I am replacing the diesel engine in a 1 ton, 100-year old 7.2 meter wooden motorboat with an electric motor. Blog here. I have ordered the batteries, but not motor or controller yet.

My original plan was to buy a 10 kW, 72 volt BLDC motor from Golden Motor and use a Kelly Controller KLS7275H and three Tesla battery modules in series (total 72V (18S) nominal, 16 kWh) to drive it. Most often I would probably only be running the motor at around 1 kW to get longer runtime / range.

I now see there is an official VESC hardware, the 100/250 that sounds like it could replace the Kelly Controller. As an embedded software guy, I really like the idea of supporting open source and open hardware, and being able to upgrade, troubleshoot problems, and modify software instead of having a black box. The features, like CAN, Bluetooth and the visualization tools seem great. And of course, Benjamin is a fellow Swede ;-)

I would like some advice as to if the VESC 100/250 would be a good choice. I know VESC has been around for a long time, but I'm still unsure of how mature it is for this application. Can I be certain that it would work with the motor from Golden Motors? How great is the risk of the VESC hardware "blowing up" in some operating conditions? I am not so concerned safety-wise about failure during use, more about spending countless hours failing at configuring the VESC to drive the motor, or having the VESC mysteriously emit magic smoke and having to spend the money again to buy another motor controller. I saw some posts (1, 2) about difficulties with large motors, which made me a bit concerned.

I'd appreciate any advice, thanks!