Ah, ok this answers a problem of mine. I tried to test the controller with a drone motor.
First i used a 12V 10A power supply. Here i got a fault because of missing amperes.
Second i used a 7.2V lipo battery but it only worked some seconds before fault.
So i think this will solve the mystery. Missing motor and battery at the moment.
1 Like
Can you expand on this fault? I haven’t heard of this one.
The motor has a continous current of about 22A.
I assumed while using the motor setup wizard it tests the max current flow.
With the 12V 10A power supply i always got a fault.
With the 7.2V battery i could finish the setup, but afterwords i got some problems.
Until now i never setup a motor without the wizard.
There is also the possibility of a defect motor!
Burnt my first Focer in action today. Looks like the LDO caved in and the 3v rail was ready 4v. Due to this, the mcu and imu also died. Had to replace all 3. Talked to @shaman and he said he had a better ldo in mind but jlc didnt have that in stock. Would request shaman to put that on the bom if possible. Can save a lot of trouble.
2 Likes
There is also a suspicion that high voltage surge happened over the 5V supply that could have killed the LDO. There is an ESD diode on the 5V rail but I think I will reinforce this with a TVS diode for v1.0
6 Likes
What other things are likely to stress the LDO? Would it be more likely with higher voltage packs? More external devices putting more demand on it?
1 Like
A Series of Unfortunate Events:
Board one: sloppy soldering, short from drain of one of the gets and a phase wire. Fire.
Board two: bad soldering? bad luck? DRV fault immediately, motor spun up just fine on the bench, but I didn’t get 1m on it.
Board three (the good one): kept getting this error where it sounded like the motor was going full throttle in reverse. this would happen after about 20 mins, seemingly caused by nothing. I also kept getting over voltage errors (like 57v) during braking. the DRV was throwing every fault in the book whenever the “full reverse” error happened (which happened somewhere around half throttle).
board 4: fried drv. found a tiny strand of a wire that had bridged some drv pins. bad luck? sloppy? careless? replaced the drv with one from Digikey, and then it wouldn’t even connect over USB. cooked microcontroller? need to figure out how to get a drv off without having to crank my hot air to 500 and max air speed.
board 5: traded a couple unassembled boards for a fully assembled board with 3d printed enclosure and heatsink (from @Helno) . got the overvoltage error, and bounced off abs max (set to only 40a so that’s easy to fix).
finally googled vesc over voltage during braking, and found a couple guys posting about bad battery connections. unwrapped my pack and the electrical tape pulled a bunch of welded tabs right off. I guess the guy that welded it didn’t get good enough penetration. also laying them all flat would have exposed them to a lot of stress.
looking back the first time board 3 had the reverse error was when I went over some streetcar tracks perpendicularly… I thought there was no way that caused it because it’s all solid stuff. guess I should have looked at the battery earlier. so now I’m looking at how to connect the cells. I know it’s not best practice, but soldering is looking tempting…
6 Likes
I had one dead LDO on one board that failed closed. I killed it during testing of the bad DRVs it must have been due to the high unregulated voltage on the 5V rail.
1 Like
I don’t think there’s a relation to high voltage battery packs. Besides voltage spikes/surges, then overloading the LDO is next thing that would kill it. It’s rated for about 1A so exceeding that will likely burn it out
2 Likes
Yeah most it likely died from over voltage stress
1 Like
As someone who just recently welded a A123 pack I wanna say the electrodes are made of something different from regular 18650’s. At least in my experience had to crank my spot welder way up to get consistent welds compared to regular cells.
5 Likes
Some promising results,
- Got this batch made my Self
- hand Soldered IMU, Big caps, Resistors and fets, and a few little things etc,
What FW do l need to run and when lam using VESC tool is saying that FW is OLD
6 Likes
FW5.01 works with the latest VESC tool just fine
1 Like
Mhmmm, maybe l don’t have latest vesc Tool ty
Ok. The latest vesc tool is v2.06
1 Like
I put together the two CFOC2’s I got in trade from @alwaysmohawk and they seem to be working well.
6 Likes
@shaman A bit earlier you mentioned that it is tricky to setup VESC with larger hubs. Our makerspace mostly uses 10" hubs from hoverboards. We make scooters out of them. We used to use hacked hoverboard driver boards with these wheels and current limited at 15-20A. Have you seen anybody using VESC with these?
You mentioned that VESC wizard is not the best option for hubs and manual setup is preferred. What did you mean by manual in this case? Could you help a bit to make start easier?
Thanks!
1 Like
I have seen the hoverboard wheels used on a 4WD build on the old forum with VESCs 4.12 or FOCBOXes. Not sure about any issues though, you may be able to find it.
2 Likes
You can try the wizard and see if it works for you and that motor. I’m sure you can get those hoverboard motors working with any VESC.
Manual detection is where you do motor detection outside of the wizard as shown in the screen shot below. Here you can adjust certain parameters that could be better for the motor you are working with.
3 Likes