Today my board just didn’t work. Turns out the remote was stuck in full brake/reverse. when paired it was sending a full reverse signal to the vesc. when unpaired back to neutral. pairing a different remote worked as expected.
opened it up and observed the red wire to the potentiometer had just failed.
glad this didn’t fail this way while riding. it would have hard locked the brakes. and in current mode hard locked reverse.
I will resolder it. wondering if I should hot glue it as well though i’m somewhat hesitant to make that mess.
EDIT for first post summary:
I think @rich had a solid observation later in the thread that with the wires routed wrong the thumb wheel can bump into them and wiggle them around which IMO would most certainly lead to eventual failure.
The correct fix is to reroute the wires and use better wires with higher strand count and to glue them in place to keep them wiggling to break point.
They probably stripped too mant of the strands when pulling the silicone off, re strip it and make sure none of the solder joints look skinny. Some more solder on all of them should wick through and secure them
I pull tested the other wires, and they got moved around a bit while soldering
The red one broke off the pot in addition to the board.
The white one broke off the pot.
The black one broke off the board.
I decided to test the failure mode of each wire.
Losing the red one failed to full brake/reverse ( as shown above)
Losing the black one failed to neutral.
Losing the white one failed to about 20% positive throttle. ( weird) also lost my screen shot of that sorry.
I desoldered the white wire board side and tried to get a close look at it.
couldn’t get a good photo of it. but under a magnifying glass it looked like only 50% of the strands were in the joint and the rest were cut off likely during wire stripping. evidence supporting @ZachTetra’s guess. but might be outcome bias.
I didn’t think it work this small. but it did. also I’d never done it before. The trick where you let solder wick in to the wire and then strip it. ( works with silicone wire). pulling out a perfect pretinned wire. felt so cool.
I’d link to where I found that trick in these forums but I can’t find the post that mentioned it.
I’m a bit scared to contradict my dude, but as a matter of public service, I need to chime in. Hot glue is really easy to service. All you need is isopropyl and a qtip. Simply swab the blob liberally with the alcohol, wait 5 mins and peel it off. Get a glue gun that does 100w and you’ll be amazed at how good glue works. Not knocking the silicone, but for electronics and small bits, hot glue wins for me every time.
afaict opinion is everything sucks except mini and hoyt ?
I have four of these and a hoyt. I liked the feel of the vx1 better so far. but this was pretty sketch inside. I will want to check the others. I have a mini coming. but they are cheap as chips too… so are they really manufactured to better quality than flipsky?
I’m on almost the exact same trail… spent the day perving mini thumb mod remotes…
and then I remembered I fukked around a long time ago with one of Robots remote models… there’s a lot of room… I already know it feels good in the hand, so I’m going to look into modding this into a mini thumb remote…
