I’ve been using the Flier 400A for more than 2 years. To me, it’s been super reliable and easy to use ESC. Now I’m really concerned after an incident yesterday.
I took my efoil out and went zooming around my friends yacht before meeting up with them. I parked it on a floating platform he had and allowed a friend to ride it. He went off about 100 meters and then all of a sudden it went crazy on him! Full speed in reverse flying out of the water and even diving down under the water like a seabreacher. It was a wild and extremely dangerous thing that happened. My friend swam as far away from it as possible which was good cause that cut the RF signal. I swam to him and turned the remote off and then opened the efoil up and turned it off.
Fast forward to today. I got to talking to @pacificmeister about it and we were wondering if it happened because some remotes like eskateboards have a reverse-neutral-forward concept. Whereas my efoil is basically just neutral-forward with a Maytech remote. Turns out when I turned the efoil on today (out of the water this time) it connected the remote and went full speed reverse straight away! As I moved the throttle to 50% it stopped, and obviously when I went to 100% it went forward.
What the hell happened!? If you own a Flier 400A you know you must use a computer to program the ESC. I haven’t had it connected to a computer in a couple years. I bet I’m behind on firmware but has anybody ever had this happen!? Talk about a scary situation that could have resulted in loss of life or extreme damage to an expensive boat or the efoil. I’m very nervous about using it other than know I can dunk the remote if there ever was another situation.
Also worth noting I tried two different Maytech remotes today and two different receivers. They all acted the same way so I know this is an ESC problem.
The beeping it does after the remote connected for a few seconds seems like a new beeping pattern too. I’m not sure if that helps to explain anything.
I didn’t read your full post but, did you set your ppm singnal to auto. And tune reverse off. Really fuk… scary. I once had such a incident also with my friend. My remote was in the early days an a signal wire of the hallsesnor disconnected and that’s full throttle. Fortunately my remote disconnects after 10m and he was off the board. So it just shot out of the water and nothing happend. But reverse in the water
Sorry. Replying to the wrong person. It should be @tylerclark
Now I understand what happened.
I’ve had this happen to my Flier ESC 240 16S once or twice!
I’ve got 2 of them in my jet board. Strangely it only happened to the same ESC.
And I did program the correct way with the computer.
In the video I see you pressing the remote 2 times before the motor actually responded.
I know that you can program the system by doing short / long presses with the remote.
Could this have caused the reverse option to be set to on?
Yes it that! Maybe you or the Friend enter in program mod accidentaly when you power on efoil… like programing ESC with motor sound when you don’t have program card thé full throtle enter program mods …you says there is New sound when you turn on today…so check it on a computer you have activated car or boat fw and back you also can calibrate the remote clean thé job😉
Scary stuff. I definitely had signal interference one time on my esk8 when I went by a large transformer station. It caused me to crash and look like a total fool. Just glad I didn’t end up in front of a car.
I trashed the remote and receiver after that and got something more powerful. Might be a good time to consider replacing that ESC. Seems it would be a lot cheaper than an insurance deductible on a big boat or someone’s reconstructive surgery.
@tylerclark and I talked about that today. But usually these ESCs only go into programming mode during power up while pushing full throttle right? So we were thinking about ways it could have lost power for a short time. Tyler has been using a 150A circuit breaker to switch on and of, no anti spark. So my suspicion is that the breaker is burnt and worn out inside and the contacts are flaky. That might have led to a temporary disconnect and the user just maybe happened to have the throttle floored when it came back on, then entering programming mode…and anything is possible then with random throttle input. I suggested to open the breaker and inspect so we can get to the bottom of this. Scary stuff, we should all use a mag leash.
Thanks everyone for your feedback. I think we’ve figured out that the ESC entered into programming mode which is scary purely because I didn’t know that was a thing! I’ve definitely been impatient before when I want to connect and go. Now I know to wait it out although I wish I could disable this ESC functionality. (Hello, VESC. Let’s chat again.)
Since my friend was riding and not myself, I don’t know if he was pulling the trigger trying to get it to go or not but most likely. Not sure if there was a temporary power cutoff or not, but that’s a possibility too. I will be looking into my breaker to see if that is faulty. @foilmore I use two batteries (with smart BMS’s) so not sure both would have cut out at the same time to temporarily reboot the ESC but I guess at this point anything is possible!
The motor which produces the beeping for the ESC is beeping different noises than I’ve ever heard. So another step I’m doing will be to reprogram the ESC (which is a pain since I’m an Apple user). I’ll let you guys know the settings when I connect.
The best solution is to customized the ESC firmware without Automatical throttle calibration or throttle Calibration only availble with progcard. Maytech MTSF300A has no automatical throttle calibration to avoid it.
, actually start by connecting your ESC to a computer to check the parameters, make an update if available, see an initialization in factory mode …