I want to test a brushless motor with a 12 lead acid battery (200ah inverter battery)... In the future I will use it with 11.1v lipo... Is it safe to do so with the lead acid? Any precautions I should take? Also I am using a micro-controller to control the esc. What kind of PWM pulses should I give to the ESC? Are the pulses the same as that we give to a servo?

Oh the ESC's I have are the 18A ones bought from rcforallin...

Yes, ESC work on exactly the same PWM signals used to control ESCs.. 12v should not upset BL motors which can handle 3S. BTW what are you up to ? static test or you really gonna put something like a Lead Acid battery on something moving/flying/floating ?

Not sure about the PWM stuff, but you can even use a small 7.4 AH 12 V battery also for testing (like I did). With 200 AH you can run multiple motors 

yeah , the servo pulse can be given to ESC for controlling the speed.

thx guys i'm testing motors for a quadcopter.... btw what is the range of pwm signals that a receiver outputs? tell me in servo angle terms... 

Okay! I tested the motors with a 7AH UPS battery. I cant get them to work. I dont know how to setup the ESC with the microcontroller. Anyone please tell me how to setup the ESC with a receiver for the first time? What exactly do you do?

http://www.rcindia.org/self-designed-diy-and-college-projects/brushed-or-brushless-motor-for-quadrotor/msg13928/#msg13928

That answers the pulse you need for 0 to 100% throttle. 

There is confusion about the receiver part.  If you are using the micro-controller to control the ESC (throttle range), where does the receiver come into the picture ?

Normally (ie, without any micro-controller), the ESC feeds power to the receiver via the black (ground) and red (roughly + 5v or +6v), and the receiver sends signals to the ESC for throttle control (and the signal details are in the thread mentioned above).

Sorry about the ambiguity.. I wanted to know exactly what kind of signal The receceiver sends the ESC..... I;ll go through that link you gave..

This post form the same thread has a picture of the waveform you need to send.

http://www.rcindia.org/self-designed-diy-and-college-projects/brushed-or-brushless-motor-for-quadrotor/msg13916/#msg13916

I changed the PWM timings a bit and it works perfectly now... Initially I feared the quadcopter might be underpowered.. now I think it might take me with it... The power is mindblowing!!! Will put up a video soon...

@gaurav - anything happening with the quad ?? we are still waiting for the video !!!

@Gaurav: Please do not try with 200AH Lead Acid battery to 18 Amp ESC!! See the battery specification about the burst current/maximum current delivers. Use a greater value ESC than the Battery Max Current supply, its a regular practice!!