WARNING: Gotway Nikola production (assembly) issue [Solved]

[Rywokast]

1 hour ago, Marty Backe said:

I mounted the fan that I had already bought and took a 20-mile ride. It's working but the temperature is still higher than I'd prefer. Will have to buy one that moves more air.

You should know that the fan Gotway uses is very impressive and move a lot of air. I really wouldn't see the point of doing what you are planning on unless your fan doesn't work.

really? did they change to a centrifugal fan in all of them? because ive seen both.. i know they can move a lot more air than a standard fan especially directly what theyre pointed at.. i was just saying that because if it was already open and your fan is loud then its not like a bigger fan would be worse air flow, and there are ones that are totally silent, i recall the fan in my ACM2 being loud enough for me to hear it while standing on it lol

[Rywokast]

1 hour ago, Dave U said:

I don't own a Nikola yet, but reading this thread since the beginning. Why is no one mentioning or advising an antistatic wrist strap, ESD wrist strap, or ground bracelet is an antistatic device used to safely ground a person working on very sensitive electronic equipment, to prevent the buildup of static electricity on their body, which can result in electrostatic discharge (ESD), resulting in further damage to a unit in which will shorten the life/falter or simply fail at start?

or did i just miss something?

idk ive built like ten computers and never worn one while doing that.. i think as long as youre not on a carpet with socks youll be fine but its possible.. no harm in wearing one if you have it but i wouldnt go out and buy one

[Nils]

10 hours ago, Dzlchef said:

Nope, no additional fan, I'm to reuse the current fan.   Line 5 of the instructions is a bit fuzzy for me but hopefully it makes sense when I get everything pulled apart.

My board just arrived, with fan installed and connected, but without BT board so still have to move that over.

[Chriull]

4 hours ago, Rywokast said:

idk ive built like ten computers and never worn one while doing that.. i think as long as youre not on a carpet with socks youll be fine but its possible.. no harm in wearing one if you have it but i wouldnt go out and buy one

I have no special ESD equipment and also build up some computers and similar things successfully.

As you said - one should stay away from carpets and similar(and maybe not wear 100% synthetic cloth), additionally I "ground" myself before starting (at some grounded metal chassis or the ground "pin" of a socket.

And then, imo the most important part - one should only look with the eyes and not with the fingers! I've seen many people saying "look what's this" and in the same moment they touched the mainboard/graphics card/etc... All the "sensitive" PCB can be nicely held just at the outside cirumference, preferably there places with some ground planes (near the holes for the mounting screws), etc. imo many small (some maybe important, some not so..) points that happen just subconsiously by beeing careful.

EUC mainboards can easily handled with just touching them on the aluminium heatsink - no contact or even getting near anything sensitive is necessary...

Ps.: And since most/all EUC mainboards have quite some coating they should be relatively safe/unsensitivy anyways...

Edited July 13, 2019 by Chriull

[Rywokast]

31 minutes ago, Chriull said:

I have no special ESD equipment and also build up some computers and similar things successfully.

As you said - one should stay away from carpets and similar(and maybe not wear 100% synthetic cloth), additionally I "ground" myself before starting (at some grounded metal chassis or the ground "pin" of a socket.

And then, imo the most important part - one should only look with the eyes and not with the fingers! I've seen many people saying "look what's this" and in the same moment they touched the mainboard/graphics card/etc... All the "sensitive" PCB can be nicely held just at the outside cirumference, preferably there places with some ground planes (near the holes for the mounting screws), etc. imo many small (some maybe important, some not so..) points that happen just subconsiously by beeing careful.

EUC mainboards can easily handled with just touching them on the aluminium heatsink - no contact or even getting near anything sensitive is necessary...

Ps.: And since most/all EUC mainboards have quite some coating they should be relatively safe/unsensitivy anyways...

i guess if youre new to this these practices probably arent at all common sense.. i can picture someone picking up the board by a capacitor or fondling it nonchalantly while walking across the carpet with it to get a screwdriver or something lol

[Chriull]

22 minutes ago, Rywokast said:

i guess if youre new to this these practices probably arent at all common sense.. i can picture someone picking up the board by a capacitor or fondling it nonchalantly while walking across the carpet with it to get a screwdriver or something lol

Lol - and one should not forget to caress ones long hair cat often inbetween 

Ps.: To write something usefull too - i like to use the foam pieces/plastic bags from the PCBs as underlay, as they all should be (a bit) conductive to prevent static electricity.

[meepmeepmayer]

The Nikola Plus has a nice fan that blows air where it should go (over the heatsink and between board and heatsink). I still wonder if this is 100V only or if all 84V Nikolas will be "Plus" in the future. Someone tell plz

Also the side-mounted board has a much smaller heatsink now. I guess the big mosfets allow for this.

(OriginalPicture credit: EcoDrift)

[Marty Backe]

8 hours ago, Rywokast said:

really? did they change to a centrifugal fan in all of them? because ive seen both.. i know they can move a lot more air than a standard fan especially directly what theyre pointed at.. i was just saying that because if it was already open and your fan is loud then its not like a bigger fan would be worse air flow, and there are ones that are totally silent, i recall the fan in my ACM2 being loud enough for me to hear it while standing on it lol

I don't know about the newest versions of all their wheels, but the Nikola has the cage fan and it directs the air over the MOSFETs. The older box fans that Gotway uses don't focus the air as well. It's certainly not a silent fan though.

