Hello everyone, I am new to this forum. I represent a large community of GetFoil.com FOIL owners who have recently learned that the company behind the product has closed its doors. This leaves us with approximately 2700 boards out in the wild with no parts or support left to keep them running.
The brand has had a few hiccups along the way, and some people are left with some component failures and inoperable boards. However, I feel all is not lost, and we as a group turn to a community like yours for help. We are suddenly DIY efoil owners!
Some people in the community have some knowledge of building–with varying degrees of familiarity with batteries, speed controllers, transmitters and receivers and motors. Failures are most often related to our remotes and our batteries.
If anyone in this community feels compelled to share what you know with us, advise us, or otherwise welcome in some orphans who need to be educated on how to work around our challenges, we would be forever grateful. We thank you in advance.
I have built an eskate in the past using vesc and a 12s4p battery setup and trampa components. I figure that we as FOIL owners have some good bones to start with: a nicely integrated motor and mast, wing options and wing adapters for Axis and Armstrong products, and a big old battery with room inside for retrofit vescs and BMS components. We just need to crack them open when they fail and be willing to fix.
So, thank you for reading this, and we may ask for help along the way. And we may ask for mercy. We spent a lot of money, have had a lot of fun, but are now up a creek!
Sorry for your collective loss! You all spent eFoil money and got the rug pulled out on you. I think it’s possible to keep the boards running but not everyone will like the kind of technical work involved and then needing to repair and troubleshoot themselves.
I don’t own a GetfFoil board but I was thinking about this yesterday and how these boards could be converted. There are a few old threads mentioning Foil boards, a few interesting things to learn.
The ESC is small and tucked into the motor pod. This is a unique design for efoils as far as I know. Makes an esc replacement harder to do given the small space. Maybe the esc could be relocated into the board, but not sure how much space there is.
Another old thread where someone from GetFoil (maybe Kyle?) is discussing the boards design before it launched. A few interesting things to learn, like the battery has all their logic boards, including the receiver.
It sucks, but there will be support here to help out. There loads of new ESC’s coming out that support and are dedicated to efoils now. it won’t be hard to customise the internals unless there is some crazy proprietary stuff in the battery.
Getfoil had some good features, but were not the prettiest and I know there were some fights on Facebook about about support. I guess they may be the first to fall, but I don’t suspect they will be the last…
Good stuff! I think some rearranging could be done. I suspect there is room inside the battery case for some replacement components, and the board itself has a cavernous space available. People store phones, Bluetooth speakers and lots of goodies in there next to the battery while riding.
If someone could fish new wires down the mast, it would seem to me that the esc could find a home up in the board itself. Granted, keeping it in the pod would be more straight forward.
I’m glad I found this page because my powertrain JUST stopped working and have been trying to contact them about it.
It sounds like I will be attempting to disassemble the powertrain to try and find a disconnected wire. For whatever reason, I was riding and the battery just disconnected from the motor. It reconnected briefly, sputtered for a while, then cut out permanently. This has happened previously and was told it was due to a loose wire, so I’m hoping I can do a DIY repair since I don’t have to worry about voiding warranties anymore.
Hopefully it is just the a loose connection as that should be a simple fix. Take a few photos and post about your efforts even if seems really simple. If it gets documented here it may help someone else out eventually!
Unfortunately, I hooked up my battery to the charger the week after the company folded up, and now I’m getting an E22 error for low voltage on the extended range battery. There has to be a way to troubleshoot/fix this. I have zero electrical knowledge but willing to troubleshoot/learn if anyone has recommendations/guides.
I have some experience reviving a FOIL battery with the E22 error on the charger. When you connect your battery to the charger do you hear a click noise coming from inside of the battery box? There is a relay inside of the battery box that will not close if the BMS board sees that your battery pack voltage is too low. There is a work around to bypass the relay and get your charger to send power to the battery, but if your battery pack voltage is too low it may have damaged the battery cells to the point that charging them may be dangerous.