Have you looked at the open-source code? I would bet it’s pretty straightforward to pick another pin on the MCU. What I don’t know is whether any other pin is broken out for you to use?
There are a couple of unused ADC pins on the COMM port. So I would think you would just update the firmware to use one of them.
Stock firmware should work as expected. Unless you changed the board itself there shouldn’t be such error in first place.
If I remember correctly, current sens for phase 3 comes from the op-amp (The DRV takes care of phase 1 and 2 internally)
Check connectivity between mcu and op-amp.
Thanks guys. I checked everything under microscope, turns out one of the resistors that create voltage reference for op-amp was soldered but didn’t have continuity. Weird as heck, current offsets work now.
I’ve got a problem with voltage reading now, my resistor values are a bit off (didn’t check tolerance when ordering :/) but I found a line in a source code that defines their resistance. If I can change that I can calibrate it myself, only question is how do I build firmware on windows? Never done it 
Oh, also, should the DRV get too hot to touch? I’m kind of worried, it draws 100-150mA from PSU constantly over 8-31V range
About building, I found GitHub - vedderb/bldc: The VESC motor control firmware so that’s sorted, what about the DRV temps?
Depending on the VESC model, they tend to pull 10mA to 40mA at 30v on my psu at idle. Anything higher usually means something failed.
Here is a DRV on an DV4 pulling 100mA total. It was much hotter than the other one, and turned out to be bad.
I so need to get me a IR cam such as yours!
I tried putting together the BOM for this ESC about six months ago, many parts were missing due to the chip shortage.
I went back and read through this thread and didnt see anything but my ADD ass could have missed it,
How are things looking now?
Seek and Flir have ones that plug into phones/tablets. I’ve been using the Seek Compact Pro for years now and love it.
There are some materials you have to modify or things you need to take into account when measuring certain temps (bare metal reads much too low) but it’s easily done with flat black paint or even electrical tape.
I doubt anything has changed. If you can manage to snag some genuine STM’s and DRV’s from someone off the forums you can probably build the rest of the unit by using JLC services (replacing missing caps with analogs) and then solder the missing chips yourself. But if you ask me what would be better option. I strongly suggest making a WTB thread. I bet someone has plenty of spare CFOC2’s.
There’s an updated BOM on github made by me. Drv and stm’s can be sourced from broken FC’s, that’s the way I got mine (1$ for working drv lol).
As per my problem, turns out I had a short on pins 50 and 49 on my STM resulting in 5.1V on 3.3V rail. Fixed it and current draw is now 69mA and drv is cool to the touch. Pretty surprised that my STM survived that.
ESC works now and I can succesfully run autodetect in foc mode, however I cannot get the motor to spin using the play buttons in lower left of the vesc tool. Motor just stutters and jitters but no running. By roughly tuning the pids I got it to spin in duty cycle mode but it’s drawing 30A with no load! It’s just a small 2205 drone motor, you guys got any tips for me on what to check?
Did that show you how to do a build on Windows? I didn’t think that was possible. The only way I’ve done it is on a Raspberry Pi.
IR cameras are great. But if you don’t need anything quite that fancy, these things are pretty good and dirt cheap…
2nd on that. The more matte the better.
I have a flir at work which is about the size of a cell phone; it replaced a big chonky crazy expensive older one and was way better. Crazy how fast the heat trace tech got so good!
Just downloaded the latest firmware (5.01 ?) from the repository.
Looks like this firmware is not fully compatible with VESC TOOL 3.01 (a warning dialog pops up).
When I try to run the “Setup Input” wizard in VESC TOOL it requests to update the firmware.
What can I do ?
Update the firmware in the vesc tool, it’s on the official list now.
Or load it manually
Thanks, with your link it works now. Looks like the latest FW is 5.3 now.
So if I want to add my own custom app to the Cheap FOCer 2 firmware, from where do I download the sources ?
Would be in Vedders repository rather than Shamans I assume ?
Yup, in the BLDC repository. There is a 5.3 release branch, the “master” branch is beta 6.00.
The Cheap FOCer config is in the hwconf folder.
5.3 and 5.03 is the same. There was bad code in the vesc tool that truncated the zero, which is fixed for 6.00
The firmware included in vesc tool is for Cheap Focer 1.0 not 0.9, there is a small hardware difference between the 2. So be careful not to use the wrong firmware
Howdy! So I got my cheapy boi soldered up, and I plug it in to about 10v and current shoots up pretty quickly to around 500ma and climbing before I cut power. The blue LED came on though, and the fault LED didn’t (though I presume it does nothing without firmware). The DRV was not warm to the touch, neither was the atmega. I forgot to touch the STM.
What’s my most likely culprit? I beeped all my connections on the components I had to solder and they seemed good. I haven’t done the diode test on the drv as mentioned in the OP, as I had put the project down by the time I found this thread, and that test wasn’t on the GitHub.
TIA for any help. I’m out of town for most all of today but I’ll implement suggestions tomorrow.