Yesterday, after a long ride I recharged my battery packs only to discover later that the VESC wouldn’t turn on. A couple of minutes later, after fiddling around and checking connections I turned on again.
Today I wanted to go for a ride → VESC + Receiver LEDs were on, the remote paired but didn’t respond to any throttle input. I loaded up the VESC tool on my android, tried some different settings → I let the motors spin up through the direction reverse-function in VESC Tool, changed safe start to “disabled” and suddendly everything worked again. Around 15min into my ride, the VESC shut off and only turned on again 8 hours later.
All i did was check all the connections with a multimeter: on-off switch closed the circuit when pressed, tried two different batteries, connected a power supply to the VESC instead of the battery, tried turning it on again and it worked.
Can anyone help me understand what could be at fault here or lead to a solution? I was thinking
a) maybe resetting the VESC somehow.
b) I sprayed all electronics with CorrosionX HD to protect them from moisture. One of the features of CorrosionX is that it has extremely low electrical conductivity and that it penetrates the smallest gaps → could it be that over the course of days it somehow seeped into the battery - VESC connector and “insulated” them from each other? I didn’t feel the power slowly fade while riding though…
Maybe the CorrosionX is creating a poor connection between the power button and the Stormcore, or the button is intermittently faulty. You could try shorting those two MOM pins with a screwdriver next time it doesn’t turn on to see if that’s the issue.
These are usually conformally coated from the factory, so the CorrosionX isn’t really necessary
If you could share pictures and more details about your setup that would be great. Do you have a BMS between the battery and the ESC, which might be causing a power cutoff?
+1, it’s a good test to see if the issue is the button itself.
The two bright yellow connectors are Battery nr1 plugged into a short cable into the Stormcore. This short cable has 7 capacitors attached in parallel.
I tried plugging in Battery Nr. 2 this had no effect. After fully removing the short cable from the VESC I plugged a different cable into the VESC which was connected to a 24V PSU but still it didn’t turn on.
Plugging the regular short cable which then was reattached to Battery Nr. 1 finally the VESC turned on again. However testing it with a multimeter and wiggling around the cables there wasn’t a circuit break detected by me.
Right now, once again the Stormcore doesn’t turn on again, without me touching anything in the meantime. The Battery was still connected.
I’m running a very long Battery cable ~ 120cm in each direction. I hoped that the extra capacitors would protect the VESC from inductance based issues.
This looks like potential fire just waiting to go off. My personal opinion would be to start over. Get rid of any metal shavings and loose screws. Get rid of all the electric tape and make precise connections where you need them by solder the cables together and using heat shrink. Also see if you can make the enclosure air tight so in the future dirt can’t get into the enclosure.
