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MSuper V3S+ lasted 5 months...


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I got my hands on a ticket to Eagles v/s Panthers on Thursday night football. Figured I'd make the trip to Charlotte and cruse around down town for an hour or so before I went to the stadium. I arrived in Charlotte about 5PM with an 8:25 start time for the game, I had plenty of time to cruse around and enjoy some of the city.

I made it half a block out of the parking deck when the wheel stuttered under me a few times forcing me to step off it. I stood it back up but it didn't re-initialize so I powered it off and back on. Poof. A nice little puff of smoke popped out the side and the air was filled with the smell of burning electronics. 

Fortunately, I only made it half a block so carrying my dead weight wheel back to the car was only marginally miserable. Very disappointing. I was really looking forward to wheeling around down town Charlotte. It's a beautiful little city.

Performance or reliability... but not both I guess.

Hopefully a new board will be in transit soon. 

great big SIGH...

20171013_193646.jpg

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Yeeks it looks like you popped a few 'FETs.   Looks to be an older wheel with the old motor connectors too.  How much do you weigh?  Done much hill climbing on it?  Maybe repeated stress from steep climbs eventually did the electronics in.  Good thing it wasn't far from your car indeed.

Did you check the rest of your cabling for melted wiring that may have softened over time and allowed an eventual short circuit resulting in the MOSFET explosion?  I'd highly recommend to any other Msuper owners to review their wiring to try to get some distance away from one another as much as possible. Bundling hot wires together I think has an additive effect like placing three propane torches aiming at the same spot.  Something's bound to melt and short circuit.

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I go about 210. 

All street riding and sidewalks. Almost no hills tho the ramp down from the parking deck was steep tho not overly long. I live in a pretty flat area. Nothing traumatic like Marty does.

Avg top speed about 15 - 18 mph when I'm making a run to the store or to pick up chinese food or ... tho I have got it up to 22 once. I probably avg 8 to 10 mph as I ride it down town quite a bit among people walking on the sidewalks. 

When it went I was tooling along about walking speed.

It's almost brand new. Just bought it 5 months ago. I got maybe 450 - 500 miles on it.

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Huh that's puzzling.  :confused1:  Got any more photos of the wiring?  Any signs of heat stress on the thermal sleeves?  Any melted wiring visible along the motor cables from the axle to the control board?  I wonder whether inside the axle maybe there could be some wiring with damaged insulation as it was pulled through the tight axle channel.   @Rehab1 and @Jrkline "Wheel Whisperer" IIRC mentioned that the entrance in the motor to the channel can be sharp and have metal spurs which could compromise cabling.  Over time perhaps vibration allowed to wires to short?

It would be informative to do a forensic analysis to see what the cause of the failure was.

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I went through the wiring this morning. Everything looks good. All the connectors are sound, no melted spots or warping along the insulation that I can find. I haven't pulled the plugs from the board yet or cleaned the silicon off them so perhaps something at one of the connectors...

Does Gotway suffer from the overcharge problem where if you take a fully charged wheel and start out down a steep hill for say 5 or 6 hundred feet... will it put too much charge in the pack? I remember reading about this with some mfg wheels but it's been a couple of years since I ran across anything referencing this and didn't think about it at all when I jumped on the wheel in Charlotte. It was a long steep ramp down from the first level of the parking deck.

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27 minutes ago, stevedig said:

I went through the wiring this morning. Everything looks good. All the connectors are sound, no melted spots or warping along the insulation that I can find. I haven't pulled the plugs from the board yet or cleaned the silicon off them so perhaps something at one of the connectors...

Does Gotway suffer from the overcharge problem where if you take a fully charged wheel and start out down a steep hill for say 5 or 6 hundred feet... will it put too much charge in the pack? I remember reading about this with some mfg wheels but it's been a couple of years since I ran across anything referencing this and didn't think about it at all when I jumped on the wheel in Charlotte. It was a long steep ramp down from the first level of the parking deck.

An unfortunate failure. I must say that it's rare that a control board will burn up under the circumstances that you describe.

