300A VESC in the works, feature suggestions wanted

[E1Allen]

Looking good!

[TechAUmNu]

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.

[TechAUmNu]

Have now tested at the max current my power supply can manage. Just waiting on the lipo to charge! 15250175495464683023867277125354.jpg

[TechAUmNu]

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.


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.

[lthall]

Sorry to hear that Euan!

Sometimes things go wrong when you are working with so much power!!!!

Keep up the great work!!!

[TechAUmNu]

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!

[jadawn2007]

Did you change the pcb for the cap updates or are you stacking them? I do want to run 18s.

[maddox10]

Eagerly awaiting the units.

[TechAUmNu]

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.

[maddox10]

So, for the time being, 6kw seems a limit.

[TechAUmNu]

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.

Been assembling the boards with capacitors and battery leads. Just waiting on the motor cable arriving now.

[TechAUmNu]

Here is the first finished controller

[maddox10]

Ec5?????

[TechAUmNu]

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.

[Roboteernat]

OOOOOOOhhhhhhhhhhhhh shiney

Well done, its been nice to see this from inception through to the first final production board