Beginner Question Thread! 2023 Edition

[b264]

@That_Jamie_S_Guy

What is a loopkey? My understanding is that it’s a “hard disconnect” between the battery and everything else in case shit hits the fan. Am I right?

I can expand on @glyphiks answer

@glyphiks

Pretty much. It’s also handy if you’re gonna store the board for a period of time, you can pull the key to reduce the chance of parasitic drain. Or when shipping the board, ship it with the loop key out so it can’t accidentally be turned on.

Its also used as a way to turn a board on/off without an antispark switch. If you use an antispark xt90, its a safe way to connect the esc to the battery without inrush current blowing up your capacitors.

It’s cheap, ugly, really high quality, and effective. It’s that “ugly” bit that some folks don’t like, and essentially the entire reason all the other methods exist at all. It’s definitely not a refined user experience like pressing a button. It’d be like if you bought a nice new car, and to start it, you had to move a wire under the hood.

@That_Jamie_S_Guy

Could you elaborate? … why are buttons likely to blow?

@b264

Most “inrush limiter circuits” fail because they are operating in linear mode during inrush. It’s a design limitation on almost every one.

Imagine a FET is a resistor with a variable resistance. When it’s “off” the resistance is [nearly] infinity and when it’s “on” the resistance is [nearly] zero. That’s all fine and dandy until you add capacitors to the load, like the filter capacitors on VESC and other ESCs. Right when it turns on, it’s effectively a momentary short circuit with [not really…] infinite current because the capacitors are empty. So what the antisparks do is they limit inrush current by turning on not from zero to full blast, but gradually over several milliseconds they ramp from [nearly] infinity to [nearly] zero ohms. It’s this period during the ramp that is the problem, the FET itself is taking almost the entire load due to Ohm’s law because the capacitors have effectively zero resistance to inrush. It’s said to be operating in “linear” or analog mode at this point, as opposed to “digital” mode where everything is either on or off with no in-between. This is extremely stressful to the junctions inside the FET and technically exceeding the design limitations for a very brief period of time. Each time it’s powered-on, it’s taking a tiny bit of damage.

The way to ameliorate this is much the same way a loopkey works – you have a “precharge” circuit where the nonzero inrush-limiting resistance is provided by an actual discrete resistor instead of the FET junction itself. So you have one FET with a heatsinked power resistor in series, that is separate from the one or more FETs on the main power switch.

So in order of operation, you’d have a single FET turn fully on [nearly] instantaneously (digitally) with a resistor in series to charge the filter capacitors, then once the output voltage approached the supply voltage (meaning the capacitors are nearing full charge) then the main FET(s) turn on [nearly] instantaneously (digitally) to supply high-current power to the system. This is never operating in “linear” mode but is “fully digital” and will not suffer the incessant failures that plague the inrush-limiting Vedder design. The power limiting and heating is moved to a discrete resistor instead of burning off the energy inside the FET junction itself, which stays cool during inrush.