Originally Posted by Tamiyadan (Post 14705018)

jomac was making ESCs in the late 1970s up till 1986.

what changed was the autodrive ran mosfets in parallel.

before the autodrive most escs of the day run a single transistor with whatever highest rating that could be found.

at the time most esc were just designed by hobbyists with little electronics backgrounds.

when Kevin came along he used his electrical engineering background and stepped up the amperage an ESC could handle by paralleling the mosfets together. Kevin also made the change from power transistor to mosfets

the Delta autodrive was designed by Kevin Orton he also developed the first Peak detection chargers for batteries, kevin founded Tekin.

he lifted the entire hobby so bob novak stepped up his game as well with the first novak ESC.

before 1984 ESC existed most were homebrew, Jomac made commercial versions, Mardave had escs from the 1960s. Tamiya had transistorized MSCs in the later 1970s and early 1980s. the difference was usually they had a single transistor rated for about 15amps handling the power this was fine for the original 540 and 380 motors. they had brakes and most were adjustable.


the first modern version of the ESC as we know it was the delta autodrive followed by novak. but before that escs did exist they couldn't handle much amperage and were very expensive making the MSC the way to go before 1984. there were hybrid MSCs some people designed a 555 timer that pulsed power through a power transistor and used the msc switch as a low amperage trigger for the gate on the transistor.

the demon 2 was released in 1977 designed by Nick Adams in great Britain.
Demon Power Products was started in 1979.
1981 the demon 2c came out, it had a relay for a full power bypass at full throttle that basically turned off the transistor and ran 1:1 off the battery.
again this was because all the early esc designs used a single transistor so as they heated up the efficiency dropped off and the amperage they could carry dropped off.

Cs electronic had a ESC in 1979 again only one transistor

Simprop SAM was around from 1980 to 1982 again pre mosfet.

the robbe 12 was the first esc they made in 1981 similar to the demon 2c it had a relay for full power bypass of the transistor at full throttle.

Ko pro released their first esc in 1986 it was mosfet.

the change in amperage that a ESC could handle allowed Offroad to blossom you went from 15amps/40 amp peak to like 360amps 500peak. buggies off jumps produced massive 200-250amp spot power spikes with 540 silver can motors.

so pre 1984 most escs were mostly used on-road with 4 cell packs, and post 1984 you went to all cars with 6-7 cell packs.