Firmware Upgrade for Turnigy Plush 40A

Again a friend of mine giving me a chance to help him with something new to us. Flashing his ESCs with SimonK firmware for his new quadcopter.
All this while i thought all the ESCs were using Atmel processor which can be flash using an USBAsp for Atmel. But after stripping his ESCs of its heatshrink and searching through the internet, seems like i was wrong. His ESCs are using SiLabs chip which is use in almost all the new ESCs design. Thus my searching begin.

What i shared here just some information on how i've done it. I might miss something important so please use this just as additional information for your own use. Do some research and fully understand what your are doing before you proceed.

This is how an old Turnigy Plush 40A ESCs looks like with Atmel chip. A single board with one capacitor.

(to find out which are yours this is a good place to look for ESC specs for Simonk / BLHeli FW flash)

Here the new Turnigy Plush 40A with SiLabs with two saparated board and two capacitors. The marking shown will be use later to flash the new firmware.

As its using SiLabs chip, SimonK firmware wont work as it is for Atmel chip. We going to used BLHeli firmware which function as SimonK but it is design for SiLabs chip.

You may ask why the new firmware? Here what i found out from my search:

"The stock firmware that is loaded on most off the self ESCs is not designed for multicopters. That firwmare typically averages speed changes that are sent to the motors. Multicopters perform better when immediate unaveraged speed changes are sent to the motors from the ESC and that is a simplified explanation of what the BLHeli firmware does. 

Warning – It is possible to ruin an ESC when attempting this process. Also, the factory installed flash is overwritten." oddcopter.com

This is what i have used for this job

SiLabs Programmer

In order to get things going we need a programmer to flash our new firmware to the chip. There's two way that i found. You can use SiLabs Toolstick Programmer if you have one in hand, or you can use your Arduino board and configure it as a SiLabs programmer. As for me i am going with the second one as i already have my Arduino UNO with me.

With Arduino, you gonna need owSilProg and the information needed can be found here. The tools for flashing the new firmware BLHeli Tools can be found there as well. Once it is flashed onto your Arduino, its gonna be your SiLabs programmer. In the tutorial from the link i give here it is suggested to solder the three wires for programming to your Arduino board. But here is my way

The three pins connector gonna be used to connect to the ESCs. Here how it looks on the esc

This way its gonna be easy to reflash the ESCs again. Repack...

My setup...

Videos before and after flashed with BLHeli...

I am not doing the step by step process as i don't want this post to be a one stop information center. This way you gonna do your own reading/searching and gain more information from others then just my post which might lack of some.