Explicit new controller photos. Including carnage.

liveforphysics

liveforphysics

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Joined
Oct 28, 2008
Messages
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Location
Manhattan Beach, CA, USA
So, I got the new hobbycity controllers. They are supposed to be running 12mhz for uController processing. They held sync perfect! Aggressive launching, rapid open close throttle changes, great wheelies, great top speed, they worked very very well. Then I went to make my normal 45-55mph charge up this steep hill near my house, and POOF!!! They shot flames out. Lots of flame. Like, a LiPo fed plasma fire that continued burning on it's own until I was able to rip a battery cable un-plugged. I LOVED IT!!!!

It's a good thing I decided to take photos before hand, because now there is just char left. :)

compares.jpg


The red one is the old style. It would always lose sync.
oldcontrolers.jpg


This is the new one. They ground off the writing on the chip.
newcontrolers.jpg

newinputss.jpg

newfets.jpg


And here is the after pictures:

flameons.jpg


carnages.jpg


fullbikes.jpg


Enjoy!

PS: I'm going to bed now, so I won't be immediately responding to anything.
 
Forgot to include this picture of the new FET layout.

newfetlayouts.jpg
 
Ahh, I fried 3 HV110s and one Kontronic Power Jazz in my recumbent. The Jazz gave me an 8 inch flame blasting out the side. I got quite a burn on my arm reaching for my battery connector! I actually have a bit of oxidation on my chain and some steel screws from the toxic rocket like flame. :twisted:

Matt
 
Toxic rocket flames is an excellent description. That's exactly what it was like, and one was shooting into my leg, which made it extra awesome. lol, ok, going to bed now.
 
This is amazing.

I'm about to walk to the post office to ship Fetcher his silicone 10 gauge stranded for the interface / limiter boards' leads and I'm beginning to see how epically important said board really is.

Luke - you need a datalogging device, STAT.

You are undoubtedly generating numbers us mortals can reference advantageously.

Thanks!

:shock:
 
Well,
hmmm..
the new fets are much better than the old ones and still popped.
They are 60V ~60A per....(packages this small are limited by package not silicon)

http://www.irf.com/product-info/datasheets/data/irf6648.pdf

They have much better thermal properties with the metal can on the top side.

I think that thermal runaway is biting one or two, then it pops, then they all
start popping becomes a plasma gasifier.

It's funny that they are grinding the label off of the controller!!
Bastards are trying to defeat our reverse engineering efforts! :x
All that'll do is make me hunt it down faster!
(the old one is atmel,is the new one a dedicated motion chip, IR? magellan?, Fairchild??????? argh!)

It sure does look like they are trying to be skimpy with the heat sinks.
Given the better fets, it seems like they may need better cooling.
Unless, we can figure how how to hook this mommasan to some
fets that look like a 16 oz well marbled ribeye, instead of these runaway salad topping crumbs.
(insert IXYS here)

I see 9 connections to the fet board on the bottom of the controller next to the
3 phase motor wires. Some pins are obviously feedback. I think I see 6 gate
drive signals.

Well, good news on the sync problem, that's for sure. Man, know I"m itching to get mine!!!!
 
My excitement is thus:

We have controller circuitry and motors that will do our bidding. The only thing, apparently, holding back a SERIOUSLY great bike is FETs.

Forget cooling.

Get enough FETs to handle current with NO wasted current generating heat and we're in BUSINESS!

I'll drop $500 on FETs if someone engineers a board that'll let me, gladly. Why cool stuff when you can engineer heat out of the equation?

We're not talking about thousands of amps here. The controller will not have to weigh 50lbs.

The batteries and motors are here, controllers that WORK are coming! And it looks like the good folks of these pages are making them!
 
With no external current limiting, and with Luke's binary latch throttle (i.e. -- off, then all on 'till it blows... :mrgreen: ), I'm guessing this well-done guinea pig was seeing currents well over its advertised/rated 100A limit. Good news, however, that the faster processor appears to have fixed the sync/response issue. Question: did you add any extra caps? I wonder if this might help, like it does on the HV110?

I'm all for doing a new FET board, for sure, especially if we can up the voltage. I still can't use my 16s5p a123 packs with these either, if it's got 60V FETs.

