Just read in the news that a German guy was hospitalized with life-threatening injuries because he rode his esk8 and it suddenly stopped for no apparent reason. Threw him off the board onto the street and he did not have a helmet (which is stupid I know).
It seems like this issue of sudden breaks that throw you off the board is quite common (at least this article is not the first time I heard about it) and we were just lucky that nobody got hurt like this until now.
On the other hand this could get the attention needed to start at least a conversation about how to make them safe and legal. Also it gives you perspective that the electronics we use today are in no way safe and potentially very dangerous. VESC issues can be life-threatening when they happen at the wrong time.
The title is misleading, there is no reason mentioned. Hope the guy gets well soon again.
Had the same experience with the winning remote yesterday: full stop while accelerating at high speed. No coasting, full stop (blocked wheels) - and that’s very dangerous!
I suspect those remotes are getting unreliable when the battery is getting empty. Else they work fine if fail safe is applied correctly. But in this situation it behaved as if fail safe wasn’t working. Need to look into that.
Yeah - sorry the question mark was supposed to go behind the entire sentence not just VESC.
Reason I did this was to get the attention on the topic that the ESCs we use are not safe. Read it a couple of times now that users had this issue with their VESCs - so wanted to show that this is a really big problem. At the time of writing I did not think of the receiver to be potentially dangerous as well. Never had any problem with my GT2B - experienced sudden breaking on my ESC however several times. But you are obviously right.
I see that many people have build their arduino based receiver and transmitter. They/I could program the receiver in such a way that that sudden braking never happens. Even if the transmitter malfunctions and transmits instant braking signal, the receiver will produce a smoother braking commands that a rider can manage.
Sudden acceleration((that can throw you off board too) is already managed by VESC but could be useful with other esc. So again the receiver can be programmed not to give out high acceleration signal.
Would you mind screwing that thing open and see if we can fit a more powerful battery in there? (thinking 800mah). I’m on the verge to buy three of them and getting kind of worried by the reports people are making
Arduinos are NOT known for their reliable connection and stable performance. So using an Arduino will probably increase the risk of these issues even more.
Umm, it will depend on how you wire them and stuff. If you solder your connection or use reliable connector(like on VESC) there WONT be any problems. At the heart of an Arduino is an AVR AtMega micro-controller, which you basically program. If your program is correct and connections strong, it will behave as you ask it to.
If you connect the receiver like in the image below, yeah they WILL be unreliable
If we had a small group of good developers that could either fork or augment Vedder’s VESC source we could add code that introduces rules for unexpected behavior, like going from full accelerate to full brake the code could transition a little more slowly.
My arduino (Teensy actually) code does this on acceleration but not brake. It sets the acceleration rate internally rather than a straight link to the trigger - so if you go from zero to full power instantly it spreads it out across some hundreds of milliseconds.
But it would be a whole lot more reliable to do it in VESC than in your controller or driver software and also would be standard across all builds that use VESC.
I had it open a few times but didn’t take pictures. It’s a 500mAh in there and normally it lasts for days. I was riding yesterday for more than 5 hours and it was not fully charged. I think fully charged it wouldn’t have happened. Nevertheless, it’s bad.
The VESC is 100% safe with it’s timeout setting and will let you coast at any unforeseen event. But it has to relay on the data input from the device in your fingers.
Now, if there is garbage sent by the remote it’s difficult for the VESC to cope with it! The remote is sending random full stop commands when it shouldn’t as soon as the battery becomes weak.
This thread is not the place to discuss this but so far I have not seen one thread about an arduino development for this type of thing where there is no mention of signal loss or other problems.
So it seems to me that so far nobody was able to come up with a bullet-proof solution. Even the VESC itself was reported to randomly reboot…
