Trouble with throttle/motor/controller? When bike goes off curb. Throttle function quits and display reads incorrectly.

[Paxondroubli]

Basically, when I give the bike acceleration and go off an elevated surface like a curb, and onto the street below, (maybe a six inch drop) the display reads abnormally high speeds and all of the readings change and my throttle shuts off and stops actuating the motor. if I try to twist the throttle again, the motor only makes some electronic sounds and moves very very slowly and sporadically. the only way to reset is to turn the bike off and on, but then the problem continues. do you have any idea what the issue is? or how I can troubleshoot it? thank you! I love this motor but I cannot ride my bike effectively if I can’t go over bumps!

I am running an NB power 72v integrated 3000w hub motor setup.

 

[fechter]

It sounds like you have a bad connection between the motor hall sensors and the controller. There should be a plug somewhere you can try unplugging and reconnecting a few times and see if that helps. There are other places the hall signals can fail, but usually inside the motor and hard to test. When you unplug the hall sensor cable, look at the connector pins and make sure all of them are fully seated in the connector body and look OK.

If that fails, you may need to open up the motor and look at the sensor wiring inside. There could also be a bad connection on the circuit board inside the controller where the hall wires attach.

 

[Paxondroubli]

I see. Originally this was my idea, I thought possibly the connection was bad due to the hall sensor wires from the controller and from the motor being a little short, and could be affected by the bike suspension flexing under weight and such, but it never cut out when I put extra weight on the suspension, and the issue didn’t change when I elongated the wires to the connection.

The motor has two hall sensor connections in case of a malfunction so I switched to the spare hall connector and the issue persists. I’ll check to see if there is an issue with the connection in the controller/motor.

I’ve never worked on the internals of these components though and really don’t want to fry them, would you by chance have any advice on best practices when working on internal components? Thanks!!

 

[E-HP]

What are “electronic sounds”? Buzzing, humming, groaning, crackling? I’d check the phase wire connectors and reseat them.

 

[Paxondroubli]

What are “electronic sounds”? Buzzing, humming, groaning, crackling? I’d check the phase wire connectors and reseat them.

It sounds kind of like a buzzing and intermittent whining.. I’ll try to replicate it and video tape the sounds so you can hear for yourself.

 

[amberwolf]

If the motor is powered during the drop, it may spin up very rapidly during the drop, then is suddenly decelerated while still under power as it hits the ground after the drop, the controller may see a current spike (or the sudden RPM change) and go into a fault mode.

Even the Phaserunner isn't immune to this issue, though for me that's only happened with a geared hubmotor (GH) rather than a direct drive hubmotor (DD). The PR also requires a power cycle to clear the error.

 

[Paxondroubli]

I see. That makes sense, what do you mean the PR requires a power cycle to clear the error? You mean it needs to be restarted to clear the error? Is there a way to keep the controller from having this error? I didn’t have this problem when running the bike at 48v with a 48v battery. Given I did have a different throttle and controller, but the controller I have now is the same model as before just a different one as I thought I had fried my previous one from arching the connector by accident.

 

[amberwolf]

what do you mean the PR requires a power cycle to clear the error? You mean it needs to be restarted to clear the error?

Yes; restarting means cycling the power, turning the system off, waiting till all the system's capactors have drained for sure, (a few seconds), then back on.

Is there a way to keep the controller from having this error?

For my system, the only way to prevent it was to let off the pedals (which on mine generate the throttle signal via the Cycle Analyst) before hitting the bump, and not restarting pedalling until after all the wheels were back on the ground. Because I couldn't always do this with perfect timing, the final solution was to not use a geared hubmotor (which spins up much faster than a DD hub when unloaded, off ground). I've used the system for a long time now with daily interaction on that same bump with the same controller and setup but DD hubmotor with no errors from this.

The actual error mine got, IIRC, was a phase overcurrent error from the motor suddenly being fully loaded as soon as it hit the ground after the bump.


For yours, I don't know your controller, so I don't know what options it has that you can experiment with. If it is programmable, it may also have error messages (mine uses LED blink codes when in fault mode) that tell you what happened.

I didn’t have this problem when running the bike at 48v with a 48v battery.

What happens if you use that battery with the present setup?

Given I did have a different throttle and controller, but the controller I have now is the same model as before just a different one as I thought I had fried my previous one from arching the connector by accident.

If yours is programmable, perhaps there is a setting that is different between the two, that is directly related to the problem.

If it is not programmable, perhaps the setting that is different is a factory setting (which not having access to these, you wouldn't be able to know if there is a difference).

You'll have to check the controller manual to see what it has available, if anything.