Electronic – arduino – How to drive brushless motor with Arduino

If it's the kind of ESC used with R/C planes, the hook-up is pretty straight-forward.

On the output side, there will be three wires to connect to the motor. It almost doesn't matter how you connect them, except that if your rotation is opposite to what you expected, you can just swap any two of the three.

For input, the ESC takes a power feed from your DC source, usually a lithium-poly with planes, and a control signal from the R/C receiver.

The control signal is the same kind used with servos. There is a pulse of a certain width, and variations in that width cause variations in servo position, or in the case of the ESC, the resulting speed. Point being, that if you can get control an ordinary servo with your Arduino, then you have practically everything in hand for controlling an ESC.

I've asked this on rcgroups as well, and it seems there's no way other than experimenting. If you had a similar bunch of motors and speed controllers that were manufactured identically, then it would be possible to experiment with one motor/esc set and apply the discovered rotation to the other motors and controllers.