Any wheel that provides regenerative charging (I don't know of a wheel that doesn't) can have a problem overcharging. Gotway will beep at you if you got downhill on a fully charged wheel. 3 short beeps followed by a  2 second pause, and then repeat.

I'm not aware that this can ultimately lead to a blown MOSFET.

Electronics do fail sometimes. Although unusual, it does happen.

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Yeah, no beeping on the way down the hill. It had ridden in the trunk for 3.5 hours and was off the charger for another 3 or so before I rolled 100 feet and started down the ramp. It took a good bit of lean back to keep the wheel from picking up speed quickly but not enough to push a significant amount of current/voltage back up the pipe I suspect. 800 feet of steep ramp or so isn't a 1/4 mile hill either.

I'll snap a few more pics of wiring and connectors and ... to post later. Maybe someone will see something I don't. I'm pretty good with electronics like this tho. I've been an RC enthusiast for years, soldering together esc's, flight controllers, vtx's, cameras, servos and electric motors on planes and quads. I've burned my fair share of each over the years...

Like I said, a few more pics later of choice bits and segments. Thanks for the extra eyes.

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These are indicative of the rest of the wiring in the wheel. All look brand new except for a little carbon dust from the burning fets. The wires all came through surprisingly well actually. Not a melted spot to be found.

I'd upload a few more but it seems i've reached my quota...

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1 hour ago, stevedig said:

These are indicative of the rest of the wiring in the wheel. All look brand new except for a little carbon dust from the burning fets. The wires all came through surprisingly well actually. Not a melted spot to be found.

I'd upload a few more but it seems i've reached my quota...

Hy, 

please use an external photo service with links, the forum software allows only minimal storage to users!

 

To your problem:

Its like Marty said: Shit happens, normally under these conditions a Mosfet does not blow, but who knows, perhaps something other on the board is responsible for the mosfet failure. Anyway: You need a new board now.

 

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External photo svc... yep, don't have one of those. taking and sharing pics isn't really my thing. I only put these few up as someone asked to see the wiring and another set of eyes never hurts.

I hope it is a result of some other failure on the board. I can see no other cause and if not it will just go up in smoke again when replaced.

I need a new board you say... laf. 

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33 minutes ago, stevedig said:

External photo svc... yep, don't have one of those. taking and sharing pics isn't really my thing. I only put these few up as someone asked to see the wiring and another set of eyes never hurts.

I hope it is a result of some other failure on the board. I can see no other cause and if not it will just go up in smoke again when replaced.

I need a new board you say... laf. 

This sounds like what happened to @EUC Extreme, he was going very slow and hit a small bump that fried his wheel.  Have you seen this video?

 

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I think we might have a winner ^

Tho my wheel isn't wrapped in an armor box like that... the behavior is identical. I stood it back up, tried power it off and back on and that is exactly what happened. twitch, twitch, jerk puff.

Hadn't seen this. Thanks!

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1 hour ago, stevedig said:

I think we might have a winner ^

Tho my wheel isn't wrapped in an armor box like that... the behavior is identical. I stood it back up, tried power it off and back on and that is exactly what happened. twitch, twitch, jerk puff.

Hadn't seen this. Thanks!

Your Welcome!  I don't know if he fixed it or not.  The date code on the video is wrong, this just happened a few months ago.  Someone pointed it out and he explained that he never reset the camera date.

  If you go to the last video in the video thread, you'll see that same wheel going super fast on trails.  He modified it for more speed.

 

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Thanks for the additional photos.  Maybe once you get the new control board after you connect the motor wires and before you connect the battery, try rolling the tire to make sure it spins freely to help rule out any non-visible wiring shorts somewhere.  I'd hate to see a new control board go poof like the old one.  I still wonder if there could be a short somewhere...

I wonder whether the three hour trip in 27°C weather in the trunk preheated the heatsink making it less effective to cool the MOSFETs.  Do you have a thermometer?  Try leaving it in the trunk for three hours with the car in the sun and see what the temperature is.

Edit:  Thinking about it some more, you probably would have noticed your wheel's temperature taking it out of the trunk so likely it wasn't burning hot....

