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.