Phaserunner v2 GMAC 10T Issues

[mexican_amigo]

Hello ES,

I am having some issues with the throttle and regen on my phaserunner v2 +GMAC 10T setup. I emailed Grin about it but they haven't replied in over a week. They are probably too busy so I thought I would try posting here! The system was working fine until I loaded the default parameters from Grin on my phaserunner and now the motor does not behave appropriately with the Throttle Output it is receiving from the CA. For example full throttle turns the motor slowly until it reaches ~8mph and then it launches to max speed. Another example is that the regen does not come on until it reaches low speeds and it comes on pretty hard. I have read about people doing a factory reset to fix PR issues but I haven't found instructions on this. Here are some screenshots of the phaserunner settings:

 

[amberwolf]

Well, the PR is an FOC controller, so you have to set it up for your motor's specific parameters, and then tune it to work optimally with it. If you don't have the settings originally used for your specific motor and system, I'd start by running the autotune, and then using the information on the PR info page at ebikes.ca to begin the tuning process. It's not likely to be an instant fix, and may take a fair bit of experimentation to get it near the way it worked before.

When you get it to a working condition, even if not optimal, I recommend saving the settings to a file as version 1 of whatever you want to call it. Every subsequent change you make, save them to a *new file* with a different version number (possibly including the name of the thing you changed so you can reference that when looking for an old file to go back to if a setting you change messes things up enough to want to do that).

When it works the way you want it to, save that as another new file that includes the date and "working version", and copy that file somewhere else, too (like a thumbdrive, etc). Anytime you later make any change, make yet another new version, etc. Then if something goes wrong at a later date, you can "instantly" go back to when it worked.


Note also that the PR being FOC means the throttle modulates motor current (torque) rather than voltage (speed), so a tiny amount of throttle will rapidly accelerate the motor in an unloaded (offground wheel) test, vs an onground (riding) test.

 

[mexican_amigo]

Amberwolf, thanks for the feedback. I guess I have no choice but to play around with the parameters; however, I do not recall having this many issues configuring an entirely Grin system (CA + PR + Grin Motor). I will continue troubleshooting and follow up if I find anything out...

 

[amberwolf]

If the PR already had been setup for the motor (for instance, if it all came from Grin as a kit, this would be true), then you don't have to tune the controller to the motor.

If you reset or change the PR motor parameters from a working system, then to make the motor work again these have to be changed back to what they were. If it came as a kit from Grin they can probably tell you what the settings should have been, or send you a file to upload to the PR. If not, then there's generally no good source of data other than experimentation to determine the settings, unless you happen to find a thread with someone else that had the same exact motor, controller, etc., used the same way, *and* that published their working settings. Most of the threads end with either no success or else no further posts once they start the process, so no idea if they ever got it working and if so, with what settings.

Because of the complex nature and interactions of the various settings, Grin doesn't offer support for this either, if it wasn't a kit from them. But they do have info on the PR pages and in their threads here about various parameters, and they also have some videos about some of it.

FOC controllers just aren't plug and play, unfortunately--it is the nature of the controller that to be a better motor controller it has to know more about what it is controlling, and since that data is almost never available for a particular motor, it's then up to the person setting up the controller with that motor to figure it out by trial and error. Since almost no one that does all this work ever publishes the data they found and their results using it, there's no database of motor / controller settings to start from, either.

I've worked with one FOC controller (with MUCH less helpful software than the Grin Phaserunner Suite!) testing for it's developer and never truly got it tuned to it's potential before the testing phase ended and I had to go back to my "plug and play" but less capable non-FOC controllers...I can't count the hours I spent trying to tune it. If it had had better setup software like Grin's, I might've gotten it tuned and spent less time at it, but it would've stll been a fair bit of work. :/


BTW, AFAIK, loading the default parameters *is* a reset.

 

[powerpeddles]

Wow thanks so much for this post I've called grin at least a half dozen times and spoken to their salespeople on the phone and they never explain this I was getting ready to hit the buy button this weekend on a $1,500 package with them but I absolutely would have been out of my mind trying to go through all of this if the settings somehow got corrupted

 

[amberwolf]

As long as you save the settings that work before you do anything, you won't have that problem. This is true of *any* controller (or any other device, ebike or not) that has *anything* programmable or user-settable.

