zombiess said:
If the throttle ramps up to quick even with slow throttle movement, turn the acceleration pot 2 turns counter clockwise. That should make a noticeable difference. They way I ship the settings is already setup for a fairly high powered bike, but every setup is different. Every time I up the amps on my setup I find it's often nicer to turn the accel pot down again.
It actually works pretty well just as it is set, with the exception of the top speed I get out of the HS3540 being so very high at 14s that I had to turn the MaxV pot all the way down for what I want (top of 20MPH so I can just hit WOT and hold it and cruise that way without having to pay attention to anything but traffic and road conditions).
I did set the ramping to be faster, since the main reason I want higher power on this bike is to be able to GTFOOTW of idiots on the road or to quickly accelerate out from the front of a line of waiting cars at a traffic light, so they don't run me over or lay into their horns when the light turns green.
Buuut...the Grin Tech / ebikes.ca 12FET controller itself (nothing to do with the Tamer) apparently has a funky way of operating, that I really really don't like, which is exacerbated by how sensitive this small-diameter wheel/motor combination is to bursts of power.
12FET Overspeed / Rollback Problem:
I put throttle at WOT from a stop, and it accelerates as desired and set by the Tamer (actually I usually use *both* front and rear for the first few seconds so it gets going quicker, with front 9C/6FET on a separate throttle for now), all the way up to top speed, which is just shy of 20MPH, exactly as I want.
Then it creeps up to around 20.4MPH, which I could live with--I don't think the police would care about half a MPH; my speedo in the CA probably isn't even accurate to that since it's just set for basic diameter of a 20" tire. But as soon as it reaches that, maybe a second or two later, power cuts way way down, nearly off. Then it goes back up just a little in power but not enough to hold the speed, and coasts down to as low as 18.5MPH. Then it applies another long burst of power, this time going up to as high as 20.9MPH. Then power cuts again, and eventually cycles back on and goes even higher the third time, up to 21.5MPH before it cuts back. Then it goes back to the first cycle again to not quite 20MPH, or maybe to the second cycle where it's around 20.4MPH.
That set of cycles will repeat constantly as long as I hold any throttle position, under any road conditions or wind (the actual speeds may vary, but the cycle itself does not).
I had *hoped* that this surging was actually being caused by me unconciously relaxing/engaging the throttle despite my willpower not to do so, when I had tested this before I saw the Tamer project was completed and available for sale. But apparently it really is in the controller itself, which makes it more complicated to solve (if it even can be).
If the surging had been caused by me, the Tamer would've fixed the problem, or at the least the ramping and buffering settings would change the timing of the surges/fallbacks, but it doesn't, unfortunately. Not the Tamer's fault.
6FET and Cruise Control Overspeed / Rollback Problem:
FWiW, if I instead use the 6FET and front motor to do the cruising, setting it's cruise (when it can be bothered to engage) to about 19-19.5MPH, then I can WOT with the 12FET and rear motor, and it will up to the 20.4MPH as soon as the Tamer ramp setting lets it, and tend to hold there pretty well, on flat terrain. But as soon as I get to any slight incline or get a headwind or tailwind change, then the 6FET's poorly-designed cruise algorithm changes the throttle setting (usually the wrong way for the conditions) and I either begin to quickly overspeed or suddenly the power dies way back, on the 6FET, and then the 12FET tries to compensate for a die-back and overspeeds and begins cycling like it would when on it's own.
The latter also happens if I set the 6FET cruise for less than 19MPH and then WOT the 12FET.
The 6FET's cruise is unreliable, and I don't trust it to use on the road in traffic, because it varies by several MPH sometimes, even on reasonably level streets and no winds. I don't yet even understand how it decides whether to raise the throttle or lower it, becuase it doesn't even do the same thing each time I ride over the same path even when wind is the same (or nonexistent), and I set the same speed in it.
