Malenki-Nano Antweight ESC & Receiver

(5 customer reviews)

£22.50

We’re delighted to stock Mark Robson’s Malenki Nano ESC & Receiver. For newer builders or those not comfortable with soldering, we recommend the pre-soldered BBB Dual Ant ESC. The Malenki-Nano is full of great features in a tiny package:

  • Small and lightweight at 31x20mm and 2.6g
  • Three 1.8A brushed channels (two for drive with mixing & center braking, one for weapon) – each channel capable of driving two N20s.
  • Built in AFHDS 2A (flysky) receiver to save weight and space
  • Two PWM channels for servos or brushless ESCs
  • Driving invert mode – can switch forwards/backwards on transmitter switch when robot is upside down
  • Telemetry – battery voltage information sent to transmitter
  • Automatic shutdown on low battery to prevent damage to lipos
  • August 2021 update: servo stretcher mode – see documentation!
  • March 2022 update: Low voltage cutoff now 2.8V per cell. Improved radio reliability & telemetry.

Wiring, setup, binding and usage diagrams below. Useful links:
Full Documentation
GitHub
Fusion 360 CAD (thanks Felix!)

6 in stock

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Size

30.7×19.8x7mm
Weight

2.6g
Input Voltage

1-2S lipo (3.6-8.5V)
Low voltage cutoff: 2.8V per cell (March 2022)
Motor Output

3 channels of 1.8A
PWM Output

Two channels of PWM output for servos or external ESCs (eg brushless)
Mixing

On board mixing of channel L and R (can be disabled)
Center Braking

Center braking on drive channels – zero signal will instantly stop motors.
BEC

No BEC. Servos can be run off 2S or require an external BEC.

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Binding & Setup

To Bind: Out of the box it will enter bind mode on power on (flashing blue light). When bound, the flashing LED will stop, you may then need to power cycle Malenki-Nano.
To Rebind: power on Malenki-Nano with your transmitter off and wait 90 seconds for flashing blue light.

Setup:

  1. Solder motors (L to left side drive, R to right side drive, W to brushed weapon if needed) and power connector to PWR + & – on the Malenki-Nano.  (JST connector and switch recommended) See diagram in the image gallery above.
  2. For servos/brushless ESCs, solder the signal cable to one of the PWM pads and power them off the power rail if voltage is supported (some servos don’t run above 6V so you may need to add a BEC to lower voltage). These are Channel 4 and 6. Diagrams below!
  3. Power it on, (red light for power) bind to your transmitter (blue light for bind) and test motors – channel 1,2,3 to see if behaving as expected.
  4. It’s then highly recommended to heat shrink, kapton or electrical tape the Malenki-Nano to lower risk of short circuiting the board.
  5. In Configuration mode you can use channel 5 to invert or swap channels, disable mixing, braking and enable servo stretching. See Full Documentation.

Soldering a servo or brushless ESC:

Solder the signal wire (orange or white) of your servo or ESC to the WEAPON2 or WEAPON3 pad.
Solder your servo or ESC positive power (red) to PWR+ and negative power (brown or black) to PWR-.
Wiring with our High Voltage Metal Geared Servo and with Antweight Spinner Electronics:

5 reviews for Malenki-Nano Antweight ESC & Receiver

  1. Scott Siegel –

    The Malenki-Nano ROCKS!!!

    The control is WAY WAY better than any ESC I’ve ever driven. In fairness, I think I might not have ever driven a bot with brakes on the ESC… I don’t know if all ESCs with brakes are this good, but these are BY FAR the best I’ve driven.

    Full disclosure, I’ve had a lot of RCs, but was never great at driving them, and all the bots I’ve run were FlySky TXs, FlySky or FS2A RXs, DFRobot or the cheapest 5Ax2 DESCs. I think the kids and I are pretty good at them, but we struggle with twitchiness…

    The precision of control with these is amazing.

    I hadn’t noticed the telemetry in the advertisement, but was THRILLED to see it working. 🙂 (we play for a long time, often arbitrarily changing batteries after 20 rounds…)

    The form factor and weight allow us to make a bot they can make weight for the first time 🙂

    For weight, the Malenki-Nano, fully wired to two N20s is 26.42g and TINY!

  2. Jack (verified owner) –

    Hands down the best bit of kit for 90% of ants out there imho.

    Combining escs and receiver into one compact and lightweight unit makes designing the rest of the bot much easier!

    Plus so many great features!
    – Center braking makes the bot handle great
    -voltage telemetry is super convenient for keeping an eye on lipo voltage
    – forwards/backwards flipping is such a quality of life feature for invertible robots

    Does need a bit of care with the initial soldering, but take your time and it’s not so hard.

  3. Nathan (verified owner) –

    Great little bit of kit this. Works great, easy to set up, and removes so much hassle by having everything combined in one board. It’s tiny and light so super easy to fit in, but theres still plenty of space to attach all the wires (even with my mediocre soldering). Highly recommended and will 100% use again for my next robot!

  4. Scott (verified owner) –

    Wow these are amazing. I’ve just installed my first one into my Nuts & Bots lifter & everything just worked, preconfigured 🙂

  5. Luke Handscomb (verified owner) –

    Guys, here it is. The ultimate antweight Brain. Totally unnecessarily feature rich, powerful, robust, easy to use, and just utterly tiny. This thing is the bollocks.

    Well. Almost. Sadly the rated stall current on each channel isn’t enough for 2 high power n20s / N10s, so if you’re doing a 4 motor 4 wheel drive, you might want to be careful not to cause the malenki to puff it’s magic smoke. I’ve not yet managed to do this, but I’ve also not tried to 😂

    For any 2wd or 2 motor Drive ants though this is absolutely the best esc/rx combo you are ever gonna get!

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