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What's your riding style like?  Any repeated fast accelerations and braking?  Any repeated pendulum idling?  Did you check if the pedal magnet got loose with vibration?  On the thermal sleeving there appear to be some brown stains of the sleeves.  Do you have a clearer photo of those and the black sheath of the motor wiring bundle coming out of the axle?

Compare to images in this post:

 

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I wonder about the effect of humidity on battery performance.  There are examples of riders like Ian of speedyfeet who get worse range than I would predict purely on the basis of temperature. 

@Hunka Hunka Burning Love

You're saying this is an older wheel, how are you able to tell?  You're saying that Gotway has changed their manufacturing of the MS3+ since it was initially introduced?  It's confusing to try to research this wheel because of all that has happened over the last six months.  I want so badly to believe that the current wheels are okay now.  The axle issue seems like it might be inevitable like with the Monster. 

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14 hours ago, mezzanine said:

I wonder about the effect of humidity on battery performance.  There are examples of riders like Ian of speedyfeet who get worse range than I would predict purely on the basis of temperature. 

@Hunka Hunka Burning Love

You're saying this is an older wheel, how are you able to tell?  You're saying that Gotway has changed their manufacturing of the MS3+ since it was initially introduced?  It's confusing to try to research this wheel because of all that has happened over the last six months.  I want so badly to believe that the current wheels are okay now.  The axle issue seems like it might be inevitable like with the Monster. 

I doubt humidity has any effect on Li-ion battery performance, but I'm no battery guru.  Cold temperature does though a fair bit.

I just noticed that the wheel @stevedig has uses the black connectors.  They might be the soldered and crimped ones.  Five months old would put the wheel to be made before May 2017.  Looking closer you see the CB is coded 2017020x so Feb 2017?

I think they more recently dropped the black connectors which melt from the heat and replaced them with the clear shrink tubing.  They also added individual heat sleeves for the wiring out of the axle before the connectors.  Check out @zlymex's photos in that link I posted.

It's difficult to say how problematic this type of control board failure is, but for lighter weight riders that do average rides without stressing their wheels I hope the majority are safe.  I'm guessing that repeated heating of the wiring is eventually making the insulation thin at some point allowing a short to occur.  Maybe the electronic components and wiring thickness aren't properly engineer rated for the higher voltages used?  They might be "good enough" for certain conditions over a certain period of time.  

@EUC Extreme did you find out what was the cause of your control board failures?

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24 minutes ago, EUC Extreme said:

The same reason as ever before. For some incomprehensible reason, it just breaks down.
Nothing seems to help.

Do you think that the MOSFETs are maybe over stressed resulting in them overheating and eventually failing?  Maybe some are below spec so they fail early?  Have you tried maybe swapping the stock MOSFETs with some heavier duty, higher rated ones?

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My riding style is pretty tame. I'm a cruiser. No tricks or jumps other than an occasional hop off a curb or down a couple of wide steps, things I do by necessity rather than intent for thrills.

I will crank the speed up a bit from time to time, 22 or 23 mph, which I consider pushing it... but have never actually gotten it to beep at me. I have turned off all but the last level alarm which I set up pretty close to 50k. I rarely ride backwards. Much easier to see where I'm going the other way around so very little hard reversal of direction.

It's ridden a lot, but not hard.

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as an aside... gotway picked up on my post on Facebook and contacted me directly, interested in helping... and Dion @myfunwheel has been great! Dropped him an e-mail the day it happened and he responded before I could take a deep breath. He's got a new board on the way along with the new connectors for me to swap out. easy stuff for me as I have all the tools from my RC hobby life and lots of experience. 

I have no complaints... other than the fact that I popped a few fets for no apparent reason. 

I wish to hell I could find a short someplace to fix. I'd feel a lot better about putting the new board in and pushing the power button when it comes if I could point at a reason for the magic smoke and do something about it.

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St. Dion and St. Jason are the two North American saints of the EUC world. :innocent1:  We can't speak any more highly of them when it comes down to customer service.

Hopefully it's just one of those rare occurrences where maybe the control board ended up frying for some random reason (maybe an out of spec component) and the motor and wiring are still fine.

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