Originally by Orion Beach
Well there seems to be some more interest in big Castle Creations ESC's being used in brushed mode, so I'll share some of the info gained through running Skorpios around on that setup.
First off Skorpios's drive runs the older version of the 1/5th scale buggy oriented ESC the XL2, the current on that's available is called the XLX, it very similar, the three big changes are a beefed up BEC, external caps, and a dedicated AUX programing wire.
Wiring and programming wise, it's pretty straight forward with the USB programmer once you know how all the settings work. I recommend flashing the most current firmware and reading the patch notes. Setting wise the big things to change for good roboting are, Brushed reversing, 0% brake amount setting, drag brake to desired level (I liked the crawler setting), Crawler reverse, 100% reverse power, and no low voltage cutoff. For wiring, just use the red and black output and tape off the yellow/white wire and not connect it.
Issues:
For a while I didn't understand what the different braking settings were doing, brake amount setting just isn't what we want for combat. It should be turned all the way off, even with Crawler reverse on it just behaves wrong. This was a big issue during season 2 and it masked a receiver issue we were having at the same time. Once this was turned off the receiver issue was easily apparent and after replacing the receiver the bot drove great.
Another issue that we've heard about, but haven't had, is controllers dieing from shock loads. Partially that's thanks to some great advice from Kevin Barker, he recommended at least 1/2" of padding, we have, we haven't killed an ESC.
Current limiting, this controller has a current limiting setting, don't expect it to act like a RageBridge this is a hobby controller, my best guess is it watches current going into the controller, so the output could greatly exceed that for short periods of time. So the issue is at the previously set 175 amp limit these controllers can easily melt an A28-400 and barley get warm. A 100 amp limit and out setup seemed about right for the S28-400 MagMotors we ran for this latest go of Battlebots. With the controllers not really getting warm and space at a premium I did remove the fans, I think for this application it's fine YMMV.