Here I am sharing some internal board photos. Wanted to share the hardware and showcase about filtering, layout, and build quality.
Control board overview:
This is the top side of the control board. MCU in the centre, power supply chain on the right (you can see the bulk electrolytics for the 12V and 5V rails), signal conditioning and communication interfaces spread across the board. USB-C on the bottom left for direct VESC Tool connection. The six-pin header on the top left is SWD for firmware development — yes, we flash and debug our own firmware directly, not just loading someone else’s binary.
Two connectors along the top — 24-pin main connector (throttle, CAN, UART, AUX, modes, switches) and 10-pin sensor connector (hall, SIN/COS, motor temp). Everything breaks out to these two connectors, no loose wires hanging off the board.
Full assembly — control board on power stage:
This is how it comes together. The control board sits above the power stage. The six large cylindrical caps around the perimeter are the bulk DC bus electrolytics — energy storage for load transients. Phase wires (black, 8AWG) and battery wires (black & red 12AWG x2) come off the power stage below. The aluminium baseplate underneath the power board is the thermal interface — MOSFETs dump heat directly through the aluminium-core PCB into whatever heatsink or chassis you mount it to.
Power stage close-up:
The MOSFETs are in TOLL packages, two paralleled per switch position, twelve total across the three-phase bridge. Between the FET positions you can see the small ceramic capacitors distributed right at each switching node — these are the high-frequency DC bus decoupling caps that keep the voltage clean during hard switching transitions. This is the filtering that matters for sensorless performance — if these aren’t close to the FETs and there aren’t enough of them, switching noise couples into the current and voltage sensing and your FOC observer gets garbage data. It’s the single most common cost-cutting move on cheap controllers and it’s the reason sensorless performance varies so much between boards that technically run the same firmware.
The current sense shunts are the four small resistors in a row between each FET pair and the phase output — four paralleled per phase. More shunts in parallel means lower effective resistance (better efficiency, less heat in the sense path) and also spreads the power dissipation so no single shunt is thermally stressed. The precision instrumentation amplifier on the control board reads across these.
The bulk electrolytic caps along both edges handle the low-frequency energy storage — keeping the bus voltage stable when the motor pulls hundreds of amps during acceleration.
A note on build quality: What you’re looking at is a hand-assembled prototype — the solder on the heavy phase wire connections is functional but not pretty. Production units will use machine placement for all SMD components and proper fixtures for the power connections. The circuit and PCB layout are final, which is what matters at this stage.
About waterproofing — this board gets conformal coated on the control side for splash protection. The power stage relies on the enclosure for environmental protection. No potting on this version, but the enclosure has gasket provisions for aftermarket sealing if your application needs it.
More testing updates coming as we get further into motor validation. Happy to answer anything about what you’re seeing here.
