Oh sweet so it is possible? Was my only concern with purchasing a vesc for my board. Cheers!
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is there a way of testing whether an esc works or not without a battery? my battery may not be ready for some time and the warranty period on my esc is slowly expiring. I thought maybe sticking an xt90 socket on a phone charger and providing low voltage power that way, but im not electric-savvy to know if this is a dumb idea or not.
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I guess you could try with a power supply that you connect to the wall, like the one that charges your battery but i have no idea. PLZ DONT DO THIS unless someone who knows what hes talking about tells you so.
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You can try it with a 9V battery but can’t run motors.
You can probably use a 12V lead acid battery to run motors.
Or you can populate R0 on the PCB and run it from USB power
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I’m a dummy, what’s an R0?
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It’s a little tiny microscopic surface mount resistor, resistor number zero on the design, that connects the USB power line to the 5V rail. You generally don’t want this connected, which would backfeed the two 5V power supplies (one on the ESC and one in your laptop) into each other. But in the case where there is no battery and you want to use the USB to communicate with the ESC, then connecting that allows the ESC to run its processor from USB power. You can’t drive a motor with it.
Honestly, just connect it to an automobile battery and it’s fine. Or a 9V battery but don’t drive any motors.
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So, I just wire it up with xt90 and plug it in?
You sure the it wont destroy my shiny new esc?
I wont plug any motors in at all, it’ll just be the esc and the battery plugged into one another…thats correct, right?
yep.
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The ESC is rated for a much higher voltage than 12V, just make sure to limit the current to the motors as a car battery can deliver up to 1000A+
The motors will take all the AMP you can give them and in the process heat and die!
Make sure you use an anti-spark xt90 connector between the ESC and the CAR battery! Don’t just “hook it up”.
The anti-spark xt90 connector should be the last thing you “connect” to create a closed circuit. This will prevent your ESC going up in smoke.
While your advice is good and useful, your reasoning for the precautions is flawed.
Antispark connectors aren’t there to protect your ESC, they’re there to protect your connectors from the spark caused by inrush current charging the system’s capacitors. Hence the name “anti spark”.
Yes, motors are dumb devices with no current limiting. But VESCs and their derivatives already have current limits built in. If the vesc has appropriate settings for an esk8 battery, then a car battery won’t damage anything. No need to change anything except the low voltage cutoffs.
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Thanks for the addition explanation!
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Alright I have a mini 2.4 ghz torqueboards remote and run a Unity.
Whenever I ride downtown , I get a few random signal cutouts. I did the whole ferrite ring thing and it didn’t eliminate the problem.
Need input. Im thinking I might have to replace remote and receiver and see if it works. I may move to UART and see if this solves the issue.
Any input on the issue would be appreciated. I would also appreciate any suggestions on UART trigger remotes.
Oh and if someone knows how to wire a vx1 vesc6 receiver to work with the Unity, I may attempt that
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Honestly I’d LOVE to see a remote offering that doesn’t sit smack in the middle of the super-common (and thus super-congested) 2.4GHz band. 900MHz and 5.8GHz are both also unregulated in the US, but of course it would still require a complete redesign of the RF frontend on both the RX and TX side, assuming you can even get comms chips in the frequency you want with the specs and features you need.
A possible remedy (or at least something worth trying) that doesn’t need a full redesign, would be to try changing antennas from a simple dipole to something like a circular polarized setup as is commonly used in FPV. That should help by providing a more even 360-degree transmit profile, and also help block out a lot of extraneous linear polarized noise. (The main downside is that these types of antennas are physically much larger (and 3-dimensional) than the the simple “whip” or “nub” linear antennas you commonly see on TXs and TXs.)
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Why does it have to be UART?
Hoyt puck is great.
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Maybe I’m not a UART professional, but I figured there would be less interference.
Yeah unfortunately I don’t have time to get into anything too in depth right now.
Just need to make sure I didn’t have anymore cut outs, ive been lucky so far, but it throws me off every time
Yeah, I know the feels. That was one of the reasons I parted out my last build and moved from esk8 to ebikes: More to hold onto for dear life, and no wireless black magic to deal with. (My last build also had gremlins re:throttle input, and I never fully got it worked out. I suspect it was the remote/rx combo, but I gave up before going so far as to replace them with a different model. I had lost my taste for asphalt by then.)
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