Heres a tip how to control your ESC without an normal RC controller, that is possibly not what youre looking for.Sea-ker wrote: 2) What do I need to control the ESC itself? I was hoping for some sort of mechanical control but now it looks like I am going to have to use a RC controller.
Use a "servo tester"; these small things give you a signal that the ESC expects and let you vary the speed of the motor with turning the knob on the servo tester(ESC responds to the same signal as a servo, where center position is motor off, and to each side is respectively forward and reverse.
servo testers: http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/stor ... ester.html the ones in the area of 5-6$ should be fine.
the pot could be soldered out and you could replace it with a sliding potmeter, that would give you a really simple system to control a 3 thruster setup, (two sliders for controlling forward/back and turn, and one for dive) with a bit of research you could probably control the 3 escs with only a few wires.
NOTE: if youre running ESC with built in BEC: the BEC means that the ESC outputs 5V on the red wire on the controll-cable. if youre using this 5V to drive equipment, you must ONLY use the BEC in ONE of the ESC units if youre running several ESC(thats very normal in a ROV). connecting several BEC outputs together without diodes can damage the BEC part of the esc and possibly damage the ESC. alternativly you can connect a normal rectifying(with low forward voltage) diode in series with the 5V output, and you will then be able to utilize lots of 5V power from the BEC, youll also get a bit of redundancy in case one of the BEC outputs fail.
hope i'm not getting very technical with this, but this issue is well-known within the quadcopter community where several ESC are used at the same time.