Mongoose Blackcomb

[Barncat]

Thanks mx. Your ability to build your own controllers is enviable.

The weight/speed claim is of course conjecture, based on quite a few build threads and various vids that I'm aware of. Something in full carbon with Ti fasteners and a minimal speed-run battery would eclipse it if you know of some examples.

 

[larsb]

...

Nice to see this build but i must say that my nutsack cringes from the look of the battery and the ribs in front of the seat.

I bid thee: May you never crash, else your bloodline will be terminated

 

[mxlemming]

Thanks mx. Your ability to build your own controllers is enviable.

The weight/speed claim is of course conjecture, based on quite a few build threads and various vids that I'm aware of. Something in full carbon with Ti fasteners and a minimal speed-run battery would eclipse it if you know of some examples.

I advise... Do not get into building controllers. It's addictive and incredibly time consuming and frustrating. Definitely advisable to buy. I got into it out of lockdown boredom but I'm thinking it might be best to consciously just stop all controller activity and focus on tidying up my ebike... 20s4p of P42 cells going into a 12070 motor on a giant trance. Weighs about 22kg...

Even at 500 bucks it would have been good value for me to just buy the controller.

Can you post some videos of riding? Chest cam or whatever.

 

[Barncat]

larsb- it's of course a good idea to not crash, ever. Considerably less likely in street riding than off road, and probably not as risky as riding with 3 gallons of gas between your legs which I do a lot . Those pieces of aluminum angle are just stiffeners to hold the polycarbonate lid flat and are not very dangerous. Again, I'll start another thread on the batteries which I built a year ago and IMO are pretty damn clever.

mx- so yeah, our bikes weigh in about the same but you're at 20s. Crap :x . So now I have to build another one............. feel free to post a link. I'd be curious to see the component layout. And fear not it's beyond my present skills to build controllers. Will see if the wife can take a video clip of me zipping by soon. Don't have a gopro or anything.

 

[owhite]

I advise... Do not get into building controllers. It's addictive and incredibly time consuming and frustrating. Definitely advisable to buy. I got into it out of lockdown boredom but I'm thinking it might be best to consciously just stop all controller activity and focus on tidying up my ebike

agree with this sentiment. I enjoyed making my VESC-based controller but other than it being an interesting exercise it was not cost effective. I also wanted something that safely runs up to 104 volts. But I just heard another good reason not to build -- a friend in here in the states just told me that many of the relevant parts are FORTY WEEKS behind in production.

 

[mxlemming]

larsb- it's of course a good idea to not crash, ever. Considerably less likely in street riding than off road, and probably not as risky as riding with 3 gallons of gas between your legs which I do a lot . Those pieces of aluminum angle are just stiffeners to hold the polycarbonate lid flat and are not very dangerous. Again, I'll start another thread on the batteries which I built a year ago and IMO are pretty damn clever.

mx- so yeah, our bikes weigh in about the same but you're at 20s. Crap :x . So now I have to build another one............. feel free to post a link. I'd be curious to see the component layout. And fear not it's beyond my present skills to build controllers. Will see if the wife can take a video clip of me zipping by soon. Don't have a gopro or anything.

20s isn't necessarily faster, ultimately the same size motor will make about the same power, and different kV just trades off voltage and current. I'm running 60kV with 6.2:1 ratio and 26 inch wheel. Theoretical is thus about 58 to 60mph.

I'm stubbornly refusing to use VESC and programming my own FOC so it's a bit of a work in progress right now (the 12070 motor really doesn't play nicely much like your one), so you have me beat for a little while. I'll catch up though

 

[larsb]

larsb- it's of course a good idea to not crash, ever. Considerably less likely in street riding than off road,

My best friend who was an avid road racer died on a cbr900 about 15 years ago.. also did you know that a common motorcycle injury is the ”tank split pelvis” where the tank breaks your hip bone apart like a wedge in crash..
just saying that it could be wise to remove the ribs in front of you, even more so now that i likely have jinxed it for you :wink:

 

[Barncat]

larsb- sorry about your friend man... I've been on two wheels for decades and have had some close calls and injuries, but hey, we need excitement in life... I'm not concerned about the battery- I'd be better served by wearing a bike helmet.

