Very nice I was still trying figuring out how to put my vesc between the mast bolt …
Ok so MY idea looks lot like this which just showed up on insta an hour ago. Whoever you are: I’m good at design, let me design it for you!
https://www.instagram.com/p/B8iEaUZhZ--/?igshid=qrom9qllz4eo
Fliteboard is gonna be after them straight away. They have patented the ESC on mast…
oh jesus. Now how is someone gonna patent “ESC on the mast”.
I’m about to buy some ESCs. I should have sell-able units in about 1 month, unless Wuhan flu gets worse. I’ll dyno test each one, so you can be assured that they have been tested to 7kW before you hook it up.
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Here the patents are:
Their patents does not even cover the EU ?
There are nearly no informations on this patent. What does it cover ? ESC above the mast ? In which position does the ESC need to be to be patented ? Because yes, you have to describe everything in the patent and even the orientation of the said esc / cables, otherwise I will just flip over the ESC or put my cable elsewhere and we are out of the jurisdiction, aren’t we ?
The best selling products in the world aren’t even patented, just think of the Coca cola…
Look how Pegasus foil got rid of their patent … How are they going to sue them ?
Pwrfoil also have esc on mast… The flite patent covers esc on mast passively cooled by a special heat convection system… That’s what we can read in the patent and this is why other companies have already started to sell efoils with such features.
Well, I ordered a batch of wavebreaker 2 for us. Was going to put them up for sale and give some away in trades. But the asian pcb manufacturer got held up due to the wuhan flu, so I just got the boards this week. Being a smart guy, I decided to on-shore the manufacturing at a assembly shop close to my house. But I am in CA, and now WE are on lockdown.
So if anyone wanted a wavebreaker 2, sorry about that. The universe has decided this project shall not happen this year.
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Hello Nick, just curious to hear about your ESC project… still on track ?
I stopped working with vesc software when I met a embedded motor control software guy (kai) on eskate builders. Been workin with him. Done a 300A esc and a 90A eskate esc. Here’s the 300A version. What’s way nicer is he does rotor saliency tracking for low speed torque and has way better motor characterization. Altogether I am also way better at designing motor controllers than I was a few years ago. Evolution not revolution I guess
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What a gem ! Is it possible to know more ?
Dimensions ? Has it been tested on an efoil ? Do you still plan to commercialize it (a few) ? Recommended cooling: above the ESC or under the board deck ? Would you have some data curves you’d like to share with us ? … Would it be possible to do PID rpm (cruise) control ? …
That looks gorgeous!
roughly w x l x h is about 3 by 4 by 2 inches.
We do not have an efoil to test this thing on.
We eventually want to sell these things, have some customers from battlebots interested (but they will pay diddly squat so we’ll see). I can’t make many this year because of ongoing semiconductor shortage.
Cool it through the bottom heatsink, but there will be an enclosure that thermally links the top and bottom. May do a board rev that moves all heat producing components to the bottom, depending on whether I can convince Nick to draw that.
Don’t have curves, but we have a video of it running a 10kW barbecue for 5 minutes. We already know it’s better than APD and others.
PI speed control is possible, but will require user hand-tuning of the gains. I could do bang-bang openloop speed control (i.e. voltage control) or bang-bang closed loop speed control. That would not require tuning but may have poor dynamic performance.
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@Gamer43 is the actual designer, and the funder and parts buyer. I am the electronics tradesman that did the layout and mechanical design. His motor control algorithm is much better than VESC. VESC doesn’t do a good job estimating rotor position over 100A and you wind up with a poor lead angle pushing far more current for far less torque.
Our current test rigs are an electric go kart and the dynamometer at work, which is limited to 10kW and is a sterile lab setting so not good for real world type testing. If anyone knows of a way we could aquire an efoil deck to test, any suggestions would be appreciated.
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Bang-bang control eh… how does that one work? I’m super curious how you’re performing better then VESC. also what particular part are you facing a shortage on?
it’s full on until you reach a certain speed. Then it gives full current intermittently at high frequency to maintain speed. You need a pretty wide hysteresis band for it to behave well.
There are a number of things we suspect that might cause vesc to perform poorly in the scenarios Nick mentioned, but not sure what. I tried to implement the cleanest possible version of FOC to my ability to try to achieve maximum torque efficiency.
Additionally, a number of people on the skateboard forum have been reporting an increasing number of bugs on recent firmware, whose symptoms I can only deduce to running out of clock cycles, (e.g. weird sputtering noises, aberrant braking behavior) and we just didn’t want to risk dealing with that.
I am facing a shortage on every single line item on the BOM, it’s terrible.
Would love to see your FOC’n Code. You’ve implemented you’re own Park and Clark Transforms? Or have you borrowed some older parts of VESC software?
I’ve developed quite a bit of VESC HW. I have a decently working but a nit noisy controller that can do significant power.
Also know a few work arounds for a few BOM items… For Eg. STMF405 off Feather development boards.
Cheers.
Mo
The motor control is unfortunately proprietary, I will have comms and interface code that will be open source eventually.
I developed a proprietary no sensors zero speed algorithm for my master’s thesis which is the proprietary stuff, it turned out it was also good for getting accurate motor parameters.
I use the STM32G4 family, which there aren’t many in the wild. It features hardware accelerators among other things that are useful for high performance motor control.
We also spent a lot of time ironing out the signal processing chain to get the most accurate measurements.
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