 

[powerpeddles]

I think that's an oversimplification take the phone I am writing you from now, you buy the phone, there are preset parameters via the software on the phone in my case one UI, Android has a very specific set of parameters, then there are user-defined parameters with your setup all of which are backed up to the cloud now I simply have to remember my username and password next time I log in and these parameters are all updated, they also continue to be refined by both Android and Samsung to provide the best user experience, if the phone is corrupted, or I'm in need of a reset the next time I log in the parameters are brought back to the last stable state. I work for a very large Fortune 50 technology platform, and we are not requiring our users to save program file parameters in order to update their account on the platform to make our system usable. I understand that grin is a rather small company and probably doesn't have these resources but what you describe sounds very unuser friendly

 

[mexican_amigo]

I am face palming myself for not saving the parameters before changing them to the “default” parameters from Grin. To add more context, the reason I changed the PR parameters was because I was troubleshooting my CA not showing the speed. I thought the issue was the PR but it turned out to be the CA firmware version - I had updated it to beta version 3.2b because I wanted to try the new regen features. Grin got back to me and suggested reverting the CA version to 3.14 and it fixed the speedometer but then my PR was having these issues :/

I found another thread where a user was having issues with his PR and BBSHD and he said it worked after resetting the PR to factory settings but I havent learned how to do that so I asked and am waiting for a reply. Anyway, if I figure this out I will definitely follow up so others can avoid future headaches!

I agree that Grin systems are not the most user friendly. They do assume that their customers are technically curious/competent and interested in DIY projects. That said, when their products work they are incredible.

 

[powerpeddles]

I am face palming myself for not saving the parameters before changing them to the “default” parameters from Grin. To add more context, the reason I changed the PR parameters was because I was troubleshooting my CA not showing the speed. I thought the issue was the PR but it turned out to be the CA firmware version - I had updated it to beta version 3.2b because I wanted to try the new regen features. Grin got back to me and suggested reverting the CA version to 3.14 and it fixed the speedometer but then my PR was having these issues :/

I found another thread where a user was having issues with his PR and BBSHD and he said it worked after resetting the PR to factory settings but I havent learned how to do that so I asked and am waiting for a reply. Anyway, if I figure this out I will definitely follow up so others can avoid future headaches!

I agree that Grin systems are not the most user-friendly. They do assume that their customers are technically curious/competent and interested in DIY projects. That said, when their products work they are incredible.

I sent them emails asking product questions which included screenshots of the various tools and they referred me back to the website (which seems to be the default answer for anyone who is associated with this industry) my take from a person who manages support of a tech company is that if they are so busy they don't have time and answer questions that their support tools can't answer (it clear the self-service support tools are not working if they are so busy they can't answer customer inquires) if they have fallen in love with the tools to the point that they rather loose business opposed to changing the support model they will never scale their business. Juiced figured this out when they lost much of their business to Rad who was rewarded by investors who saw they had their @#$& together.

People can get caught up trying to prove how smart they are as opposed to solving the problem/answering the questions and getting the business or providing what the customer wants not what you want.

 

[amberwolf]

I think that's an oversimplification take the phone I am writing you from now, you buy the phone, there are preset parameters via the software on the phone in my case one UI, Android has a very specific set of parameters, then there are user-defined parameters with your setup all of which are backed up to the cloud

Every generality is always an oversimplification.

For example, those devices and settings are only backed up in some automatic way if you set that up and/or allow it (many people do, but not all), *and* the system to do that works correctly in every step of the process (most of which you have no control over or feedback on what happened in the process). Those backups are only retrievable if the restore process all works correctly in every step of the process, *and* the backup maintenance always works correctly at whatever physical location(s) they are backed up, *and* the data itself is still compatible with whatever OS/etc is now on the device (since forced updates are extremely common and updates can cause incompatibilities between backed up data/settings/info and

For example, none of my devices have this ability, some because of device limitations, some because of design faults, some because of my choices, and require manual backup.

However, even if I did allow this to happen automatically (for those devices capable of it), and the backup process worked correctly, it would require access to the internet to reach the settings on the cloud, and if there was anything preventing this, the process wouldn't work. (so in my case I use a tool to back up the devices to a file on the computer, and for certain things I also have screenshots saved outside the device and/or paper notations of critical info or settings).



So in general the safest way to ensure you always have your settings (or data, etc) is to back them up in a way that you can manually restore them yourself, for anything that is essential or critical to you. (if it's something that doesn't matter to you if it works or not, or works the way you want it to or not, then it doesn't matter if the setting is backed up).

