I’m budgeting and doing researching so I can purchase a Funwheel X7 and a Speedboard. I keep hearing content creators, sponsored or not constantly put VESC on the high graces as if its premium but I cant read between the lines to figure out as to why
VESC is an open source motor controller firmware that can run on a bunch of different hardware. It’s not an entire vehicle. It’s the thing that takes DC power from the battery and and injects bursts of it into the motor to make it spin.
Think of it like windows vs mac
You can buy a bunch of different computers from different brands that run windows
You can buy a bunch of different motor controllers that run vesc, and therefore there are multiple types of “onewheels” you can buy with multiple types of vesc based motor controllers installed.
But you can only buy a MacOS machine from apple the way you can only buy a “Future Motion ESC” equipped balance thingy from Future Motion.
future motion is Apple in this metaphor. They have their own firmware for their own motor controller that they use in their one wheeled self balancing device.
You can take the future motion motor controller out and replace it with a motor controller running vesc firmware and potentially get better performance. There are multiple models of VESC motor controller capable of pulling more power from the battery and pushing it into the motor. If you were to build a one wheeled self balancing device using such a motor controller, and used an appropriate battery, you could out perform the future motion device.
Many people have done exactly that. Their builds are often used as evidence for why a “VESC” is better than a OneWheel from Future Motion
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VESC is software used by many different controllers made by many different brands. You are able to use many different motors with the same VESC even if they are massively different sizes, brands, use different position or temperature sensors etc.
VESCs (and many other controllers these days) are able to “run motor detection” to detect the exact position of the sensors relative to the position of the can to reduce current spikes, as well as gauging other parameters. You can mix and match motors without these features but it will work less well.
VESCs are generally extremely powerful for the size and price, and you are able to configure motor amps, battery amps, and voltage cutoff to your preference.
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VESC is a fully open source software and firmware, and some hardware, for controlling brushed and brushless motors, named after the creator, Benjamin Vedder, VedderElectronicSpeedController.
The project was made public around Jan. of 2014 on Vedder’s website:
A custom BLDC motor controller
A year later (Jan. 2015) the project was named VESC, and anounced on Vedder’s website:
VESC – Open Source ESC
Since 2015, the VESC project(software, firmware and hardware) has evolved significantly from It’s
beginnings as an RC/E-skate class system, to encompass nearly everything from
<200watt quadcopters, to >250kW car controllers.
Software/firmware wise, this video shows a graphical rendition of the commits made to Github from 2014-2024:
One thing that I want to add to vesc onewheels is that their ride feel is much more customizable than FM boards, power isn’t the only advantage. I preferred the ride feel of the vesc wheels I rode in my friend circle compared to the FM wheels I tried.
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Here are some links to various availible VESC based esc’s;
VESC users also have larger peens
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