Ubox… the horror. So i went after the Ubox when it hadn’t gotten any flack yet for being finicky. found out the hard way that even though it has 5.3fw and 6.0fw… it really doesn’t. running the stock installed 5.3 fw was super frustrating, i was also having issues with the CANbus being complete dog shit. Motor detection was an exercise in patience as I would have to try and detect and adjust settings 10-20 times before anything would take, constant errors, time out and loss of communication. as my first experience working with a VESC based controller i was ready to give up many times. I could get it to work for one setting with a controller detected, then the second ubox would drop out after a mile of test ride and i would be walking home with new bruises. bluetooth was out of the question, the bluetooth module i purchased with the ubox was doa but had a blue light and i was way past return/refund and i didn’t know the metr pro was also a bluetooth connection… how did i miss this?
Tangent: Metr pro uart is the big winner here, fucking hell. it just keeps giving and giving. logo should link to the giving tree ffs. Except when I busted the external antenna off I never lose connection (now after FW 5.2) just a sold piece of kit and I only got it as a last minute no preplanning thing. Just saw it was in stock and made another poor financial decision. worked out fucking stellar though, i use the metr almost every ride because its just fucking cool.
getting long so here is some gore. most of my other wounds get flagged NSFW
back to the fw5.3 blues. was about to give up as i was always just blind with rage trying to get this thing to do what it was supposed to do, it wouldn’t accept the 6.0FW when i would try to update, and vesc tool was shitting so many “YoUr FiRmwaRE is oLD aNd misSMatCHeD sO i cAn’T dO NOFin” errors or similar unless i rebooted for every connection attempt and power cycled the board and prayed to RNGesus while sacrificing small mammals to Skaten. Took a long break. like a loooong break and just decided to work on other parts of the build and come back to this after.
Accidentally found one of the problems… my bms. so there is an edge case that Ubox just happened to fulfill where the way the ennoid xlite v2 CAN was terminated can destabilize the bus (fixed in later versions and they were super helpful guiding my ignorant ass to the issue), which was unfortunately only one of my compounding issues, at least after pulling it out of the circuit i could talk to both of the Ubox halves consistently. still having issues with the remote and outputs acting super sketch but at least i could blame that on user error as i fuck up the settings and also because i was using old FW that’s “mostly compatible”… so fucking sick of acknowledging that fucking error message every time i do anything FUCK
accidentally stumbled on the method of updating the FW while digging through every word published on the spintend website. you have to update the boot loader first before using their FW for it to take… FUCK that was hard to find, or I’m just so new i didn’t realize that was so fucking basic knowledge no one mentioned it before. GOLDEN, 6.0fw uploaded, local PNWesk8 build day coming up and someone who knows VESC tool close by to help me sort my shit out because I still cant figure this out. And they fucking did, thing was working like a champ by the end of the day and made a few test laps and it was solid
you know when someone asks a question on the forum or on reddit or somewhere… and you read it and think to yourself: the question they asked is so off base, so far from basic understanding, and kinda entitled that you say to yourself that it will take so much effort to get them up to speed and on the right track that you just let it sit… someone else will chime in probably and help this poor fuck. i just don’t have the two days its gonna take to teach them how to read first in order to fix their shit. Those are my questions
I don’t know why the fuck this started happining
like look at this shit, just started doing this randomly. thanks again to the Metr Pro. nothing like breathing on the controller and having it go 100% duty cycle for .5 seconds. kick you off real good and then when you wake up and try to figure out what the hell happened and limp home… one motor doesn’t work, the can bus is shit again, settings are all default and you busted your puck. LOL
it was acting so weird it had to be me, i must have broken something or got chips in the case or some shit. took it apart and it was so clean and fresh looking. not one thing wrong. went over the whole thing under magnification but anything beyond a visual inspection for complicated pcbs is outside of my wheelhouse.
took a fall and got a big sad. had to limp my as home with my broken toys. fuck this ubox and all its bull shit. fine! ill replace it and just take the L and move on. no more ubox. ordered a dual SKP - probably super fucking overkill for my needs but everyone testing that shit was all - it just fucking works - and i needed that energy or i was going to part some shit out.
couple days before the skp shows up I’m hooking up a Flipsky 50a dual just to see if i can make anything work but i’m warned about killing it on the 12s voltage and just put it back down. beginner question thread pulls through here. Thanks to @haven for the solid advise to roll back to 5.2 and @Common_good for spoon feeding how and the old vesc tool to me. rolled back the FW and everything just started working, I could talk to it on my pc EVERY FUCKING TIME! I could see both of them across the can and didn’t have to program them separately. Bluetooth connection was available! and working solid - even if i sometimes have to write twice to get it to stick it works more than it doesn’t. Controller works all the time, no more dropouts or weird outputs.
You have no idea how scared of riding my board I had become, it was going to kill me. I was about to just abandon the whole thing and that was making me so fucking sad I cant even describe. Like seriously if it was just not working it would be totally different than the Russian roulette I was playing. Board runs amazing for like 30 miles of testing then takes a shit on you right as you are starting to build confidence in it.
My boring build has started to be boring. press go, go. press break, breaks. not a big ask. glad that issue is solved… kept the skp as both a threat to hold over the ubox and because I really like building shit.