I've had to help people try to recover / fix / setup things for decades because they didn't do this, even when automated backups existed, simply because those wouldn't restore for one reason or another, and couldn't have data manually extracted from them to recover anything either. (most of the time, no recovery is possible, and starting from scratch is necessary).



Devices like ebikes, etc., don't typically have internet connectivity (and don't typically need it, and could be undesirable in a number of situations as certain manufacturers of systems in various industries have created and shown us), so such a cloud backup of their devices' settings / data / etc is impractical. Hence recommending manual backup of the data.

 

[amberwolf]

I found another thread where a user was having issues with his PR and BBSHD and he said it worked after resetting the PR to factory settings but I havent learned how to do that so I asked and am waiting for a reply. Anyway, if I figure this out I will definitely follow up so others can avoid future headaches!

I have only done minimal poking around, but so far I haven't found anything other than the method you already used to reset to defaults. These controllers were based on the ASI controllers (BAC500 IIRC?) so you could look into info on those as well if you don't find anything on the PR/BR/FR series.

I agree that Grin systems are not the most user friendly. They do assume that their customers are technically curious/competent and interested in DIY projects. That said, when their products work they are incredible.

That's generally true; it's part of why they make those RTR kits, for the less technically inclined users. Their more technically challenging products are highly customizable and thus require end-user competence (or willingness to research and learn) in those fields to correctly setup and use, like the Cycle Analyst and Phaserunner, etc.

There are ways user-friendliness could be improved for most of these things, by altering the UI significantly, and adding some automation in the setup programs asking specific questions of the user to guide the process. But the nature of those types of devices still require the user to know a fair bit of technical information about their parts and usage to properly setup and tune the operation of the devices to match their final goal. (specific goals with specific functionality requirements are the major reason to use Grin's customizable products...without that need there are usually much cheaper and easier ways to do things).

So...for people that don't need that specific a setup, those types of devices aren't needed, and the cheap generic plug-and-play ebike kits are generally good enough, and the tedious setup processes are reduced or eliminated.



I can imagine a UI that would run a user thru the setup of say, the Cycle Analyst, asking the user a series of functionality questions, and the setup program automatically choosing various options in the CA menus to accomplish those, then providing tuning of those options via easy-to-understand readouts and inputs, on a phone app or computer program. I couldn't write the code for this, but if there's ever anyone that would like to try coding it, I can help with working out the UI and workflow to make it easy on the user.

I am not as sure how to design such a UI for an FOC controller, but one could still be created.

 

[powerpeddles]

I have only done minimal poking around, but so far I haven't found anything other than the method you already used to reset to defaults. These controllers were based on the ASI controllers (BAC500 IIRC?) so you could look into info on those as well if you don't find anything on the PR/BR/FR series.


That's generally true; it's part of why they make those RTR kits, for the less technically inclined users. Their more technically challenging products are highly customizable and thus require end-user competence (or willingness to research and learn) in those fields to correctly setup and use, like the Cycle Analyst and Phaserunner, etc.

There are ways user-friendliness could be improved for most of these things, by altering the UI significantly, and adding some automation in the setup programs asking specific questions of the user to guide the process. But the nature of those types of devices still require the user to know a fair bit of technical information about their parts and usage to properly setup and tune the operation of the devices to match their final goal. (specific goals with specific functionality requirements are the major reason to use Grin's customizable products...without that need there are usually much cheaper and easier ways to do things).

So...for people that don't need that specific a setup, those types of devices aren't needed, and the cheap generic plug-and-play ebike kits are generally good enough, and the tedious setup processes are reduced or eliminated.



I can imagine a UI that would run a user thru the setup of say, the Cycle Analyst, asking the user a series of functionality questions, and the setup program automatically choosing various options in the CA menus to accomplish those, then providing tuning of those options via easy-to-understand readouts and inputs, on a phone app or computer program. I couldn't write the code for this, but if there's ever anyone that would like to try coding it, I can help with working out the UI and workflow to make it easy on the user.

I am not as sure how to design such a UI for an FOC controller, but one could still be created.

