Looking good! Have you been able to test a ebike throttle yet?
Printable View
Looking good! Have you been able to test a ebike throttle yet?
I did send one to be tested. Curious...
I have been using the ebike throttle that maddox sent for all my testing. Should I make a video showing how to set it up?
Please do.
OK will make one shortly then.
The fab finished the first board and it passes the functional tests I sent them. (Without a motor) Which checks that everything is connected properly and working. So I am pretty confident they will work when I get them back.
Here are the photos, it is so much cleaner than the ones I put together!
Attachment 7970Attachment 7971
Looking good!
The boards have now finished being assembled by the fab and are on their way to me! All the other parts have arrived so I will be doing final testing this weekend.
https://i.imgur.com/BrW2ASg.jpg
Have now tested at the max current my power supply can manage. Just waiting on the lipo to charge! Attachment 8029
During my testing yesterday I put the wrong settings on the board and managed to blow it up on the switch from Hall sensors to sensorless. Also had 0A regen which was stupid. So on the switchover it probably slammed the motor to a stop causing arcs across the current shunt amplifiers and then tracked around the board to the mosfets. The spike was over 120v as the gate drivers also exploded. It was doing 45% duty 164A @ 18S when it hit the magic 8000 ERPM, it was quite spectacular! I will double check everything in the configuration this time before I go through all my spares.
https://i.imgur.com/G9gg0ea.jpg
So my advice at the moment is not to use Hall sensors at high current! As the switchover is extremely violent. The best way to use them is to aid startup of the motor and switch to sensorless as soon as the motor is turning. I have changed the default hall sensor ERPM settings down significantly.
Sorry to hear that Euan!
Sometimes things go wrong when you are working with so much power!!!!
Keep up the great work!!!
Thanks Leonard
I took a few days to go over all the settings and make some improvements to the board for 18S, such as 3 additional capacitors on the output side. Now the inductance to the bulk caps is similar throughout the board. Although I am only adding them for people I know to be using 18S.
Also found the swdio and swclk pins the the debug connector are swapped which had me puling my hair out for a while!
I will be assembling all the V1.2 units and testing them (without explosions...) over the weekend. They should be shipped out next week if all goes well.
Can't wait to show you all how it looks now!
Did you change the pcb for the cap updates or are you stacking them? I do want to run 18s.
Eagerly awaiting the units.
All the units will be shipped on Wednesday as I need to order more capacitors to put the extra ones on.
I spent the whole day testing at 12S, I seem to be saturating the Revolt160sh at 140A and losing tracking, which I now believe is why it blew up last time. My advice for all the folks running 18S is to test at 12S to get the settings correct and make sure it runs perfectly before switching to 18S. For the mean time I would not go over 80A motor current at 18S while I do more investigation.
Hall sensors seem to be fine as long as you make the switch over to sensorless as early as possible. For the 160sh this is about 1000ERPM.
12S seems to be very safe, all day I was slamming the motor to a stop at 130A and losing tracking etc with no issues.
The battery current reads half what it should read. So set your battery limits to 50% of what you actually want.
So, for the time being, 6kw seems a limit.
Did more testing today, with some help from the other thread over on vesc forum (https://vesc-project.com/node/339?page=1) it turned out to be an issue with the current shunts reading the wrong current. So that explosion at 164A before was actually more like 300A!
I can now run 200A without a heatsink for quite a while (ran for 20s and it went 30oC) so its looking great now. What a difference 1 day makes lol.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi4NstKcim0
Been assembling the boards with capacitors and battery leads. Just waiting on the motor cable arriving now.
Here is the first finished controller
https://i.imgur.com/GE4kiWq.jpg
Ec5?????
Yes, it's an inverter so battery current is normally significantly lower than motor current unless you spend all your time at 100% duty 200A which I rather doubt. Ec5 is good for 120A continuous battery current. You can put something bigger on if you want.
OOOOOOOhhhhhhhhhhhhh shiney :)
Well done, its been nice to see this from inception through to the first final production board
I guess 9kw is enough for our purpose.
Any of these bad boys left?
Unfortunately not the first batch has sold out.
I am currently changing the design slightly to improve the performance significantly. Which will take about a month before I can accept preorders for batch two.
What are you changing, if you don't mind me asking?
Really good work on the ESC. I have no use for one yet, but it looks like some brilliantly fun electronic design.
So I finally got round to redesigning the A200S for a V2 version with a different layout. It is now comically small and performs really well.
The power stage layout is based on the 75/300, so it will work good with low inductance motors that were a big problem on the V1.2 and V1.3.
Price is a major concern for a lot of people. So I have optimised it a lot to get down to £250, about the same price as a VESC6.
It is now up for preorder on my store, to get them back in time for BattleBots S4 the order will be going in on the 18th February and should be back in 3 weeks.
http://teamtriforceuk.com/a200s-v2/
https://i.imgur.com/FEa6wDe.jpg
That's a nice package
If you want to solder the pcbs yourself you can get them here:
http://teamtriforceuk.com/a200s-v2-pcb-kit/
I have also added options to select the maximum voltage you need, if you select a lower voltage you get more current capacity as I can put in lower voltage Mosfets which have lower resistance (so less heat).
The unit is modular, so you can easily replace the power board with one for a lower voltage/higher current or vice-versa. This might be interesting for people wanting to run DC motors at lower voltages.
That's a nice feature.
That's a nice comment :P
Doing some shock testing this weekend. Will be throwing a unit as high as I can into the air and landing on concrete. I heard of some inductors and capacitors coming off other escs so want to do everything I can to stop this happening on my ones.