-- Gary
 
http://www.irf.com/product-info/datasheets/data/ir2103.pdf

This is the data sheet of the old fet drivers.
HV hi lo halfbridge.

I just ordered some get drivers yesterday that I think are the same
package, but bigger ampacity !!!

I'm starting to get a nerdie!!! :lol: (term I coined myself !)

(can't spell gEEk, without a double EE) :lol:

The fet drivers can handle the voltage up to 600V on the high side(IGBT), no problemo.

I can't figure out what the new fet drivers are....

muhaha hah ha ha

Well, let's pool some money and buy the biga$$ 350A 75V modules @$150 bones per. :evil:
on second thought, let's get some cheaper ones working first.
 
http://www.irf.com/product-info/datasheets/data/irs2003pbf.pdf

Data sheet for the new ver 4 turnigy gate drive.

Nothing too exotic here.

200V floating high side capability.

small current capability mA, not A

hmmm....I wonder what that controller is....
 
Hm... doesn't look like the new controller is an Atmel. What I'm guessing is the programming port for each chip doesn't head to the same pins, neither do the power and ground pins on that side. On the new board I bet the vertical row of open circular pads to the left of the controller chip is the in-circuit programming port. (this can be seen on the closeup pic) Can't find a crystal or resonator on the board, the controller must be running on an internal oscillator.

Good to hear that it keeps sync well.

Lawson
 
Good to know that it keeps sync, too bad you let the smoke out, although at least you're not too bummed about it!! :D

I see you mounted the heatsinks to the aluminum bracket. I'm assuming you had lots of heat transfer paste in there, but do you think it would have been advantageous to expose them to 40 mph airflow? The aluminum bracket can absorb lots of heat initially, but once it gets hot, it won't transfer that heat to the air all that well without fins.

Is there anything in there to promote heat transfer from the fets to the heatsink? With that many fets it stands to reason they won't all be the exact same height, and any gap drastically reduces heat transfer.
 
the two chips do look like the same one to me, at least i found two power pins are the same. it would be easier to use a multi-meter and check if the wiring is the same.

too bad there's no datalog. i am very curious on the current that blows the controller, i bet it's well over 200A.
 
It could easily be over 200a per ESC. My battery pack would chuckle at 400amp current draw. If it could talk, it would say "yo, wake me up when you are ready to put some load on me, otherwise I'm taking a nap". It should be able to do 1200amps for 1minute bursts, or sustain 1000amps continously. Also, it was nice that my pack that should be only 39.2Ah actaully measures 43.2Ah discharge at 5amp loading, and a 2.85v LVC on the computerized discharger. That's always nice to have cell capacity de-rated by the manufacture. I know Methods has been regularly pulling 5.5Ah from each 5Ah rated pack, and not over discharging them to do it.

The good quality hobby packs seem to not only be de-rated for C levels by a fair margin, but also seem to be de-rated by capacity. At least for the perticular models that Methy and I have been playing with. Now if only the damn ESC's would be de-rated...

Looks like it's time for me to send a stinky burned box of crap back to hobbycity :) There will be 5 burned up ESC's in the box this time, and a small 3-turn helicopter motor that didn't like getting 22v @ 80amps.
 
sorry for your loss :cry:

All in the name of wheelies though :mrgreen:

Next time we need some video footage, especially when the likelyhood of short run time followed by 'flamethrower' finish is high. :lol:

Oh, any shot of the drive side of the bike with your batteries mounted? It looks good, very clean!
 
I took pictures of both sides, but I didn't bring the right mem-card to work with me. I can post some pics up of the other side when I get home.

Looks very similar, except the other side's pack is getting re-configured to connect in series with this pack to make 72v. Then I'm going to mount the hall sensors, and try out the Infinion controllers. I'm thinking of starting out with them having the normal current limiting, and adjusting the hall sensor position and getting things all dialed in before I swap out the FETs and build them into high current controllers. I just bought 100x IRF4110's, and 100 more caps, and 50 of another FET i don't remember the name of, and 50 hall effect sensors. So I've got some playing around to do when all the packages arive :)
 
Glad you took the photos before the inferno................