And I'll just be buying controllers guys. Though I have no other builds on deck. If I could get a Flipsky 75100 I'd put it on my Mongoose Girder build.

mx- so we have similar theoretical max speeds with slightly different components. Was riding this afternoon. I get a kick out of the shriek this motor makes when you wind it up.

 

[Barncat]

For anyone interested: I've introduced my battery pack design as the "Barncat Battery" in a new thread on site in the battery section.

 

[owhite]

For anyone interested: I've introduced my battery pack design as the "Barncat Battery" in a new thread on site in the battery section.

That's one heck of a nice write up.

 

[Barncat]

Many thanks owhite. And continued success with your projects.

 

[Barncat]

Well folks, yesterday was not a good day in Barncat Land.

Figured I'd finally video the bike and post a short clip here but after the second 10 second full speed pass on a modest 61V full charge the HI200 instantly burst into a ball of . Catastrophic fail. No warning- none. Motor cut out as I was accelerating and I looked down to see a fire inside my left thigh. Fortunately I always wear long pants when riding, and I had my leather gloves on. Pretty odd since I'd pushed the bike as hard on full 30 mile rides. I never exceed 15 seconds of WOT... Good news is my custom battery survived literal trial by fire with flying colors, and the U15 motor does not appear to have sustained damage.

I started a thread over in the Motor section if intrigued. I believe all my vesc tool settings to be within advertised Maker-x specs for this unit.

 

[owhite]

Sorry to hear about the controller and, I'm really glad it stayed away from your batteries, and from the sounds of it your leg. I've blown plenty of controllers before but I've never heard of them catching fire. Glad you're alright.

 

[owhite]

Mr Mongoose.

I know you had a shitty experience with the HI200 -- I hope you havent stopped building.

I was considering getting one for a lower voltage project of mine, and I came across this comment that seems like a recent addition to the the HI200 page:

Phase filtering is not available on HI200 and HV200. With the update of VESC TOOL, the phase filter function of the new version firmware is used. Using firmware version 5.03 (VEC TOOL 3.1) or above, without turning off the phase filter, will damage the VESC.! !

I do not claim to know much about phase filtering, I believe it is when the controller detects the position of the windings of the motor. I tried to do some quick research and as an aside I really hate some of the other sites that talk about VESCs they are pretty much unusable. I did find one comment about phase filtering on ES.

At any rate -- do you know if prior to your you had this phase filtering switched off?

 

[Barncat]

I used vesc-tool 3.0 with probably the 5.2 firmware which is of course an earlier version that did not allow turning off phase filters. IDK exactly what that is either but I've known of that important requirement for a couple months. Not sure what fried that ESC, and I'm not buying another one til next fall when I get back to the FL place. Will see who's selling what then, and hope the tech is matured a bit...

 

[Ecyclist]

You probably not gonna like it, but I tell you that I use these Chinese VESCs at 75% max. I blew my first at set-up (it was not good right from the get go) and had my second one running for three years. Of course my build is much lower power so..
If comes to the dead man switch, I asked around and got crickets, so I attached a string to the fuse and my plan is to pull the fuse out, if I have to shut the power off. So far, nothing has happened, so it's useless, but one day it might save my life.
One more thing. If you're going for so much speed, you might want to invest in bigger brake rotors.

 

[Barncat]

Ecyclist- thanks for your observations. Apparently the type of motor I'm using is notoriously difficult on controllers. So I'll reassess all that when I get back on the project in 6 months or so.

It was my bad for being too lazy to install a fuse. I knew better. It wouldn't have prevented the controller from blowing but might have prevented a fire and would have been safer for the battery.

No worries on the brakes. Even without regen they are more than adequate. My forte is chassis building.

