Evolve motors with Stormcore, no torque

Noob problem here. This is my first foray into VESC territory. I’m not getting any torque out of my motors. It seemed to work the first time around. One motor gave up, then soon after the other. Detection runs OK for both motors, which I’ve run numerous times. VESC 5.3 firmware. Are my motors toast? Or have I missed a trick in the settings? Thanks!

Asking the obvious here, but did you configure the vesc?

1 Like

Aside from running detection, and the usual motor/battery/regen max amps. No. There be dragons in those settings. I don’t really understand what I’m looking at outside of current and voltage settings.

Hm. Did you just use the wizards?

1 Like

Correct. Then manually rounded down max motor amps (generated from detection) and added some battery and regen limits.

1 Like

I just went thru redoing a board and I think this might be normal for 5.3. Feels fine when I road the board.

Edit: when you say gave up like it’s no longer functioning? Your video just looks like you can hold the motors down while the other side is in gear

1 Like

The motors gave up. As in they were working (first test launching me from a standstill, while standing on the board). Now they have so little torque, I can hold the motors while at full throttle. Standing on the board now and pulling the trigger they start clicking and not rotating.


In case this means something to someone lol…

clicking sounds like it’s reverting to sensorless?

also based on the errors given, sounds like the hall sensors aren’t playing nice in general

after wizard, when you go into the motor tab to change the amps, do you remember to read motor settings for the side you’re changing?

and reading the motor settings when you switch to can?

(i know 5.3 sorta does it but it’s iffy ish afaik, so i still manually do it just in case)

my guesss is as you’re going into settings the hall configuration, along side detection settings are being mixed up, so it’s causing the esc to read and run the motors correctly

1 Like

Thanks for the tip. I think you are spot on here.

Solid tips. This software is so confusing, but I think I understand what you mean. So I ran detection from scratch and didn’t touch anything manually. Works great.

I think I confused myself after breaking a sensor wire. One motor wasn’t working while standing on board. Saw broken sensor wire, tried to run sensorless. Didn’t like how it was spinning the motors up, so re-crimped the broken sensor wire. That’s when I started grabbing the motors to check torque. Seems this firmware has a progressive torque thing going on. Seems fine now, ran up and down the driveway a few times.

New question. The acceleration is very slow compared to Evolve (even on 10S), now it has a Stormcore on 12S, and it has no punch. It winds up but I can sort-of tell it’s a software thing. How do you make VESC more like Evolve where it tries to kill you every time you punch the throttle? I miss that.

1 Like

amp settings, ramp time, and throttle curve

ranp time and thrtottle cyrve are in the APP tab (you don’t neeeed to set the settings on both sides of the esc for these)

2 Likes

assuming you’ve configured and saved the proper settings. Check if you have power all the way.
Bottleneck in power is usually a bad connection somewhere. Voltage is getting thru but the amps arent.

I’m pretty confident 50% of motors will tell you that the hallsensor arrangement is shite. That should only affect startup torque tho. once the motor is spinning hallsensors really doesn’t matter.

If you monitor the VESC batt voltage while throttling the motor. Is it plummeting?

4 Likes

Also be aware that motors on the bench without any load(free spinning), can behave very erratically and seldom gives you the real world representation compared to you atcually standing on it.

2 Likes

Brilliant, thank you. Looks like the Wand remote can be tweaked in the ‘VESC Remote’ settings? That’s where I’ll start messing with curves I guess.

2 Likes

Today I learned this. Don’t assume an artificial test is worth shit with tech you don’t understand. :melting_face:

1 Like

Tested on my driveway - 5-10% incline. Voltage according to Stormcore app drops from 47 to 45 volts after roughly 50 meters.

Vdrop in acceptable range.

Could you copy paste motor settings here? Some data on your battery would be helpful too. Cell type and parallell arangement

1 Like

Motor configs:
VESC107Motor.xml (9.7 KB)
VESC108Motor.xml (9.7 KB)

Battery is Molicel 21700 12S4P.