Shorted throttle wires, I think I killed my controller

I was setting up the new pedicab system, BMC v2 second hand hi power cycles and was having trouble with the throttle. In the midst of fooling around with the wiring I accidentally shorted the black and red, there was a big spark and I quickly disconnected everything. Now I notice that the "on" light on the controller is on whether or not the power switch is on and after going through a couple different throttles I can't seem to get this spooled up.

So, is my controller fried? And if so is there an easy fix, hard fix or should I just get a new controller?

I searched the forum and was hard pressed to find anything specific on this issue. Thanks in advance for any of your input.

Check for 5V across throttle black and red. if you don't get 4.5-5.something volts, then open up the controller and check in there at anything marked 5V to see if it's there.

If not, then it could jsut be the 5V regulator, and that is often a TO-220 or TO-92 style case with LM7805 marked on it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Semiconductor_packages

That's relatively easy to replace, and could be pulled out of any other old controller you have laying around (and possibly out of a bunch of other kinds of dead or unused electronics you might have somewhere).

If it does have a 7805, you can check wiht a voltmeter from the center pin to the outer two, and see what voltage yo uget. If you have hte label facing you and pins "down", then left pin is input and right pin is output, center is ground. Input is usually 12V or so, and comes from another (often) TO-220 or TO-92 but 7812 (12V regulator). If there's no input ot the 7805 then that previous one could be fried, too.


If it doesn't have any of the 78xx series stuff on there, it may have a switching regulator setup on there, and that is more complicated to troubleshoot (but more efficient to run).

Thanks AW, I checked the voltage on the throttle line and it came out at 4.65 volts according to my multimeter.

I wonder if it could be that all my throttles are junk. I've been trying the three wire ones and the four wire ones swapping the extra wires to try and get the right combo.

I'm also going to run the motor through my ebike tester as well as the controller and just keep going down the list till I either find the problem or get a new controller.

Argh!

Well, if the 5V line is ok (sounds like it) then another possibility: If you are using a 4-wire throttle with one wire for battery meter, and that is hooked up to batt+, then if *that* wire got shorted to any of the other throttle wires (except ground) it could easily have sent battery full voltage into the controller and/or the throttle, and toasted anything it went to.

If you are not using any batt+ up there, then a "big spark" (which I missed previously in hte OP) doesn't make much sense, as there isn't normally enough voltage *or* current avialble on any of the throttle wires to give such a spark.

At that point, you might have to figure out if perhaps something on the battery+ is grounded to your frame, perhaps thru the controller's FETs and it's case, if not thru the wiring harness, and that maybe something else in the throttle wiring somehow touched the bike frame, and *that* is where the spark came from? If so, then it could still be what I said first in this post.

Otherwise I dont' know what it would be, without more info.