You using this with your flipsky?
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My friend does. I have one on my vesc6.
Wait, either it’s white screen or numbers are static. It cannot be both at the same time. 
Is it sometimes white screen and sometimes frozen screen?
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Yes, at times white screen. On some occasions, static telemetry numbers then eventually turn into white screen.
I have wierd problems like this too. Sometimes it locks on a certain speed and I’ll stop and it says 15 mph. Other times I’ll lose all data and it will only display the battery bar at the bottom. I haven’t thought it’s the Davega though. My light controller is a power suck and causes all sorts of wierd things. Metr pro has wierd nuances when the light controller is plugged in too. I figured it was just the controller. I’ll start logging issues I see now
Hey guys, sorry for the late response. I think these problems have to do with the flakiness of the 5V on some VESCs. This has unfortunately been reported by quite a few people already and is apparently a serious issue. I don’t have a good answer for it now so I think I will put all DAVEGA X orders on hold until we’re sure we can figure this out. (Fortunately there are not unfulfilled orders that have already been payed for.)
Let me start from the beginning. We have been testing DAVEGAs with @LR-designs, @SeanHacker, @rpasichnyk, @hexakopter, and @bigmisan. It was working fine for everyone, except, ironically, for myself. My own DAVEGA would restart time to time while riding. I tested several different units (and several different cables) and it was more or less the same with all. The only difference was that some units would restart completely whereas other would get stuck in the white screen. My hypothesis for that is that some units were more susceptible to an MCU restart in case of an input voltage drop whereas for other units only the display would get restarted (without the MCU restart), in which case the white screen happens.
At any rate, the situation was such that I was the only one affected and there was one problem or another regardless of which DAVEGA piece I used. So I logically concluded that something must be wrong with my VESC (Unity) and I figured we’re good to go with the production.
A few weeks later, @ThomasL was the first one to report the same problem, at which point I reached out to @shaman to help me troubleshoot it (since my own electronics background is very limited) and he was very kind to agree to help. What we decided to do was to power DAVEGA from another 5V source than the VESC’s one. I used 4 rechargeable AA batteries. I haven’t seen any restarts since then. This supports the hypothesis the problem is in my Unity rather than in DAVEGA.
In the meantime @ThomasL informed me that his DAVEGA problem has mysteriously disappeared without us doing anything about it. So I thought we’re good and continued shipping more DAVEGAs.
However, now it looks like there’s a number of people experiencing similar symptoms. I know about @pookybear, @Ace, and @dk-odense. That’s more than enough people to be worried and take some action.
Here’s what I’d like to do:
- Have a poll here to find out what percentage of users is affected. poll
- Start a separate thread for whoever is affected by the problem to share the symptoms. See what the pattern is. Hopefully get some help from the community with the investigation. DAVEGA X: Restarting, freezing, white screen
- Figure out the solution for everyone affected. Worst case scenario is that I take the units back and refund. I hope we can find some workaround though. Should it turn out that the problem is indeed in the 5V supply, I imagine we could put together some add-on module that would power the DAVEGA directly from the battery pack and be enabled from the VESC’s 5V signal such that DAVEGA gets powered off whenever VESC is powered off or something like that.
I’m really sorry about this. I hope we can sort it out and make everyone happy. Any comments or suggestions are welcome.
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How 'bout another option: I have done 100km working fine but I broke something myself and haven’t fixed it yet. (Think I broke the uart wire when taking apart my board, have not thoroughly investigated. Might need re-soldering)
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Can this hopefully be fixed by adding some decoupling capacitors?
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If the 5v is patchy on vescs, wouldn’t that also affect the PPM/PWM 5v terminal? Meaning we would get issues from PPM/PWM users?
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Hehe, not relevant. Let me know if you need a replacement cable.
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There’s already a 100 uF capacitor. I actually wanted to test with bigger ones. I purchased some beefy 22 mF capacitors but haven’t had time to test them yet.
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I’m re-doing the poll since I didn’t make the previous one public and it’s quite important to have the list of people who experienced some issues. Sorry about this.
How reliably has your DAVEGA X been working:
- I have done more than 100 km and had no issues.
- I experienced restarts, freezing, or white screen.
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Thats just silly. 
True. That’s a good point. Maybe the difference in power consumption is a factor. DAVEGA takes about ~100 mA at 5V with WiFi disabled and ~150 mA with WiFi enabled. I don’t know how much a typical PPM receiver takes but I assume it’s less.
This could be due to to the receivers having a lower minimum input voltage requirement. Depending on the ESP32 breakout board used, the 3v3 LDO can require 1v-1.1v drop, so your minimum input voltage required before unexpected things start happening would be around 4.3v-4.4v. If the 5v supply from the ESC is regulating to slightly under 5v then you are left with a small window for voltage drop over the cable and power sags due to current demanded by the motors.
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Print the spacer I made and route the cable underneath the board.
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Thank you so much. I slice it tomorrow and print it with PLA.
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