6v sag too much?

Yes it does record a graph of voltage of the pack, amperage and lately you can pinpoint lowest and highest voltage from the whole record to a particular point on the graph and google map.

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With my 10s 5ah pack I’ve gotten up to 14 miles on flat ground and up to 12 miles with big hills.

That’s pretty damn good for only 180 watt hours (nominal V * Ah). The original space cell was 270 watt hours and I range tested it at 15 miles and change in the 15 degree weather going moderately slow.

That was about two years ago with the LG cells i guess. Chemistry is always getting better.

I got around 23 miles with hills on 12S 6.2Ah lipos, averaging over 20mph

Up steep hills I averaged 18Wh/mi. But on flats with nice concrete it was only 8-10 Wh/mi. Overall average was 12Wh/mi

Now I can trigger BMS cutoff at ~47V (3.9V/cell “nominal”). Zippy’s suck…

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Btw - would you know what cells Raptor 2 has? They seem to be very decent in terms of range and discharge - 432 Wh :fearful:

Samsung 30Q’s

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yeah they have 10S4P samsung 30Q packs. So your looking at 36v @ 12Ah so roughly 432 watt hours.

Not sure what that translates to on a Raptor but on one of my boards that would get you about 25 miles at 25mph. Ish.

That’s pretty good range namasaki and jmasta but it’s difficult to compare to 18650s because there seems to be different weight listed on different sights for the lipos you guys have. Seems to be close tho

@jmasta I average 23 wh/mi on flat land

The lack of voltage sag really helps mileage and so does the moderate San Diego weather.

15F is colder than I have ever experienced. Unless I’m mistaken, that kind of cold can have a huge effect on lithium cells and a huge effect on mileage.

Ok so my pack still has about 5 volts until cutoff, or about 10 mile range, but due to sag vesc is hitting soft and hard cutoff during heavy load. I can’t feel any power cutout while riding though, not sure how or why.

My concern is when per cell voltage goes down to 3v, let’s say, and sags down to 2.4v under load, would this cause permanent damage to the cells since their charge should be kept well above 2.5v?

when you hit cut off’s you shouldn’t be drawing nearly the same current, so you shouldn’t be sagging as bad, just make sure your cutoff start is at a sane value like 3.0~

If your cutoff start is set to 3.0V and the cutoff end to 2.8V then the VESC will start to reduce power linear ones it reaches 3.0V.

So if you give 100% throttle and your motor max is set to 60A it will be behave like this. 100% throttle at 3.0V single cell voltage = 60A 100% throttle at 2.95V single cell voltage = 45A 100% throttle at 2.9V single cell voltage = 30A 100% throttle at 2.85 single cell voltage = 15A 100% throttle at 2.8V single cell voltage = 0A

And the VESC is extremely fast to redice the power. So when your cutoff end is at 2.8V it will very unlikely be possible to go below that. And 2.8V a cell is still relatively conservative so that you don’t need to worry when you feel that the VESC reduces the power. You can even drain until the board barely moves and still be on the safe side. But it is of course important that you use other cutoff start and end values for LiPos (3.5, 3.3).

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This is exceedingly helpful, thank you.

I’ll send you some beer money for all the work you’ve put into this, and your continuing support here.

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I did notice that a vesc will still run the motor at reduced speed beyond cutoff end, but this is unloaded. It’sd probably fail to drive anything loaded.

I’m around 200lb, I get 20-23wh on my commutes (very spirited). This is on 12s2p A123 with a variety of stuff. Carvon v2.5 dual, banggood 5065 single, jlabs 6355 dual. Amazingly consistently around 20wh/mile.

What’s everyone’s weight @Jinra @Titoxd10001 @jmasta?

Are the lipo guys relatively light? Or does lipo really delivery more efficient wh/mile? A123 have very good voltage sag characteristics, but not as good as lipo, I think.

And I’ve found it’s really hard to squeeze out the last few % out of the pack. The voltage sags crazy when the pack is near depleted. But A123 kind of have weird behavior.

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The problem with this theory is that the vesc doesn’t monitor single cells, it only monitors the battery as a whole. So trusting the vesc to fully protect your battery is false security because if your cells become too unbalanced, you could wind up over discharging cells before the vesc backs off. A BMS on the other hand, can provide full protection by monitoring individual cells or cell groups.

I have the Metr app and module. Here is a record of some riding I did today with some long gradual hills and some short steep hills. Numbers recorded from just 1 of 2 Vescs. Motors are 6374 200kv gearing is 15/40 with 90mm wheels

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Because of that I recommend to use 2.8V as cutoff end. Gives you some wiggle room. But the cell drift on li-ion cells is very little. At LiPo cells it is much worse.

Watt hours per mile is the overall efficiency of the entire system (and driver). I’d argue battery chemistry is somewhat irrelevant to this value. It’s simply how much power did you draw, for how long, and far did you travel? The VESC only knows how much power it consumed, not where it got it from

Wow, after reading this thread I’m concerned about my next build with 10s4p VTC5. I didn’t know that the voltage sag is so extreme with Li-Ion :fearful:. On my mountainboard with top mounted voltage meter and 10s1p 10Ah Turnigy Graphene Lipo the worst voltage sag I’ve ever seen was about 0.6V :grin:

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