Hi guys i was riding my diy-ebike that has flipsky vesc 4.20. This one
I was doing a 0-max full throttle run.In the middle of the run it suddenly stopped working. I tought temp protection kicked in so i pulled over and waited it to cool down. (Heatsink was hot but not that much.) After letting it cool vesc was not responding to throttle.
I came back home and realised when powered on, no single led on vesc lights up. And pc doesn't recognises it.
I was using it with 12s li-ion around 48volts. I setted the battery current to max. advertised 50amps. and motor current to 80. And mosfet temp cutoff start to 85 degrees .
When disassembling the vesc i saw hall sensor connector was loose. No component on the vesc looks bad/damaged/burnt. When i plug it in it makes a normal spark and draws very little current but no sign of life whatsoever. No component gets hot too. Is it fixable? Can somebody help ?
EDIT: I measured only 300milivolts on 5v rail. I think my 5v regulator blew up.
Hi Erdem,
I've recently bought the same hardware. Let me know what is the issue if you figure it out. It will be good to know the weaknesses of this hardware.
After the 5V regulator I would check if the MCU is survived and then the MOSFET driver.
Good luck!
I tried giving 5 volts to vesc's 5v rail. It drew ton of current and diode near hall sensor connector got extremely hot, i thought diode was bad i desoldered it and tried to plug vesc back to my battery pack and mosfet driver blew up with magnificent smell and sound. Yes i suck at troubleshooting and yes maybe it was a fixable problem but that's not the point. I mean why problem occurred in first place? I was riding it for nearly 50km.
Those things are fragile and not reliable in my opinion. They cant take any abuse. And they are damn expensive too. Even with tons of current/temp protection it managed to kill itself.
I think i will buy a normal ebike controller. And i recommend those if anybody wants to build an ebike. They are even cheaper and definitely more reliable than vesc. And if anyone wants to push this vesc to its limits be careful.
Good luck with this things!
I mean, yeah, a eBike controller is going to be far more suited to eBikes than a VESC.
VESC v4.20 which are just slightly more polished & compact v4.12 are rated for 60V, you were putting in 50.4V which doesn't leave much overhead for voltage spikes, I've seen some people say it's fine but others complain that 12s kills older VESCs like the v4.12.
The VESC v4.12s typically can only sustain 30A at long periods before they complain about overheating, the 60A was always a very, uhm, aspirational claim.
From what it sounds like you experienced a spike of >60V, blew up the switch mode power supply die inside the DRV which means the +5V rail is dead. I'm not sure why removing the diode near the hall sensor caused it to blow up the DRV but maybe the +5V rail failed shorted to 0V and the diode was providing a safe alternative path?
If the eBike controllers are cheaper & more reliable why didn't you use one of them to begin with? A +48V controller would specifically designed with enough voltage headroom for a 12s pack and it's not impossible to buy a 2000W controller that ought to perform as well as the VESC would have claimed to do so. You'd miss out on some of the cooler features like HFI & FOC but it would be more suited.
I already had VESC and its specs are suited for my application so i didn't bothered to buy a new controller. Since it is claimed to work with max 60volts i thought it would be fine. Even for more headroom to protection i used 12s pack instead of 13s. I wonder how a voltage spike over 60volts came from battery that can output 50volts max? When under full throttle battery voltage drops to around 46volts too. Problem occured when VESC was under full load.
Then why manufacturer claims this thing can stand for max 60volts?
And i saw DRV's 52. pin BST_BK had blew up.
The 60v is the absolute maximum voltage it can handle, any voltage spikes above that voltage will almost immediately cause it to explode.
The marketing using 60v is a bit dumb.
If your battery is at 50v and you brake hard with long wires between the esc and battery, you can make 60v easy.
Also just running the motor causes large spikes in voltage so you need quite a lot of headroom.