I’m re-programming my setup once I get a new torqueboards motor and esc 4.12 in the mail. This seems like a new opportunity to play with some things…the torqueboards motor allows me to program sensored or sensorless, and with reduced sound.
Is there a guide on how to program sensored? Why would I want to do that versus my unsensored setup? My unsensored setup is easy to program through the ackmaniac programmer, so why change? I’m sure there’s a great reason…but what/why/how? Thanks all!
Sensored can be nice because it allows you to start without any cogging from a standstill. Also you can collect data like motor temp and all that jazz.
It’s just as easy to set up as sensorless; just run motor detection and select sensored instead of unsensored. Hybrid runs sensors at low speeds and turns them off when it’s spinning faster because sensors can be a tad slower and I’ve heard it’s not as smooth at higher speeds. I always run hybrid until my sensor wires beak and I get too lazy to fix them so it’s unsensored for me!
Yeah like @Saturn_Corp said, the startup is much better, no need to kick off or anything.
It is simple enough to program, you mentioned changing the sound? If you mean FOC mode, I am not sure I would recommend running it on the TB vescs in worry of reliability.
Yeah, FOC is definitely not recommended on close-to-reference 4.x based ESCs.
There are heavily modified versions like the FOCBOX that do just fine, but I got bit in the chin (streetface) by FOC failure of a pair of 4.12 vescs, so I won’t go there again.
I don’t recall what exact component it is that the 4.12 based boards lack, but they tend to end up causing DRV errors (catastrophic failure basically lol). It doesn’t happen for everyone but it has happened enough times that we don’t really recommend running FOC on them, especially in 12S, except for on the boards that have been heavily modified, like FOCBOX or OllinESC.
We do still have a lot of people riding in FOC without issues. More so, I’d say it’s probably people who aren’t always riding pedal to metal and who program their ESC in FOC correctly.
I can confirm that with a slower board FOC on tb beefs is fine. I’ve had 2 torque board escs on 2 single drive boards running 8s geared to about 20 mph running FOC for a year or two with no issues. But of course this is my experience yours could end up being different and I’ve just been lucky.
I should amend my statement to exclude heavily modified forks of the 4.x hardware family.
@Davewesh One of several problematic design elements of a 4.x based ESC is the lack of a third current shunt - ideally you want one on each of the three phase wires, and the 4.x only has two, and just uses interpolation (fancy guessing) for the third.
In 6.x versions there’s the third shunt, and other stuff like physical layout improvements to reduce noise in sensitive areas, and some higher component ratings and/or better protection/filtering.