign pins to change your motor order.
For example, if Motor 1 was assigned to BO1, and Motor 2 is assigned to A02, you can easily flip the places of the motors by assigning Motor 2 to B01 and Motor 1 to A02.
This is the basic principle for changing your motor order with betaflight pin remapping. Here’s some easy steps you follow to make sure you get the right motor order on the first try!
Step 1: Write Down Motor Locations
To start the process of remapping, write a quick diagram of what your motor order should look like. The diagram should look something like this
Step 2: Determine Motor “Pins”
To figure out what pins your motors are currently assigned to, connect your drone to Betaflight and go to the CLI tab.
Type “resource” into the CLI, and hit enter. You’ll get a list of where all the pins on your flight controller are assigned.
Going back to your motor diagram, write down next to each motor what pin is assigned to it.
Step 3: Write Where Your Motors Are
To figure out where your motors actually are, plug a battery into your drone and connect it to Betaflight. Make sure the propellers are off!
Use the Motors tab to figure out where each of your motors currently are.
After you test each motor, write down on the motor order diagram where it’s supposed to be.
If I spin up Motor 1, and it’s in Motor 3’s spot, I’ll write “supposed to be #1” underneath Motor 3 on my diagram.
Step 4: Write the Supposed Pin Down
Now that you know where your motors are supposed to be, write down the pin for the motor that it’s supposed to be.
In my diagram, my Motor 3 spot is supposed to be Motor 1.
All I have to do is check what pin Motor 1 has (B01), and write it under Motor 3.
Step 5: Reassign Pins to Correct Motors
Congratulations, you’ve made it to the last step! Now it’s time to use your handy-dandy diagram, and punch the correct pins into the CLI.
The command we will be using is [resource] [what motor] [what pin]
To reassign my first motor to the correct pin, use the pin that you wrote in step four. My Motor 1 spot is supposed to be assigned to A03, so I type in resource motor 1 A03.
Make sure to reassign all of your motors to the correct pin that you’ve found in Step 4. After you finish reassigning all your motors, your CLI should look something like this.
Type “save” into the CLI, and hit enter.
The only thing to do now is to test out your motor order, by spinning each motor in the Motors tab.
Final Thoughts
I never use the correct ESC orientation. I rotate my ESC’s so that the solder joints are on the sides of the drone, which makes it easier to change a motor quickly if you’re out flying or at a race.
The whole point of rotating the ESC for me is for convenience and accessibility, so having messy wires going to random spots with the motor rewiring fix isn’t for me.
I’d rather do a little work to remap my motors in Betaflight.
Make sure to follow the guide closely the first couple times you remap your motors. You eventually get the hang of it and can remap your motors a lot quicker if you’re building a lot of drones.
Comment below with any questions and let us know if you’d rather remap your motors or rewire them!
Happy flying!