Source: https://www.vesc-project.com/node/628
"I may be a little bit late to the game but this is of great interest to me.
I represent an undergraduate team (duke-ev.org) who builds ultra-efficient vehicles and we’ve been considering picking apart the vesc firmware to borrow some useful algorithms. I had made some edits to the firmware for a different project and I’ve gotten familiar enough with the firmware that I could probably get this implemented without too much difficulty. Benjamin has made it such a breeze to edit and flash firmware; I am very grateful.
Aside from the wildly unrealistic operating conditions our vehicle competes in, I do completely understand the appeal of this technique partly because I think about efficiency pretty much every waking moment. I think the big selling point is what you said earlier about how someone riding at partial throttle could theoretically match the acceleration proposed by your algorithm, but a human guessing what acceleration curve will make the optimal efficiency is never going to be as good as an algorithms forming a closed loop control to hit exactly the optimal efficiency. When we run our vehicle for record attempts, for example, we have 2-3 buttons which just apply the exact acceleration curves for optimal efficiency rather than using a thumb throttle.
I don’t want to make it sound like our ridiculous use case is the only reason you would use devin’s control, though. It’s definitely extremely valuable to just make the board run efficiently on its own without the user needing to tweak their thumb at just the right amount. Maybe you could make the argument that you’re splitting hairs on efficiency, but I could also make the argument that if you sell 1000 boards and each one runs 10 miles a day and saves 1% efficiency, over the course of a year that amounts to a lot of CO2 and $$$!
I’ll do some more research and further consider implementing this into the firmware. In the mean time, devin I may DM you for more theoretical details and I hope more people can see the value that this offers.
Gerry Chen"
^I hope if he doesn’t implement it someone else will… the easiest way to think of it is having a different motor current limit at each rpm, for constant efficiency during full throttle acceleration. When you “turn down” the efficiency setting you get more power and greater acceleration, and when you “turn up” the efficiency setting, you automatically get more range in start and stop riding, sacrificing some acceleration but not top speed, because more motor current becomes available the faster the motor turns. While accelerating through very low motor rpms, low efficiency is basically inevitable…