is Benjamin Vedder working at Trampa now?
There’s lots of variants of VESC’s floating around, but where is the “original”? (focbox/unity, flipsky, trampa, ???)
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The original is the Vesc all others are variant copys. Some better than others but all based on Vedders design.
Original vesc was not very good at handling power they used to love to go poof. Best imo has been the Focbox and then the Unity.
Original vesc was not very good at handling power they used to love to go poof. Best imo has been the Focbox and then the Unity.
That was the 4.12, which was never made by Vedder really. You refer to poor quality clones.
There is the original (Trampa VESC 6 plus, VESC 75/300, Wand Remote, NRF Dongle) and there are clones (everything else).
Benjamin works independent on the software, but we make the original hardware together
and send him financial kickbacks from hardware sales.
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Lol original was way before the vesc 6 and copys quality vary wildly. Some are better than original some were just as good and others just sucked
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It’s what happens with a good open Source esc people will take it and improve it or make it cheaper for profits.
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umm. can you link to a better and cheaper clone Vesc than the official Trampa Vesc?
Any news on possible dual drive vesc6 in the near future? 
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Dual drive vesc6 sounds boring…
When we do things, we try to do a proper job.
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can you make a unity competitor?
Enertion and their perpetual delayed shipping is getting into everyone’s hairs lately
This…
Focbox and Ollin vesc to name a few are better than the original. Trampa Vesc 6 is not the original hence the 6 in the name lol
Original means first design not what ever iteration of the device Vedder is on right now.
Imo Unity is far and beyond better then the Trampa Vesc.
If you dont think so then tell me why not just because Vedder made it that’s not an good enough reason.
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you must not have read the shit storm on the other forum.
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Trade you my unity for a pair of vesc6?
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I did read the shit storm. I have 2 unities havnt experienced the issues they were having but it seemed like it was fixed with a firmware update.
It’s got a small form factor can handle a literal shit ton of power and blue tooth and antispark built in. Nothing really competes with it atm. Makes DIY simpler and frees up space in the enclosure for a bigger battery.
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I’m in your boat brother. Loving the unity, hating that people are getting hurt.
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The VESC 6 is still superior to the 4.xx focbox unity as a VESC. All that other stuff is neither here nor there. If you want the best, better pay up.
Ironically, enertions best product wasnt the raptor or the focbox, it was the forum. Thousands of dollars in free advertising. Once that forum goes down, enertion is going down with it which is a shame really.
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VESC 6 has three phase shunts with shunt amplifiers and adjustable filters for ultra accurate current readings. Unity, Focbox, VESC 4.12 etc have two battery side shunts and can’t sample the currents far away from the switching cycle. The consequence is noisy current and voltage readings and for FOC operation that can be a killer. You need ultra precise data to compute the FOC commutation reliably for a wide set of motors. If the input data is off, you can’t fix that easily in software, unless you know exactly which motor you drive. We all use different motors.
What people do not get is the fact that a VESC can drive pretty much any motor. So the design needs to be able to spin up any motor reliably. It is quite a task to design a ESC that works with MOTOR A, B, C, Z.
The downside of the more precise three phase shunt design is cost.
It is more complex and expensive.
However, the difference is big and considering that the ESC is the heart piece of the built, You have to think twice if it is the correct part to save $$ on.
https://vesc-project.com/node/403
Quote Benjamin Vedder:
Three phase shunts help quite a lot, as it enables sampling the current far away from the switching cycles even at high speed. This can be noted on HW4 where a commanded constant current will give a non-linear acceleration: it will be linear to around 60% of full speed, then it will decrease for a bit up to around 80 % and then it will increase from 80% to 100%. If you give full throttle and pay attention to this, the effect is very obvious. I spent a lot of time trying to work around this, but it is not easy as it depends on many things and behaves differently on different motors and voltages. The current simply becomes noisy and gets aliasing at certain motor phase angles at high speed when using two shunts. Analog filtering is also not possible in the same way as with three shunts as the rise time has to be very fast at high modulation for two shunts to work. The VESC6 has a smooth linear acceleration from 0 to full speed, and this is mostly because it uses three shunts.
Two phase shunts are slightly better than two low side shunts, but three shunts are still the best. I would prefer three low side shunts over two phase shunts in general, if that is a choise to be taken in a design (e.g. when making hardware that supports 100+ volts).
Current sampling is one of the topics I have spent the most time on, so I’m quite sure about the statements. It is not easy to explain though, as you have to understand how the modulation works under all conditions. BLDC is also very different from FOC, and for both BLDC and FOC there are different ways to do the modulation that affect current sampling.
