There is something fundamentally wrong with these controllers. I have burned up 7 of them now and after 7 I was starting to doubt myself as I could get it all working perfectly then when I tried to use it outside without a protected power supply, it would just glitch and burn up.
There is something really wrong with its voltage regulation. as soon as it draws any power it’s glitching the esp32 causing it to short out and light up the mosfets like an incandescent light bulb.
There is also something really wrong with the signal traces from the PCB to the esp32, when trying to use hall sensors the signal is just so noisy even after adding strong pull up resistors it chugs and glitches as soon as they are used due to the noise picked up on the hall signal traces from the power swiching that run right next to them.
I have tried the 3.2plus and the 3.3 plus and both done the same when using hoverboard motors at 12v.
I was just about to buy some odroid controllers and give up on simpleFOC when i seen these on aliexpress, I cant find who makes them but gemini said it was a copy of the ESP32 DUAL SimpleFOC 1.0. so as a sanity check I ordered one to see if it was a hardware or software issue I was having before and if it was a repeat the next step was odroid or VESC.
To my surprise the new board just worked! no glitching, hall sensor signals are clean, it hasn’t shorted out my power supply once. The only conclusion I can come to is that the MKS DUAL FOC are just terribly designed and completely unfit for use. Just search this form and its just post after post of smoked MKS DUAL FOC PLUS controllers.
4 Answers
4
If it’s a copy I’d like to know if they are using the same driver chips (EG2133)?
it looks like it is the same chip, even the current sense example code works so it looks like its all wired the same other than lacking USB.
I have been trying to replace my hoverboard controllers for over a year now but I have had nothing but problems with esp32 simplefoc controllers.
So you’re able to set a dead zone with these drivers and have no shoot through?
Would you recommend them for hoverboard motors in general?
It seems your wheels are smaller than 6.5 or 10" and running at lower voltage tames the motors even more. (I assume you use 24V)
I only have one of the new controllers at the moment but all the tests I have done shows it working perfectly so I have ordered another 2 so I can test it driving. but I’m very confident they should work as they have shown none of the intermittent faults of the dual foc plus controllers. I was actually shocked how undramatic the new controllers were after all the problems I had seen with the mks controllers.
hoverboard motors are great they are very powerful cheap and reliable, the biggest issue is a controller for them, I have been using the v1 hoverboard controllers with custom firmware at 48v but they are big hot and need a lot of supporting hardware to make them work properly and are getting very difficult to find, so I have been working on making a replacement using simplefoc but I keep frying controllers. my rover normally only travels at walking pace so dropping it from 48v to 12v works fine as im not going very fast as you only need high voltage if you want speed.