If anything, the controller board on this ESC looks to be easier to re-use with a better FET array than the CC one. It looks really straightforward to just unsolder it from the power board and feed the FET drive directly to some better mounted FETs in decent packages.

I'm near certain that the problem here is down to the way they build the power board. Those FETs can't be well thermally connected to the heatsink, plus the heatsink is probably a bit small anyway.

I bet that, with a decent set of big FETs on a proper heatsink this could be made to work reliably. It's pity we can't find a way to buy just the "brain" for this controller, as I bet it'd be cheap. All the money in these things is tied up in the FETs.

Jeremy
 
Jeremy- I'm sending them back to HobbyCity in a box with other ESC's to get them replaced (generally it's always free replacement). When I get them back, I'm not even going to try to make them work, but rather just start out by setting them up to switch a bank of 10 irf4110's per channel. That will give me 60 irf4110s to be running my 2 motors, which I would ASSume should be enough to last more than a 20minute ride on my next test run. Do you think I should do more than 10 per channel? They will be very well heat sinked. Any ideas for bumping up the FET driver circuit to be able to handle that many FETs?

And, while I'm waiting on shipping to and from HK, I'm going to be building the infinion controllers that arived, and sticking hall sensors on the motors to see how that goes. It would sure be a lot nicer to be sensorless though... sensors seem like a big hassle, but if it works well, I will be sure and run it until it turns to ash as well :)
 
You know, I've been extremely happy with the way HobbyCity has always treated me, and done pretty much everything I have ever asked of them. I'm going to try asking if I can buy just the top boards from the new style of controller. They always seem eager to please me, I think they just might sell me a stack of the top controller boards.
 
Hmm, you don't think that would make them realise that maybe you're not using the gear for its intended application??? :shock:
 
They don't want to lose the $10k a year I spend with them. I don't think they care what I do, they just want to keep me a happy cash-cow to milk :)
 
Think I'll mount my controller somewhere than under/in front of the family jewels.. :shock:

DK
 
i'd replace the fet drivers with these:

http://www.irf.com/product-info/datashe ... 186pbf.pdf

irs2186S same package soic-8 pin as the fet drivers on the board.

easy to swap. however, whatever is feeding current
to the gate drivers better be able to keep up.
worth a try I'd say....that'll expose the next weak link if there is one.

4A drive source sink

I bought 6 at a few days ago
~5 bones a piece digikey

IR direct
~4 something a piece.

Jeremy, what do you think? beef enough?

Luke, if you could get the controller boards, that would be awesome!! I'd buy 4 of them.
 
I haven't heard back from hobbycity yet, but I will order like 20 of them if they let me buy them and the price is right. I'm going to order some of that driver chip you recomended as well. Best to upgrade the possible weaklinks before they fail and cause more damage.
 
That battery pack of yours is crazy.... :shock:

You could take that pack and start doing electric human flight!!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6br6DJ1Dis4

I'll check and make sure the pins are 100% compatible on those drivers....
I didn't check that because they are in the same driver family.

Well, crap, ASSume, and Murphey will bite.

IR rerouted the pin layout.....along with a logic inversion on the low side.
I'll look for a high current , PIN compatible version, in a SOIC8 package. :?
You can still do it, but its not as easy. Now you need to throw a single inverter
at it, wire all that up, divorce the chip from the pads, reroute, etc...etc...

Hope you didn't order those just yet...! :oops:

sorry for jumping the gun!

Are you planning on putting series resistors on each gate of the 4110 to help
balance transistors and ringing? ...(other electronics guys, please chime in)

10 fets per channel
4A capable drive
I'm assuming that the gate drive signal is gonna be 12V depending the power supply
of the contoller.
12V/4A = 3 Ohm total resistance capable.
1.5 Ohm Series on output of gate driver pluss 15 ohm series with gate on each fets,
10 in parallel, will yield a 3 ohm total per driver.

edit: No luck on a 100% pin compatible high current fet drive chip yet, I did get some samples of
a single inverter chip that could be added as well. So that still seems like the best option for
beefing up the drive so far, even if it isn't as clean as I'd like. I'm tired of datasheets right now anyway.
time to cut some metal.
 
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