Actually these things cost more than $100…
The problem is that VESC can fail for many reasons, especially in its raw form without no case!, one of the reasons they can fail is shorting them out accidentally - I did this to two VESC - it’s simply bad luck! and not covered under warranty.
The warranty I offer is only good if the fault is proven to be a manufacturing fault.
From the 250 units sold by me so far, since the BETA program started, it actually seems the failure rate is fairly low! I am not sure what an acceptable failure rate is with electronics but so far it seems ok.
Originally I had people return the first batch because of the wrong capacitors being used during assembly, not necessarily because of faults - those vesc actually did worked well with the wrong caps… Those people got their money back
The 2nd batch - all made to spec - maybe just 2 or 3 out of 100 (which is what batch @moja has @cmatson) - these guys will get a repair or replacement. whatever is cheapest/quickest
This last batch it’s too early to know if there is problems. hopefully none!
Most people’s VESC problems can be solved/repaired by replacing a few parts that often cost much less than $5 - the difficult part is the soldering job and man hours, so REPAIR is what i offer first…depending how/who carries out the repair i might offer store credit or cash refund etc to cover cost of repair…
Like I said these things are super expensive and I make next to no margin out of selling them, so of course I am reluctant to straight swap these for people - especially when I have not stock of them to swap with… So in the long run if failure rates get too high I will simply stop having them made as it won’t be viable.
However, so far i think it’s been fairly acceptable in terms of reliability & failure rates & most people are being reasonable when it comes to solving problems. ALSO I am not a PCB technician OR Software engineer so don’t get shocked when i say i can’t fix it! I can’t because i don’t know how! I also can’t fix the dead ones in a box on my bench so I’m out of pocket on those ones too.
At the end of the day, If we all work together we can find viable solutions… Hopefully this melbourne business can repair the moja VESC, if they can at a reasonable price i will contact them and try to negotiate a repair contract so that i can offer better warranty & service to everyone through the form of repair. Maybe eventually I could even start offering extended warranties OR replacement warranties!
For folks in the us with VESC i know that @chaka has done some repair work. Contact him to get a quote & ill pay the repair cost. if he is obliging. My general concept is to ensure no one is out of pocket if their vesc fails due to manufacturing faults.
Eventually VESC won’t be considered a BETA and then everyone can expect much better warranty & service but in return likely pay a small premium more per unit for that.
I hope this make things clear to anyone wondering about buying a vesc!