If you’ve calibrated ESCs on an ArduPilot platform before such as Plane or Copter, when building a quadplane you may instinctively go to Mission Planner’s “ESC Calibration” section.
This is wrong and you should be ashamed of yourself. The symptom of getting this wrong is an error message similar to the following:
WARN MissionPlanner.MAVLinkInterface - Trying to set Param that doesnt exist ESC_CALIBRATION=3
and, if you were to check, indeed ESC_CALIBRATION does not exist on QuadPlane.
Instead, you need to use the Q_ESC_CAL parameter manually set via the parameter list, and moreover, you need in be in a Q* mode during this procedure (QSTABILIZE, QHOVER, etc).
See also
- ArduPlane docs on this: https://discuss.ardupilot.org/t/esc-calibration-error-in-arduplane-q-mode-vtol/141732
- Random forum post that I figured this out in: https://discuss.ardupilot.org/t/esc-calibration-error-in-arduplane-q-mode-vtol/141732/2