Can I run my controller without the hall sensor plugged in?

MarkJohnston

10 kW
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Mar 25, 2021
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620
Hello,

I have a controller of which the hall sensor no longer works. The controller still works but it's very loud. I had zapped(tapping positive to negative) the controller a couple times and that lead to sparks and the situation today. It still works and is pretty much the same speed but it stutters from a stop.

The other controller I have is the same cheap Chinese one however this one I also zapped on accident and it's acting up and cutting out a lot. pretty annoying but it also still works.

I am wondering if it's safe to use the really loud one or could it damage the bike? Also I am not sure if I messed up configuring the SW900(LCD). I might've messed with one of the settings on it that was configured at the factory for 26 inch wheel size. That's a possibility or let me know otherwise. I may have messed up one of the settings on there on accident.
 

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It's fine to run a motor without hall sensors, that's if the controller is dual mode/sensorless which appears to be in your case. The negetives of not using hall sensors is; stuttering when moving off from stand still as the controller doesn't know the position of the motor without hall sensor, loud motor during operation and in most cases, worse performance. If you're ok with those then you can run it without hall sensors.

Regarding the SW900, you can change the wheel size in the setting under P06, here's the manual if you need it: https://f.hubspotusercontent10.net/hubfs/7933366/Hub%20Drive%20Display%20Manual.pdf

Wheel size only effects the speed calculation of the display so if you changed it to something else other than your actual wheel size then your speedo will be inaccurate. There are settings where you can increase the current limit, however I was never able to get those settings working with generic Chinese controllers so it's unlikely that you will damage your controller when messing with the display settings.
 
MarkJohnston said:
I had zapped(tapping positive to negative) the controller a couple times and that lead to sparks and the situation today.

The other controller I have is the same cheap Chinese one however this one I also zapped on accident

I've heard fairly often of people doing this once. Not sure I've heard twice; but 3 times has to be a record. Can you share any lessons learned?
 
E-HP said:
MarkJohnston said:
I had zapped(tapping positive to negative) the controller a couple times and that lead to sparks and the situation today.

The other controller I have is the same cheap Chinese one however this one I also zapped on accident

I've heard fairly often of people doing this once. Not sure I've heard twice; but 3 times has to be a record. Can you share any lessons learned?

Its just how I had it set up. I kind of learned. An electrical engineer saw it and turned pale lol. He was kind of a prude anyways... I'm always tired what can I say... Hard to focus when tired
 
MarkJohnston said:
Hard to focus when tired

Knowing that, consider adding connectors that can't be plugged in the wrong way. I even try to change out signal connectors that could accidentally be plugged into each other, like a 3 pin throttle vs a 3 pin PAS connector. If both are male coming out of the controller, I change one to female, and make sure the corresponding connectors from the throttle and PAS can't be accidentally plugged in the wrong way.
 
E-HP said:
MarkJohnston said:
Hard to focus when tired

Knowing that, consider adding connectors that can't be plugged in the wrong way. I even try to change out signal connectors that could accidentally be plugged into each other, like a 3 pin throttle vs a 3 pin PAS connector. If both are male coming out of the controller, I change one to female, and make sure the corresponding connectors from the throttle and PAS can't be accidentally plugged in the wrong way.


Yeah that is what I did.
 
I took off the hall sensor and it works without error 11. No stuttering escape for sine wave stutter. However I noticed an odd thing.

The controller only spits out error 11 at first. Unplugging controller from battery and plugging it back in fixes the problem. No more intermittent controller errors or open throttle. The caveat is the bike has to be ridden for a while to warm up the controller.
 
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