I am brand new to VESC and love it! I am not new to electronics.
I fell into the VESC project as it came on the Flipsky 75200 Pro V2 ESC. I also bought the Flipsky 65121 brushless motor. I am using 12X Ryobi 18V battery packs as a power source. They are wired up in a 3S4P configuration. That's 15S8P if you are counting the 18650 cells. I got the VESC tool loaded and did the basic firmware update, motor setup, and basic parameters setup for controlling the motor via PPM (PWM). Everything works, mostly, as expected. Took my canoe out on a 6 mile adventure today! Sea trials went well and I made it back to the dock with about 10% battery remaining. Too bad we did not catch any fish.
I am running into a tuning problem. The motor feels like it is stepping, same as a stepper motor on my CNC or 3D printer at slow speeds. Found in my test run today that 10% duty cycle was really nice, but made the whole canoe hum. When I take the prop off I still get the vibration. Does not feel like a motor/physical alignment/balancing issue. Feels very much like stepping. Any thoughts on what setting I am missing?
Pic's from the adventure and setup process. I rather like my hot tub test bed. My wife did not.
I spent the better part of today playing with vesc-tool. I was not able to get the low end "stepping" to stop. Tried basically every configuration I could find in vesc-tool. At this point I am wondering if the 75200 V2.0 Pro has issues. If I get time later this week I may try one of my CastleCreations RC Plane ESC's, just for kicks. Need to sort out if this is a physical issue, or a configuration issue.
Any one have ideas?
Tried a TURNIGY Plush 40amp Speed Controller. Exact same rough/stepping at low speeds. The prop was removed for this test. I am guessing the motor is unbalanced, or the tech is unable to drive it efficiently at low speeds. Not sure yet.
I dug more into HFI, but it does not look like the 75200 V2.0 Pro support the needed sensors to make that work. I looked into the official VESC hardware and had a bit of a price sticker shock.
I am running out of ideas.
Do you use any sensors or is it sensorless motor?
BLDC or FOC mode?
Sensorless, FOC. Motor is Flipsky Electric Outboard Motor 65161 6000W electric propeller outboard motor.
I spent the better part of last week on Lake Shasta fishing. During the hot days I would work with vesc-tool and try different settings. Still feels like the motor is stepping at slow speeds. I also have a hard time getting the motor to start at low rpm. Please keep in mind my use case is fishing; specifically following the shore and going real slow. Most of the time my duty cycle is sub 5%. I feel like much of this can be solved through HFI, but I can't seem to get HFI to work. I have found a couple of good videos on HFI, but when I enable graphing I just get garbage. Manually spinning the motor does not show the motor phase. It's just noise. Any ideas?
In HFI mode, I did get sensorless spinning very slowly, but under moderate load - wchich is not your case I believe...
Looking at Benjamin's videos sensorless can be tuned to be really precise at low rpm. I'd suggest to start with HFI tuning from really low values of "start" "run" and "max" voltage. I've spent few days trying to optimize settings and ended up with pretty satisfactory results.
Good luck!
Went through a few HFI videos, including Benjamin's video on HFI last night. I was able to get HFI kinda working. It's still really rough/choppy. I think I need to start up a different thread on the specifics of HFI for the Flipsky 75200 Pro V2 ESC with 65121 brushless motor. The in-running is making things a bit more complicated.
When you get a chance, record a video of this phenomenon. Might be useful to fully understand what you're dealing with.
Video embedded, I hope. It's quiet but the rough/stepping sound is clear. It's really clear when bolted onto the back of my aluminum canoe. This stepping is consistent regardless of propeller type, or no propeller. Any ideas?
http://workerbeeit.com/20240817_143346.mp4