I'm new to this and I hear alot about brushless motors and ESCs. Obviously it refers to motors without brushes, but what is a brushless ESC? Does it refer to the only type of ESC that can only be used with a brushless motor. If so, can a brushless ESC be used with a brushed motor? Thanks Don

Some schulze brushless controllers can also be used with brushed motors, but only at 50% of the nominal rating.
But it really makes no sense paying several times the price of a "normal" ESC to get a heavier and bulkier Brushless ESC and risk damaging it in a mishap. Jürgen

The schulze futures no longer have the ability to run brushed motors - they took that feature out to make room for something more useful (and sensible!).

Short answer to your question, twinster is yes: brushless controllers for brushless motors only (the controller also does what the brushes do in a "regular" motor). It's actually more complicated than that, a bit. For some discussion of that see my September 2001 column in the Ezone archives. But look at the Ezone FAQ section first!

A brushless motor is a three phase motor. The electronics in the ESC take care of providing a voltage to each phase in turn to spin the motor. Basically, the ESC is like a DC to AC converter with the AC frequency controlled by the speed of the motor.

A brushed ESC just has to provide a DC voltage to the brushes and the commutator takes care of distribution between the windings.

Here too you'll find some information on the workings of a brushless controller, it includes 'pictures' of the different signals used:
http://www.aerodesign.de/peter/2001/...DY-BL_eng.html