 

[Eastwood]

Nice looking build :thumb:
I really like the clear battery box. Looks like you put a lot of detail in this build. Great job!

 

[Barncat]

Thanks Eastwood. It was a lot of fun til I blew the ESC. Will get back on it in the fall... My no-weld battery packs get noticed and work great for the street.

You referenced an MX track around Lenoir in another post. We spend summers just over the border in Erwin (tax friendly) where I zip around the mts on my cafe racers and fly fish quite a bit.

 

[Barncat]

After a long time in mothballs, the Blackcomb rides again. Flipsky 75200 is running the #s shown, not what was detected, on the original Ortega observer. I'm using vesc-tool 6.0 with the 75300 unlimited firmware. Still experimenting with tuning but seems pretty good. Haven't hooked up the thumb throttle regen yet. I have some suspicion that a voltage spike from that setup may have fried my previous controller.

I've upgraded a few other components to keep myself entertained and to shave more weight. One piece carbon stem/handlebar. I wanted to lower the seat platform about 1-1/2" and the only way to do that was cut the remaining seat tube and construct an aircraft style aluminum affair that securely clamps to the two square frame members as pictured. Didn't want to drill any holes. These two changes probably shed over 2 lbs. Will weigh the entire bike soon.

 

[Barncat]

For those interested, the wizard detected motor values are pictured. Those #s were great for sensorless from standstill (this motor is sensorless), but I was getting hard cutouts at near WOT. So for now I've reverted to basically the specs above that B Vedder arrived at when tuning this motor in a video. Pulls smoothly, no cutouts, but as before a faint push of the foot is required from standstill. There's probably some happy medium...

One other issue at present: can anyone else confirm a vesc tool 6.0 hard 3.3V upper limit on ADC1 throttle mapping? Mapping reads around 3.46V on this particular hall throttle but I can't override, and believe I'm leaving some top end on the table, which is unacceptable. I'm wired to 5V on the COMM port.

 

[owhite]

For some people at least, getting the motor parameters from VESC-tool can be complicated/frustrating/unreliable.

I made some documentation that let's you define the relevant parameters yourself if you have some electronic tools.

Documentation is here.

PM if you have questions.

 

[Barncat]

Thanks, but only have a dmm and clamp meter so won't be getting that far into it. Will be tweaking numbers as I put more miles on. Main irritant is that 3.3v throttle limit, haven't figured that out yet.

 

[chuyskywalker]

For those interested, the wizard detected motor values are pictured. Those #s were great for sensorless from standstill (this motor is sensorless), but I was getting hard cutouts at near WOT. So for now I've reverted to basically the specs above that B Vedder arrived at when tuning this motor in a video. Pulls smoothly, no cutouts, but as before a faint push of the foot is required from standstill. There's probably some happy medium...

I've had the same issue on very high power motors. I think that the motor detection tends to run very low amps during detection which works on the bench, but when you push higher amps will not work well. You can redo these parameters under the FOC section of the app and turn up the amps (I) to a much higher number which tends to give me much better results and no high amp cutouts.

One other issue at present: can anyone else confirm a vesc tool 6.0 hard 3.3V upper limit on ADC1 throttle mapping? Mapping reads around 3.46V on this particular hall throttle but I can't override, and believe I'm leaving some top end on the table, which is unacceptable. I'm wired to 5V on the COMM port.

Yes, every VESC since forever caps the ADCs at 3.3(ish) volts. Most won't explode if you feedback the 4.2v from a regular 5v input hall sensor, but some will error out in software and, if not, you'll still be missing a whole ton of range on them. You can either cobble together your own voltage divider, or spintend offers the ADC Adapter with a host of other nice features as well.

 

[Barncat]

Chuyskywalker- thanks for the heads up re the throttle and link to the esk8 thread. I mistakenly assumed wiring to 5v was ok...........

[Additional edit: I did crank the amps up to 180a motor and 280a absolute max right after detection prior to any test riding, so it wasn't that.]