In most cases it comes back to one thing when using only two shunts: sampling when the time between the switching edges on one particular phase is short. If currents are sampled at the same time during high modulation and you look at the state of each phase individually, they will vary between being off for a short time and being on for a short time during one electrical revolution, meaning that if you pick a fixed sample time it will always slide past switching edges that affect the measurement in one particular phase. It is when the switching edges come close to the sample time that causes the issue, and you want to stay away from it when sampling that phase. One common way to deal with that is sample in a zero vector and pick the sample point in the middle, and limiting the modulation to e.g. 95% so that the switching edges never cross the sample point. Even when using phase shunts you can’t have too slow filters as the switching edge will get really close to the sample point and you want the filter to settle in time for taking the sample.
With three shunts you can always find two phases that are far away from a switching edge when taking a sample if the sampling point is fixed, but with two shunts that cannot be done regardless of which sample time you pick, even with phase shunts. One thing that can be done with phase shunts and FOC with SVM for example is sampling in both V0 and V7 of the SVM cycle and picking the samples furthest away from any switching edge, but the problem when doing that is that control is done with current measured at different times and thus positions that can be quite far apart if the switching frequency is low compared to the motor speed. I spent some time experimenting with that, but the performance was simply not that good.
Again, If I have to choose between two phase shunts and three low side shunts, I would pick three low side shunts for sure.
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I’m gonna try and take a different track on this, see what you guys think.
Im looking for very specific things in an ESC. I’ll hit the highlights.
- The ability to handle 80 battery amps in bursts (overkill)
- The ability to handle 30 battery amps in all the time (overkill)
- Throttle curve support
- Inputs, IE: UART, PPM, USB
- Small form factor
- Reliability & Repair-ability
- As cheap as possible
Assuming those are the main criteria for most people, I think it’s fairly obvious that the FocBox was and still is the best Esk8 ESC in existence. Assuming the Unity issues have been dealt with, it would be in second place for me. I don’t like having all of my systems integrated, modular design is almost always better for the user and definitely is in this case when thinking about failed AS switches and DRV’s. The VESC 6 would be in third place for me as the inflated cost doesn’t give me anything that I don’t already have in other reliable ESC’s.
That being said, if cost is not an issue and you want robust, abusable and dependable the best ESC on the market right now is the FreeFly Arc200 by far. It is so far superior to any other ESC I’ve tried it doesn’t even fall within the same comparison study. If you want the specifics I’m happy to give them to you, they just haven’t taken off for esk8 for some reason.
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huh, didnt even know that existed…
also almost zero details on it in their store…
I assume it can only drive one motor at a time despite more than three phase wires coming out? (foc box, not unity style)
yeah, interested to hear why it is better by an entire class
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Each unit will only drive a single motor. It only has 3 phase wires, the other leads are for sensors, canbus, USB, etc. The main reason they haven’t caught on is the size. They are big, almost twice as long as a focbox and the leads take up a lot of room as well.
The specs are amazing. I’ve had mine up to 120a before and had absolutely zero issues.
- Input Voltage: 4S (13.6v) - 12S (50.4v)*
- Max peak phase current: 200A
- Continuous current with little to no heatsinking (hot-side facing upwards and unobstructed): 60A
- Continuous current when bolted to a typical EV aluminum chassis: 100-150A
- Continuous current with infinite aluminum heatsink or water cooling, and forced air cooling on phase wires: 200A
- Control Inputs: PWM, Analog (1x combined throttle/brake or independent throttle and brake), UART/CAN (for advanced users to interface through the Freefly API’s QX protocol)
- DC-Input: XT90
- Phase-Output: 8mm Female Bullet
- Sensor support: Fully sensorless, digital hall sensors, PWM
- Operating modes: Torque mode (EV), speed mode (Multirotor, requires advanced user tuning), angle/servo mode (experimental, requires advanced user tuning and high-resolution motor encoder)
- 23.4kHz switching frequency for zero audible PWM noise
- Integrated 5A 5V BEC (Recommended continuous-current draw to be kept less than 3A)
- Water resistant and splash proof - integrate into your application to avoid continuous water exposure
This is a pic of the kit they sent me.
Here’s some more info if your interested…
https://freeflysystems.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FRP/pages/269320193/Motor+Drives
This is a link to the original thread over at builders…
https://www.electric-skateboard.builders/t/freefly-robotics-new-universal-motor-controller-arc200-thoughts/67341
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