You’re right not practical for all uses. But with mountains closing and limiting sales I think we will find a new way to traverse.
My goal is to ride the trail system from Mammoth to June. That alone is a business.
It won’t be cool unless it fucking rips. It will be dangerous but fun when I’m done.
@powertraverse glad you made it on here. This project is rad. Make it work, make it work well, and many success will come your way. I look forward to seeing your development. Lots of people on here are only able to rip seasonally (not looking at you @b264 
), this would be a most excellent gap filler. Also, have you considered eventually moving development to include snowskates? The bideck kind. Would be effing perfect!
@Pedrodemio tried once seemed liked it was a dog and loss of power.
I’ll try again. I have the 13s running up to 50A now. It’s still a dog @ start.
Dou you have pictures of the inside of the motors? There is some comercial stators that have really thin teeth, so you can’t push much current that they will go into saturation really easily, this may be what is happening
@Pedrodemio took it a part to machine the case but forgot pics. (might crack it open and look for damage tomorrow)
The motor is for scooters with 11" tires. Vendor states up to 120v 150kmh
Had a 1200w motor before this and it had so much power I couldn’t keep the paddles mounted it would wheel hop build RPM and self destruct
https://www.instagram.com/p/CCEJhY7h_zi/
You can always turn the power down, but not always up. Things last longer as well when they aren’t running at 100%.
Maybe try BLDC instead of FOC? I recall a while ago that FOC had a little less torque than BLDC. I don’t know if that’s changed now, but maybe worth a shot.
Another thing you could try is the FOC open loop command
Type help on the VESC terminal to the get correct syntax, set it to a really low erpm and slowly increase the current, be careful because you can easily burn your motor if you let it run in this mode for more than a few seconds
See in what point the torque stop to increase, if indeed it stops increasing significantly your motor is saturating badly and there isn’t much we can to to improve the startup torque
I’ll give that open loop a try.
opt for the 1600w over the 1200w due to case design and the fact we could get lots of them at over 3600w.
Ordered larger sample motors to have something to compare.
Should I order the 120v stator? I have the top 60v/3000w and 72v/3600 on DHL. Think I should get the biggest one to see the current it can handle… thx for your feedback.
Order the one that has the most copper on it by weight.
Most hub motors are more than 14. My bike’s hub has 23 pole pairs.
Wow! What amazing project dude!! Congrats man!!!
I’m sure at this stage you already tried everything but, do you use the Wizard or manual motor detection?
Definitely you need more amps than the results of the Wizard.
Try to run hall_analyze 10 in console
What’s the motor kv?
To start with 1200W motor I would say is under powered. I use over 5 times this on a longboard on tarmac mutch less friction to overcome to start moving than a snowboard.
To give you a idea in a general DIY Single drive board on tarmac we use a 6375 motor 3550W and class this as a compromise in power
Gearing
170kv, 50.4V 15-36 gearing, 85mm wheels
Motor example
More common is dule 6355 2x 3510w (7020w) this will give a good tork for acceleration I’d guess you will need more on a snowboard if you want to power up hills and overcome the friction of the board on start up.
Secondly move volts dose not give you more tork unless you gear it down as well. If you haven’t it’s more likely to be hindering.
If the thing just wants to paddle spin I recommend upping the ramping on the remote
Can you give us some spec on poles, KV, gear ratios, paddle diameter. I want to double check what you max speed is see how low we can reasonably gear it to give you the tork for starting up
There is a tool built in to this forum to help with the calculations
Fascinating project
Following
I agree.
However, a lot of larger hub motors (scooters and ebikes, not so much esk8) can be significantly overdriven as long as care is taken not to saturate the stator or overheat the magnets.
It depends on the stator design (some do have very thin stator arms that saturate really easily, but others don’t), but it’s not unheard of to push several times the nameplate rating without much issue, especially if it’s only for short bursts, or with good cooling. (I think freezing cold air and flying snow counts as pretty good cooling especially if you add a couple ml of ferrofluid in there as well. That stuff is magic.)
Yes I totally agree with the additional cooing from environmental effect will apply but as you say
Will limit the max tork needed to pull off. The higher volt battery won’t help with the tork and I’m presuming the stator is saturated as it’s not that large of a motor at 1300W makes me suspect it is. There is ways around this such as gearing. I would guess it take 60A ish to start moving some thing like this with a good punch of tork to push you up a ski slope.
Just some quick and simplified maths
On flat ground and assuming you paddle is is 0.25 m diameter, the slip is negligible and a snow friction coefficient of 0.1 and 120 kg total system weight, you need 14.7 N.m of torque to get moving, increase that to a 10 % grade and it increases to 40 N.m
Translating that to phase current with an assumed Kv of 20, which means a Kt of 0.48 Nm/A (that would give a top speed of roughly 40 km/h on 12S), you would need 30 A for level cruising and starting and for a 10% slope 83 A
Given the lower torque capability of the VESC on really low speeds, I would say you need a good 100 N.m at the paddles to have a good performance and fun system
Unless you go custom motors, that even that may not be enough given the size constrain, I have two suggestion
1 - take advantage of the of a dual esc, get two big motors, 190 Kv 6374 or bigger, run both with a custom gearbox with a 10:1 gearing, two stage may be needed and 100 phase amps each, that will give you a 45 km/h speed and exactly 100 N.m at the paddles
2 - go to the ebikes.ca motor simulator, test all motors and see what can do 100 N.m without cooking really fast, see if the diameter is too big, if not you can use that or at least have a ballpark estimation of how big your motor will need to be
What about two opposing screw drives?
That seems easy enough to prototype
I feel like they would give you more buoyancy to start, but ultimately slow you down on downhill.
Possibly danger but they could be plastic and not have pinch points
Perhaps they could be raised and lowered to allow some unpowered riding.
Ok so its a motor pushing the board, but it doesn’t look like you can actually snowboard. as much as stand on the sled… I see no turns. Its ALL about the Turns