John Bozi said:
This looks wonderful Justin! Can't wait to play again.
1. Has the rated system voltage complexity been change? I could only ever set up my bike as 48v while I'm running 22s lipo. I am hoping to understand whether this miss calculation might be affecting what I feel as odd usage of power to torque to RPM. It still is probably just the FOC that I haven't fully grasped yet.
There were two issues here, one is that (unknownst to us) ASI's firmware requires that the rated system voltage be set between 28V and 84V, so if you put it to 85V then nothing would work. The 2nd issue was that in the previous software, during the autotune routine we would read the actual voltage present and temporarily set this as the new rated system voltage so that the motor RPM during autotune was close to what it should be (50% of full RPM). But in the process of doing that, it would also change the fast and slow over voltage faults on the advanced setup phage (since these scale with the rated system voltage), which would then be clamped at 90V, and then when the rated system voltage was returned to the previous value the over voltage faults could decrease to a value that was less than the pack voltage, so you would have a voltage fault error. That's why we were advising people to leave the rated system voltage alone and do the autotuning with 36 or 48V packs.
Both of these behaviors should be fixed in the 0.99 SW version and there should be no problem now with you doing the autotune with your 72V or 80V or whatever pack. If you could confirm that with your setup using the V0.99 software that would be great.
Once I get to open speeds around 60 kmh I've got maximum power of 3.5kw for example, which I presume is just heat producing with very little work. ( I do feel the torque still it is more but just wonder if I have this set up totally wrong or this is the FOC experience.
This isn't a result of being an FOC but just the fact that the phaserunner controller is doing actual phase current limiting. It would be exactly the same sensation with a trapezoidal controller that also had a 96A phase current limit. At 60kph and 3.5kw the motor is probably running at pretty decent efficiency and doing a ton of work. If you ran that same motor at 3.5 kw and just like 10 kph then
that is when it is mostly generating heat. Yes the torque will be higher, but it's not very good use of your battery energy.
Right now your motor has a KI of about 0.75 Nm/A, so with 95 amps of phase current you have at best 70 Nm of max torque. That's decent, but it's not the kind of value that's going to spin out the front wheel or pop a wheelie if it was on the back.
2. Bit off topic but not really, since I am running the same as your signature I think... I understand that the controller has thermal roll back and would like to know if it is fool proof. Can I run it at 3.5kw (yes the motor probably overheats quicker than the controller) and it will fold back my extreme usage without warranty problems?
Yes
I have the CA controlling motor temps from 100 - 120c.
A bit of an aside from this thread, but be aware that the grin motor will hit these temps with 3.5 kW very quickly, in like a few minutes, even if you add Statorade. For those power levels you'd probably want both Statorade and something like the HubSinks for better heat flow out of the rotor shell.
3. The all axle auto tunes to hall start and sensorless run.. is that right? and why?
If it senses a valid hall signal during the autotune then we set it to this behavior, while if it doesn't detect valid halls during the autotune it will default to sensorless only. You could choose the sensored only mode too, but we felt in general it's more robust to have the system not depend on the hall signals as much as possible.
I also tried this controller on my mid drive and it would not set up anything but sensorless which was jerky as hell.
There are many more things to tweak to have smooth sensorless start behavior on the controller. But if you have halls on your mid-drive and it still defaulted to sensorless mode then that means an issue with the hall signals, and I would check with a multimeter to ensure that all 3 of them are toggling properly.
Finally I am loving the all-axle / phase runner combination. I have never experienced a hub motor so completely silent and so smoothe on the throttle. I use it everywhere through suburbia and then hit my mid drive when I need torque to climb serious off road stuff or have overheated. Can't wait for custom fins.....
Well good to hear. To appreciate just how much silencing the FOC does, you should try hooking up a regular trapezoidal drive controller to the Grin All-Axle hub motor, that thing becomes so noisy it will buzz enough to make you embarrassed every time you pass a cyclist or pedestrian.
Cheers and happy 2017
Ditto to everyone else on the Sphere too!
