Did I kill my mountain board in the mud? UPDATE: It is Alive!

[rafaelinmissouri]

• Put it in rice, it will be fine.
• It is fucked

So yep. Took the mouintain board out for its first real real off road ride…

It snowed here a week ago and it is sixty degrees today.

The trail was half mud half snow.

After a couple miles powering through the mud and snow the board shut off.

Me being the genius I am turned it back on. It went for a second. Then one of the motors sounded like it was cogging and the power button was blinking.

I could not turn it off via the power button.

I disconnected the battery and carried the board out in shame…

[rafaelinmissouri]

It is a 10s4p 40t pack
Unity
Maytech 6374 170kv motors

[ryansinatra]

I mean it would help if you took a look at the electronics to see if water got introduced somewhere

[yelnats8j]

Are you running it sensored?

[Fosterqc]

I’d try to check error messages if you can.

Get a good whiff in there. Burnt?

[rafaelinmissouri]

There is just a wee bit of mud in the sensor ports… Fuck me.
No fire damage looking anything… Wire ports needed more better water proofing…

[rafaelinmissouri]

I had the sensor wires hooked up. Only one motor had good sensors

[yelnats8j]

Sensors + Water = No good

@b264 can better explain this then me

[ryansinatra]

You might be able to still run it unsensored. But yeah mud is water and water is no good. Before running the board in conditions like that you should have been sure that it was 100 percent waterproof/resistant so nothing could get to the exposed wiring or boards

[Kellag]

Ur fucked buy a meepo

[rafaelinmissouri]

I have always wanted a meepo.

[rafaelinmissouri]

Yeah. I thought the cable glands were going to keep the wires close together enough to keep water out… I’m going to put some jb weld in there as well for the revival or version 2.0

[CiscoV]

I knew I was gonna find your ass here . Electronics and water don’t mix.

Hope the homie’s board is good but still don’t feel bad

[Seabjorn]

I’ve blown some DRV chips on the single focboxes while running through harsh terrain. Symptome usually is the same as you describe “cogging”, makes some twitchy movements/sounds but never starts to run if I remember correctly.

So it could be a dead DRV chip, not sure if the unity uses the same one but there are some people out there that can replace them. Can you see any fault codes in the unity app?

[b264]

Set it up unsensored and waterproof it this time

[taz]

Uncensored is not going to work for a MTB with bindings that is used off road especially when you have proper hills

[Benjo]

Unsensored works totally fine for an MTB, it is a matter of configuration and the algorithm the ESC uses. I have wheelspin from a standstill and no jerking whatsoever.

[taz]

Could you share more information because my experience says otherwise?

[Benjo]

I don’t know about VESC, but the Arc200 has something called Jitter Start. You need to be a bit lucky with the default values, but for me they worked to start the motor from a standstill no problem without pushing and with considerable torque. There are Jitter Speed 1 and 2 values that you can optimize by trial and error to further improve torque. For me startup is super smooth, immediate and powerful, so that I wouldn’t bother getting sensors. I didn’t test super steep hills, though.

I would assume that the VESC also has some parameters to fine tune sensorless startup.

[taz]

I have not had luck with sensorless in my VESCs, actually I even tried sensored/hybrid BLDC and the torque was considerably reduced compared to sensored FOC.
However some of the hills I ride are really steep.