Well well, it’s time for an update. It has been quite some time since I last posted here, and a lot has happened since then. I last posted in March, which was shortly before my ESK8CON performance. In short, it was awesome! Somehow I managed to avoid all of the professional photographers at esk8con, so here’s a couple pictures I took.
Shoutout to @davidbonde for being a cool dude to race with, @sparkospeed for his “thing”, and @fessyfoo for pushing me to go harder. The other david was super cool, and it was nice to finally meet and race against Ron as well.
I’m going to be doing an overview video on the 14s Phase One of this build to provide an idea of what it’s like to ride the first-rev board. In that video I’ll probably have some racing footage as well. I have a super short gopro clip that I captured in one of my heat races, before it promptly decided that it wasn’t tight enough in the mount, and sloped to a useless angle.
Here’s some practice footage that you might find interesting. It’s funny looking back at this because I’ve improved so much since then, so I can’t wait to show off in the future.
So, how did I do? Quite excellent for my first ever race on my board! I was able to place 12th overall fastest qualifying time, and while I got knocked out of my second heat, I placed 17th overall out of everyone in the entire competition (90 racers). I was super happy with my performance, and that I managed to place into the Pro class in my very first race. Now, I think I could have done a lot better, but lack of passing experience bit me hard and not having quite enough confidence in the board didn’t help either. Gunning for at least top 5 next time!
Below is the raw video that I was able to capture during my heat races, and while it’s not really the best I’m sure some people will find it interesting. First heat, my camera decided it was time to point at the deck, so that’s why that one is so short. Right at the beginning, the guy on the Evolve Gremlin (an incredible racer, board, alright) took the inside corner, and I was chasing him the whole time, and wasn’t able to find a good spot to pass. The second heat, @fessyfoo is absolutely running me down, and I got over confident on a corner, slammed the brakes too hard without leaning back, and lost grip, ending up in a hay bale. I didn’t fall, nothing was damaged, and I finished the race, but it really caused me to lose heavy on that one. \
Next race on the schedule is AVS, and that’s a totally different animal to deal with, prompting my transition to Phase Two of this build.
Anyway, I’ve made some progress further into the build, and in fact, this video is actually all recorded before Esk8con. See below, for my process of upgrading to the @Skyart SKP Solo! This ESC is massive, but also comes with massive power!
Installing the Solo was pretty easy, here’s some other pictures from when I was installing it
My experience with the Solo has been pretty good so far, but I did have a couple issues. When setting up the esc, I had the classic vesc issues that we’ve all had experience with. First, I had a couple failed motor setting writes, super weird. Also while configuring, I had some out-of-date firmware notifications, which was weird as well. (this is all on FW6)
I ended up re-writing the bootloaders and re-flashing 6.2 on them. After re-flashing, the motors ended up detecting fine and I was able to write the settings. Here’s what I ended up going with for the race at Esk8con:
Motor amps: 120/-120 each
Battery amps: 40/-15 each
Hoyt Puck on PPM:
Current smart reverse
10% deadband
0.1 pos ramp
0.22 neg ramp
15% expo throttle curve
This setup worked great for me at esk8con, but I’ve grown in my racing ability a lot since then, and have completely maxed out my performance on this setup. By that, I mean thermal throttling.
No surprise there really, I was warned before I did this, that the Solo can get quite hot, and man, does it. I’ve got a large number of logs from our local i2s meetings where I thermal throttle the ESC every 5 laps or so (80-85C). Now, for a race, this is most likely okay, and I didn’t experience these issues at all at esk8con, but I wasn’t able to push nearly as hard then as I do now. Here are some of those logs for your enjoyment:
Since finding out that I needed to cut a massive hole in my enclosure for the heatsink of the Solo, I also decided it was time to upgrade to 18s. Here’s a couple pictures from that process:
I’m still working on the battery build, but the solo is ready to get silicone-d into my enclosure, but I’m waiting until I finish my battery to make sure I don’t have to pop it out again for wire management or something. I’ve got two videos coming up for this build, first one will be my enclosure-cutting experience, and the next will be the massive 18s6p battery build. Artem is going to hook me up with some sweet pre-cut nickel strip for the battery to make the build process a lot faster, and I’m planning to use pre-tinned copper braid for the series connections, which will be a first for me as well. Not necessarily because I need space, but because it’s a ton easier than stripping and soldering 40 10awg cables. I should be able to use only one single braid connection for each series, with 16mm being capable of somewhere around 120a continuous.
Since the Solos can draw 160a, I’ll probably end up going for 2 braid pieces, but probably not entirely necessary since I would only be pulling 160a for a couple seconds as far as I know. Better to overbuild though than have stuff getting hot.
As for other upcoming upgrades, well, I still want to paint everything, but that’s not going to happen for a while, maybe not even till after AVS. Who knows. I also intend to drop the trucks through the deck a bit by drilling out holes for the heim bolts, to bring the deck closer to the axle height.