The 6FET's cruise may sometimes hold the speed I set for a few seconds, or not at all, or for a whole mile (which is usually as far as I can go before I have to stop for a traffic control--typically it's every half mile; very rarely I may reach a light when it's green and be able to go thru without changing speeds, extending the cruise another half mile or so). But it pretty much always decelerates by 1-2MPH within seconds of releasing it. Since the law says I can't exceed 20MPH and I don't want trouble, I try to never do that. That means that if I set the cruise at 20MPH, speed drops to 19 or even 18MPH pretty quick after I let go. Sometimes it keeps dropping, down to 16 or 17MPH, and I wonder if it even set at all--then it surges a bit and I can hear and feel that it's definitely engaged, just not working as expected (probably as designed, but it's a crappy design, if so).
Sometimes, though, it begins accelerating instead of slowing, and if I'm already at 19-20MPH I have to twitch the thumb tab to disengage it.
(FWIW I have tried tapping the brakes either mechanical or the rear regen (no ebrake hooked up on the 6FET) a bit to slow, which works and makes the cruise work normally for a second, but hten it will again either begin overspeed again or it will start slowing.
Even when I'm in a big parking lot or on one of the multi-use-paths where I ride at about 10MPH, cruise will do the same thing. In this case I've allowed it to continue with the overspeed to see how far it will go, on occasion, and it's reached 13-15MPH from a setting of 10MPH, which is pretty ridiculous. It doesn't usually slow down that much from 10, around 8 or 9MPH most of the time. But it still doesn't hold the speed I set.
6FET Cruise Control Engage Problem:
Most frustrating of all is trying to get it to engage AT ALL--even with the Tamer helping me to give it a constant voltage (monitored with a multimeter ziptied to the bars in one case), the cruise frequently will not engage at all; sometimes it does after only a second or two, and sometimes it takes 30 seconds of holding it at one setting (of course, it could've engaged long before then, and I wouldn't know, but if I hold it and it doesn't engage, I count one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, etc., each subsequent time it won't engage, and release it to zero each time before trying again. I may try this over two or three miles sometimes to get it to engage, increasing my count by one second each time before releasing, only eventually getting it to engage after 30 seconds or so of holding it.
That's an awful lot of concentration that's not being applied to watching traffic or road conditions, so I've only done this under zero-traffic conditions, in broad daylight so I can clearly see quite far when I do have the chance to look around. And it is why I basically don't like to use the cruise function.
Basically the 6FET never holds a speed, or even close to it, as I would expect, and it doesn't engage when it should, and does when it shouldn't. It takes far too much of my attention off the road to monitor it or to get it to work, when in fact it should be doing hte exact opposite--freeing my attention from speed control and allowing me to more closely monitor traffic and road conditions!
Again, I'd hoped that twitches or vibrations causing throttle voltage changes were responsible for the issues of engaging it, but they're not, as proven by the Tamer and a voltmeter.
So while unfortunatley the Tamer doesn't fix the two main issues I'd hoped it would, it *does* do what I expected it to do, and is very easy to use and set up. Once I get the other two issues solved, it will be able to do what I want it to do.
I may need to do a modification to one of it's throttle outputs, though: Eventually I want to use a single throttle to control both of the motors, and since the Tamer has two outputs, I can easily do that. But each controller responds very differnetly to the throttle's WOT voltage for it's final speed, so I will have to do some sort of adjustable voltage divider on one of them so that whatever MaxV I set in the Tamer is for the least-responsive controller (6FET, I think) and then set the divider on the other to match that speed output on the other controller/motor. Should be easy to do once I get some of my parts from the house, but that will probably be a while as I have little idea where they presently are.
TL;DR:
Basically, you've got a fine product that will eventually be able to help me do what I want, but I apparently have other problems to solve before that.
If your controllers don't have block time set to 0.0S, go into the programming software and set them to this. If your software doesn't let you do this and you run Xie Chang EB2 or EB3 based controllers I have posted modified version of the software that will allow you to do this.
I haven't yet tried to deal with the programming on the ebikes.ca controllers yet--first I have to find my USB-serial dongle for this, which was from Lyen a couple years back but should work with any of these controllers, assuming the controllers are actually programmable.
Once I do that I may be able to solve the other problems, as well as strengthen the wimpy regen of the 12FET, which while it does slow me a little, isn't even enough to overcome the front 6FET by more than about 1MPH or so at 19MPH. :lol:
It's been a long time since I tried doing any controller programming changes, though, basically since I first got the Lyen 6FET that is still on DayGlo Avenger, I think.