Fire TV, landline phone with voice mail, my washer and dryer, robot vacuum, ring camera, my cars infotainment system all things I am looking at now from my sofa that can be reset to a usable state without back files and 10 hour configuration processes,

The RTR kits come configured but according to grin if you make the mistake of any modifications you're back to the same state this gentleman's in, the kids themselves are the exact same products they just configure it the first time

 

[mexican_amigo]

I have a bit of an update with this. I was able to get smooth throttle performance. It turned out to be a hidden parameter (Wheel Speed Sensor) which was set to [2]Hall A. I am not sure which hall sensor that is but it made the phaserunner confused with the wheel speed and it messed up the throttling. I got smooth throttle after changing it to [1]Analog Input 3 or [0]Fwd/Rev or PAS2.


However I am still unable to do regen braking. In the Dashboard screen I can see the "Brake" flag highlight when the brakes are pulled but the "Regen" does not activate even though I have regen enabled on the CA and its throttle output is in the regen voltage range (mine is set up from 0.7V to 0.0V). I suspect it's because the phaserunner is not detecting the vehicle speed. In the graph below I throttled for some seconds and you can see the GMAC 10T RPM go to max RPM (~410 revolutions) which makes sense w/ my 52V battery; however, the vehicle speed remained at 0 kph the entire time (right axis is vehicle speed). According to the software suite the vehicle speed is just a calculation of motor RPM and wheel diameter (which I have set at 6" because the GMAC has a 5:1 gear reduction so the motor spins 5 times faster than the wheel), so there should be some speed calculation but it's just not happening. There is also a Regen Braking Speed Minimum setting that is set to 0 kph, so if the phaserunner thinks the vehicle is at 0kph then that is probably why the regen will not turn on. I am going to email this to Grin. I think this whole issue is just a compatibility error with my v2 Phaserunner. Currently Grin is on phaserunner V6 and the software has had several iterations as well. This whole thing is a bit frustrating but I hope it can be fixed!

 

[mexican_amigo]

I did a bit more testing. I reviewed the V6 phaserunner user manual and the table in section 6.2 states that V1-3 phaserunners should use the Hall A for the wheel speed sensor so I switched it back to that.


These are the settings on my phaserunner:

The issue is that the calculated vehicle speed is erratic and oscillates with negative values as shown in the graph below. The motor regens when the speed is above 0.0 kph. Maybe this is a bad hall sensor? What is strange is that it was working fine before I loaded the "default" phaserunner settings for my system.

 

[mexican_amigo]

FIGURED IT OUT! It turns out that the Wheel Sp. Sensor Pulses Per Rev has to be set to 0. The software suite says that it only matters if a third party display is used so I never thought that the default 6 pulses/rev (GMAC has 6 magnets for speedometer) would do anything. Strange how something that seems so insignificant was the root cause but I am glad it's over. Anyway once I set it to 0 the speed oscillation stopped and I am able to use regen as normal. The wheel diameter also had to be set back to the actual value for the speed to be accurate.

The graph below shows the motor RPM and vehicle speed in sync as it should be, and the speed has no oscillation.

 

[powerpeddles]

This is precisely why I have not bought a RTR kit from Grin, I'm sure the "tech" is amazing they are still not making a general consumer-oriented product for those who just want to buy something that is Plug and play. Amberwolf over simplified replies wrapped in a technical explanation of how the product works while impressive misses the mark. What needs to be solved for is a kit that allows you to set it up ONE time and it works EVERY time, if you mess it up it resets back to a default state like a car, if you switch from eco to performance setting in a car which is changing the throttle mapping you don't have to open the software and reconfigure settings or save a reset file if the controller goes south on you because you overtaxed it.

If you buy a RTR it should work as if you bought an EV,

 

[mexican_amigo]

You bring up valid points and I agree that they will need to step up their support if they want to scale up. One thing I worry about is their long term support for products. I am fairly convinced that the issue I had is due to a lack of compatibility with my older V2 phaserunner. At least the issue was fixable. I emailed Grin and asked them to update the "default" parameters since this could affect other users with V2 Phaserunners. I can follow up with their reply.

Due to this, as much as I enjoy Grin products, if someone is not technically/mechanically savvy AND has the time to do their own troubleshooting/research then it's hard for me to recommend them. But if you have both those things then I say go for it.

 

[titan_rw]

I was going to post my settings, as I have two bikes, both gmac / phaserunner conversions on 14s, both with around 4,000 km.

I checked my settings though, and I don't have the PR setting of 'wheel speed sensor pulses'. Only the CA cares about that in my setup. You must be on a newer PR firmware. Good to know if I update.