Hey guys, tonight I’m going to be trying to troubleshoot my remote. For some reason when I wiggle the on-off button, my remote often disconnects from the receiver and quickly reconnects. This feels extremely dangerous, so tonight I’m going to take it apart and see if there’s anything loose. Do you guys have any suggestions for what exactly I might want to look for and probe with my multimeter? Thank you!
Update: well it seems there is no real correlation between the remote disconnects and the on-off switch. Probing the crap out of it, wiggling the on off switch (which I mentally correlated with disconnects) don’t seem to trigger them. I am thinking it has to have something to do with the receiver. BTW, does this lipo look puffed to y’all? Might need to replace it.
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I don’t think I’d worry much about the lipo here really the smaller ones like this look kind of puffy in the first place. If you are powering the receiver off the VESC I think adding a small electrolytic cap in parallel with GND/V+ on the receiver can help even out any moments of higher draw from the receiver (moments it might otherwise “brown out” and temporarily disconnect but maybe without fully restarting). Other more obvious thing to check out is just the connection between receiver and ESC, I like to just solder the connection myself and cover the JST pins with heatshrink to hold things together.
Edit - would just check the lipo for any puncture looking marks from through hole solder points poking it otherwise if it holds a charge it doesn’t look too bad from here.
Lipo seems to check out. The cap idea is a great idea! I might have one somewhere, let me look around and I’ll give that a try, thanks!
There really seems to be no rhyme or reason with the cut outs. I’ve been monitoring it, wiggling connectors, moving around, it just happens randomly. What size cap exactly do you think? I’ll check what I got and post back.
Whatever you find probably works, for an Arduino based DIY receiver I used a 100uF electrolytic capacitor (think 16V but anything rated above 5V basically should be fine), it seemed to help with some little dips I’d get using the NRF chip/arduino combo where the arduino LED would go faint but not out entirely and a restart would always fix in my case, since your receiver is no doubt something different the exact behavior might vary… curious how it goes. Unfortunately don’t have a good enough oscilloscope to do anything but speculate on what exactly was happening, but working stable now for a while with the cap on there.
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So I am going to try a 22uf low esr cap closest to the receiver to mitigate EMI, and two larger 2200uf a bit down the wires hopefully to help with the “brown outs” and receiver possibly losing power if that’s what the issue is.
There shouldn’t be an issue with making a separate connector like such that I can just plug into CH2, right?
Time to see if this works. Gotta double check polarity first to make sure I didn’t fudge this though.
BTW, went one big cap instead of two. Too much fandangling.
Edit: Polarity checks out. Beer!
Well that seems to have not been the issue.
Still get random cutouts. Thanks for the idea, I wonder what this is. Now that I’m messing with the remote I really wonder… I jiggle with the on/off switch and it tends to cut out… Maybe my initial impression was not fully off base, and this has something to do with the remotes. I’ll try reflowing the on/off switch solder joints and blowing the switch out if I have air duster and update? It definitely only happens when jiggling the power switch.
Welp.
As random and odd as the disconnects are, it seems reflowing the on/off switch has helped substantially. I’m gonna go ride a bit now, I’ll report back if it actually worked or if the results are just placebo. The solder joints seemed fine just by looking at them, I have no idea why reflowing (hot iron, held a bit with lead-free solder added) might help. eh?
Just tested- basically drained my battery from full to empty going hard tonight. Turned on and off a few times, and besides for one or two cut-outs just seconds after turning all electronics on [Wayyyy less cutouts than before], there were no real cutouts during riding or weird inputs.
I feel like the capacitors have helped smooth out throttle input- smoothing out and making my throttle 100% predictable, whereas before I would randomly feel a weird delay in input at times. They may have not solved the cut-outs completely, as those were reduced to basically a non-issue with reflowing the on-off switch imo as determined by testing after adding caps compared to testing after reflowing the on/off switch.
Thanks again for the help @wafflejock… if I ever use PPM remotes in the future (assuming UART remotes don’t take off and I swap to one of those) I will be plugging these capacitors in to my PPM receivers from here on out.
Even though they may not have solved the cutouts completely, there is a noticeable impact over the control I have on my board. It may be placebo, but I feel like just as large+small caps combined have helped and ultimately eliminated over-voltage and over-current faults when placed just before the vescs, these caps have helped at least some (substantial?) amount with cleaning up throttle input… unfortunately I don’t have a quantifiable test method for determining the exact correlation between physical throttle input and what the VESC receives- I can only tell qualitatively that is feels much better.
Anyone else try caps on their receiver that can talk to weather or not it helped them at all?
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I think the receiver should be placed elsewhere away from the phase wires and power wires. They can cause interference.
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Yeah I think so too, it’s just so tight in there right now. 
Yeah that’s a problem I have encountered before too. I wonder if it can be shielded from that somehow.
I am no electronics expert but maybe an aluminum plate. No idea.
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