Y piece or canbus

I’m putting my 2nd board together. What are people’s preference for dual setup? I have a reciever y piece but could put a canbus cable together. Is there a real advantage to setting the vescs up as master slave with canbus cable?

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i split and not use CAN.

two reasons.

one, redundancy. if one vesc goes out you’ll have the other still working. if using CAN, if master goes down, slave does as well.

another, ease of configuration. why mess with configuring BLDC tool to use CAN when you can just program each vesc as if it’s single use? i know CAN configuration isn’t that complicated but why introduce that at all?

i know CAN is required if you’re using any kind of monitoring tool, but i think that’s beyond the scope of this discussion.

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I also prefer the split. simple=better

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hmmmm. So after reading that attached thread and this one I went ahead and bought a few servo splitters. So this would be as simple as setting setting up each vesc with one motor with the same values right? Connect both vescs to a single receiver with one of the 5V wires cut/disconnected…is this all correct?

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yep, that’s how my e-mtb is set up.

Thanks for the replies. Pressure is on now as I think I have all I need to complete the build…

I just took a regular servo, cut a small slit into the outer wrap on the PPM cable, and soldered another cable directly to it. The other VESC only needs 1 PPM cable going to it.

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i would just do motor detection for each motor for its respective vesc, the values can vary just slightly across motors.

and yes, cut one of the 5v lines coming off the Y split.

So just connect them up as normal and cut one of the red wires coming from one of the vesc servo cables?

Where did you get your servo splitters from? A link would be much appreciated. I looked but could only find leads like this

Do you guys think I could just have one male to male connector on each vesc like normal. Then connect each of those those connectors to the 2 connectors on this Y harness? Then plug the remaining connector into the receiver? Then also cut one of the red wires?

Yes, but don’t know what color. The one in the middle.

I have been using the split method since day one and it has been rock solid dependable. Also torque when accelerating and braking feels very even across the back wheels.

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Have a look for this kind of split wire :

They are smaller and more compact, less wire mess (-:

ebay https://www.ebay.de/i/310826874737?chn=ps&dispItem=1

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I use this exact same one, courtesy of @psychotiller

I would solder them instead of these connectors, had them coming loose once…

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Why do people use CAN bus? Is there an advantage to that over something like pwm? Also am I blind or is my account restricted? I can’t find where to start a new thread. Im a new user. Also what kind of CAN is this, Ive only see that kind with 2 wires, can low and can high.

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You probably haven’t spent enough time reading posts to post. You need 30 minutes.

Can has the added benefit of being able to retrieve data from both VESCs while using a bluetooth module and appropriate mobile software, though I suppose you can split servo while using the CAN connection purely for data.

Yeah you are right they can come loose… The linked one are better then some other from tight fitting factor… But I always take a piece of electrice tape or shrinktube to secure them… better for sure!

So I would simply solder the orange or white wire coming from one of the vescs to the orange or white wire from the other vesc?

Glad this thread was made. I was debating on whether to use canbus or just split the servo lead. My friend told me to use canbus because then the motors would be “synced up”, but he’s never built a dual drive eSk8 before :joy:

Really, the only reason to use canbus that I can think of, is if you want to use the traction control setting, but traction control makes things a little too predictable for me!

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