Oh wow! is this an estimated cost for users to “DIY” themselves as well? (obviously abit more if they do smaller batches)
Very cheap 6.6 FOCER indeed! 
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Yeah that’s about right. This is pricing for JLCPCB for the PCBs and partial SMT assembly plus the remaining BOM components from LCSC plus the heatsinks, cables, and other hardware from AliExpress. Even conservatively speaking, your looking at $20 per controller when making these in batches.
You still have to figure out the enclosure but I’ll be designing an open source 3D printable one to along with it.
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yeah thats pretty insane! a 6.6 based vesc for $20 is unreal
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Materials ordered! Putting JLCPCB’s SMT assembly service to the test.
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Great! Supporting this!
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Good luck with this next phase!
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Small donation sent. Thanks so much! This is a really cool project!
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Good news and bad news.
Good news is that everything has come in!
Bad news is that I have leave on a business trip for 1.5 weeks starting next Monday and I won’t be able put these bad boys together until I’m back…
In the mean time, check out what JLCPCB’s SMT service can do by itself. They were able to knock out a good deal of the soldering leaving me with just a few of the larger SMT components and then of course all the through-hole stuff. Not bad in my opinion.
Also you can see the PCB bus bars. I figured this is a little more graceful than just globbing on tons of solder to beef up the board.
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Looks good! How much do they charge for presoldered components? Just out of curiosity. The amount of time you gain is priceless
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Its really reasonable, the SMT portion of the vedder 4.12 costed me $18USD when I got a couple made, super cheap 4.12s and 6.6s if you have the gerber.
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that’s a really good price indeed
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So it’s $7 to start plus $0.0015 per solder joint. So a 64 pin IC will be more than the little resistors/capcitors that have 2 pads. There’s also the cost for the part itself which you can see when you choose what part you want.
There’s an extra $3 charge for “extended” components. The DRV8301 is considered extended. It’s a on-time charge of $3 so not $3 per DRV.
It’s all still stupid cheap. It came out to about $11.50 per board w/ SMT assembly plus the bus bars. I ordered 20 of them since I had plenty of funding thanks to those that donated!
FYI JLCPCB also runs specials for whatever reason during the year. They’ll basically have a coupon available that will offset the $7 fee. I think they have a special right now.
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I think you took the right decision. Manually it would take way too much precious time. So they even provide the components right?
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They have a set library of components to choose from. It’s mostly common “jelly bean” components that get used in most electronics but they also have some really good parts too like the STM32 used in the VESCs. I actually made some design decisions in the CFOC2 to accommodate what is available in JLCPCB’s SMT library.
Things they don’t have are the large inductors or large 100V ceramic capacitors needed for the VESC power stage. Those you have to acquire and solder yourself.
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Are you going to use air soldering on small components? I have tried only once but looks way cleaner than classical one. As I said I am super interested in the bigger brother ESC you are making but I find your commitments and goals really remarkable. Thanks for the updates
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Thanks!
Are you referring to the remaining SMD components? If so, they’re no that small in comparison to the ones already soldered. One can handle those with a regular iron.
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That I got it. I meant in general what you use to solder the small components
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Gotcha. Yes I use a stencil, paste, and hot air to solder components to bare boards if starting from scratch.
Otherwise if soldering just a few components, I still use an iron but just with a finer conical tip.
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Got it, thanks!
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Happy New Year everyone!
I’ve assembled and tested a beta unit up to 50A under load. It does well functionally starting with full torque sensorless. Just gotta assemble the other units and ship them to the testers.
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