Several years ago, my board stopped working due to a failed VESC, likely because of moisture. I switched from a dual VESC to two single VESCs. Unfortunately, while soldering, I destroyed one of the two, so I bought a new one. Little did i know how unlucky i was, the version had changed in the meantime, and so had the CAN connector order, leading to a short circuit in both. If I remember correctly, the new one was repaired, and I bought an additional one with the correct version. After that, I stopped working on it. Today, years later, I decided to give it another try, and they both suddenly overheated and failed. My question is: Is it possible for the motors to destroy the VESC? I measured about 0.1 ohms between all phases on both motors. I will give it an last try with an dual VESC. If that fails, I probably will simply burn it to the ground.
Most multimeters aren’t sensitive enough to measure phase resistance on esk8 motors accurately. You can check for shorts manually by pressing 2 phase wires together and spinning the motor by hand, then cycling through all 3 possible phase wore pairings. If the resistance feels different with one pairing from the other 2, it’s a problem.
If the motor has a short, that can totally destroy a vesc. Otherwise, it shouldn’t be able to damage it.
You can also check the sensor wires and make sure there is nothing weird going on there. Ive had the 5v rail short from what was probably the Metr harness getting loose. This overheated the DRV chip and deaded the vesc
What would be the best or simplest way to check the sensor wires without disassemble the motor? Measure all wires against each other for zero resistance? Probably also against the case and the motor wires?
I think i still have some Cheap-FOCer laying around. Probably i could also do a fast test with them. They are as the name says at least cheap.
They seem to be pretty good about getting the positive and negative wires consistent:
so measure the outermost wires (Red and Black) for zero resistance. If that checks out then
put +5V on the red wire, GND on the black wire
Switch the meter to volts mode
put the meter across GND and each of the other wires.
Spin the motor slowly and you should see the voltage alternate between +5 and 0 on 3 of the wires. The last wire is the temp sensor so it should just be at some nonzero value.