So I finally got all the parts together that I needed to bench test my board, and everything was working great. My motor was reacting as was expected, until everything stopped working all of a sudden. To give a little context, I have a vesc, a bldc motor, and a DC power supply that I used for testing because I don’t have a battery yet. The power supply can output any voltage from 0-31.5V up to 1 Amp (could this be the root of the problem?). My motor is rated for 8-10s so I figured this would be perfect. I cranked the voltage all the way to 31.5, and I mounted the motor on the board, plugged the power supply into the vesc, and plugged the vesc into my computer and the motor.
Everything was working good. I switched from the default setting for BLDC to FOC (my motor is unsensored). Then, I followed this tutorial to configure the FOC settings. It was working great on FOC, and it made much less noise, which was even better. I wanted to show my friend the difference in noise between to two configurations, so I saved my configuration, and I switched back and forth between the default configuration and my new configuration a couple of times. All of a sudden, I heard a loud “click” noise, and my motor stopped turning. The vesc still had a blue light, and the yellowish-greenish light still comes on when I hit the arrow keys on my computer, but the motor doesn’t turn.
I can’t imagine that the problem is in the motor, although I am definitely not an expert, so please correct me if you think otherwise. The motor still turns fine when I turn it with my hand. Running “faults” in the terminal window returns nothing. On the “Realtime Data” tab, when I turn the motor with my hand, I get the expected results on the Current/Duty and RPM tabs, and the Tacho and Tacho ABS values respond as expected.
However, when I hit the up arrow on my keyboard while using the default configuration, the ERPM maxes at about 210 and does a weird pattern (see picture). Before, it would go up to around 14,000 and do a kind of jagged line that stayed between 13,000 and 15,000. The motor doesn’t even twitch.
When I hit the up arrow on my keyboard while using my saved FOC configuration from when my motor/vesc was working, I get a flat line at about 10,000 ERPM. Before, it was a flat line at 13,000 RPM. The motor doesn’t even twitch.
Also, the Tacho and Tacho ABS values go up when I hit the arrow key, even though the motor is not moving.
Here is a screenshot of the ERPM values when I turn the motor back and forth quickly by hand:
Please help me out here. Is the problem my VESC? Is it my motor? Is it my power supply? Let me know what you think!
BTW, I got my VESC from