zzoing said:
I have CA23. CA3 is necessary to configure a base ebrake resistance setting. Do I need CA3 for variable regen?
Can I arrange variable regen using CA23, throttle and Grinfineon 2018 48v 40A controller? How do I do it?
Nope - the CA3 is not required.
As the manual excerpt above details, the Grinfineon (and Phaserunner) controllers have a dual regen capability that is unique to Grin controllers.
- The first mode increases regen when you increase the throttle with the brakes applied. This mode is designed to work without any CA or special hardware and uses the normal throttle voltage range (1.0V-3.5V).
- The second mode only works without the ebrakes applied and uses a special 0.8V to 0.0V range of voltages to increase regen. This second mode is designed specifically for the CA3.
zzoing said:
When I engage the ebrake, does it switch the throttle line to 0.0V? Does it stay at 0.8V? the ebrake is not a simple switch?
The ebrake is a simple switch and does not affect the throttle voltage at all. As outlined in the two cases above, it does determine which throttle mode is used for variable regen.
zzoing said:
I thought that It would give me variable regen right out of the box, perhaps I have to program the controller differently? It's not switched on to variable mode?
Good question. The Grinfineon controller is actually not programmable. The two regen modes are mutually exclusive according to whether or not you use the ebrakes and should work right out of the box.
zzoing said:
I asked Justin who said:
You will require either a throttle that is bidirectional and has a 0.8-0.0V region for regen control, or the use of a CA3 device which will be able to output such a throttle voltage based on a normal ebrake lever and the regular forwards throttle.
This is very confusing. I do not believe that they have removed the normal mode that uses ebrakes. I'm wondering if your question was about variable regen
without ebrakes (?). That would make his remark make sense.
I'm going to put that remark aside for a minute and plow along with the way I understand they are still shipping those controllers (according to the manual excerpt above)....
zzoing said:
there are 15% hills everywhere here.
I think what is happening is that your CA2 is preventing regen because you may have a speed limit set and are exceeding that limit in your regen test. If that were to occur, the CA would try to slow the motor by reducing the throttle voltage. Since you are on a hill and reducing motor power is ineffective at slowing you down, the CA keeps cranking down the throttle in a futile attempt to slow down. Pretty quickly it gets to minimum or about 1.0V. This would stop the motor completely if it weren't already stopped by the ebrakes but also clamps the throttle so that you cannot apply regen. Oops.
Here you are getting into a little trouble because the CA2 does not know about ebrakes or regen and is blindly doing its motor thing. The CA3 does know about those and so behaves more appropriately.
So - to test this out, either raise your speed limit to maximum or try your regen test with the CA2 unplugged. Either strategy will prevent the CA from affecting your throttle and upsetting your attempt to control regen. I'm pretty sure this will fix the issue - anyhow it's a best guess
- FWIW:
Although you should not require a CA3 to make the basic variable regen work, the CA3 does have some nice regen features. For instance, you can hook up a pot or a two button (up/down) DigiAux switch and configure the CA3 for regen speed control and speed adjustment by the pot or DigiAux. Now on hills the CA3 will automagically slow you using regen to whatever speed you have dialed in - no ebrakes required. You just ride along and back off the throttle on a hill and the CA does the braking. You can twiddle the speed knob on the fly if you wish, and of course you can use the ebrakes to override this automatic operation. Kind of handy if you live in the land of hills...