My replacement box fan is allowing the wheel to run about 8-degrees Celsius warmer than the stock fan. It's moving 9.5 CFM of air. I think I need to double the air flow.

[Dzlchef]

3 hours ago, Marty Backe said:

My replacement box fan is allowing the wheel to run about 8-degrees Celsius warmer than the stock fan. It's moving 9.5 CFM of air. I think I need to double the air flow.

Maybe it's reading the correct temperature now and the old board gave false lows?   How does it compare with the temperatures on the MSX 84V?

[esaj]

11 hours ago, Chriull said:

I have no special ESD equipment and also build up some computers and similar things successfully.

As you said - one should stay away from carpets and similar(and maybe not wear 100% synthetic cloth), additionally I "ground" myself before starting (at some grounded metal chassis or the ground "pin" of a socket.

And then, imo the most important part - one should only look with the eyes and not with the fingers! I've seen many people saying "look what's this" and in the same moment they touched the mainboard/graphics card/etc... All the "sensitive" PCB can be nicely held just at the outside cirumference, preferably there places with some ground planes (near the holes for the mounting screws), etc. imo many small (some maybe important, some not so..) points that happen just subconsiously by beeing careful.

EUC mainboards can easily handled with just touching them on the aluminium heatsink - no contact or even getting near anything sensitive is necessary...

Ps.: And since most/all EUC mainboards have quite some coating they should be relatively safe/unsensitivy anyways...

An EE once told me that usually handling an assembled board shouldn't be an issue, since there are resistances and capacitances etc. on the boards that can sink the energy from the usual static discharges. Mostly it comes down to handling individual components during assembly, there the danger is much higher, and the worse kind are the "walking dead/walking wounded"-components, ie. such that have been damaged by ESD, but that don't "show" it right away, instead they'll fail hours or days of use later, but it seems quite rare. Someone here in the forums (pico?) mentioned that they used to do a "burn-in" running the devices 48 hours at full load / maximum stress to see that things work like they should, but I guess it's rare with EUCs. KS does do some sort of a running test (shown in their videos where the wheels are being run on treadmills of sorts), but no idea how long or if each and every wheel goes through this. Some components are more sensitive to ESD-spikes than others (mosfet gates come to mind, it doesn't take that much to break the insulation between the gate and the channel).

[Marty Backe]

5 hours ago, Dzlchef said:

Maybe it's reading the correct temperature now and the old board gave false lows?   How does it compare with the temperatures on the MSX 84V?

Don't know. Haven't experimented with anything else (I just installed it last night). But my gut tells me that I need more airflow. When we ride tonight I'd like to compare temperatures a few times to get a proper calibration.

Edited July 13, 2019 by Marty Backe

[esaj]

I've bashed Gotway (without ever owning one ) in the past, but this debacle isn't exactly anything we haven't seen before. Granted, GW is probably the only manufacturer that more seriously pushes the envelope (KS and Ninebot have been catching up though), but at what cost? Failure rates of EUCs are higher than most types of vehicles, but subjectively it seems GW's still leading the pack there (too)...

KS has been more conservative with their designs, but they've also had issues with newer wheels (at least the lock-up and shaking issues with the newer KS18's), after a good run with the KS16-line, which had the lowest number of warranty issues a year or two back on the reseller statistics published somewhere in the forums, but those are probably outdated. And even then, the warranty-repair rate of over 1% of KS16S wasn't exactly stellar (that's still more than 1 in 100). CGI lately got a KS14 replacement board from them that had the battery connector installed in reverse (wtf?) and fried the charger and the new board. Ninebot seems to concentrate more on the (likely far more lucrative) e-scooter -business, after Z-series hasn't exactly been shining in reliability, although it seems to be mostly issues with the battery drain, and there have been rumors here that they might be leaving the EUC-business all together. InMotion had really serious battery issues with the V10-line (don't recall the model, V10F or something?), that could catch fire by itself if moisture creeped into the battery packs.

GW, Ninebot, KS and InMotion seem to be pretty much the big 4 nowadays. On the smaller brands, after a couple of years of hiatus, Rockwheel released GT16, but the V1 had lots of problems, don't know how the newer V2 has fared, better I assume, after GR16 I haven't really followed up on them (and that was already released before I got here... 2014?). Supposedly they do have a new model (GT16S / Iron) coming out, but it hasn't been released yet to my knowledge. I haven't followed up on IPS, but looks like they're more or less dead in the water, I5/S5 were the latest models? IPS has had a relatively good track record on reliability, as far as I remember, but they've never made a real high-performance wheel. Maybe they're just cooking up a new model, and taking their time, which probably is not a bad idea. That's pretty much all the "bigger" manufacturers that come to mind, even though EUCs are relatively new (Solowheel early this decade, 2012 or something, the Chinese manufactures emerging somewhere around 2014-2015?) a lot of manufacturers have already disappeared entirely from the scene.

We may be in something like the "Model-T -era", but I'd expect better reliability from these things, especially at the current speeds, considering how much more worse a failure can be if you're travelling at something like 30mph or such. Some people have suggested that the manufacturers should follow something more like the automotive / aerospace industry standards, but likely fail to understand the costs of such (a friend of mine, who's a helicopter mechanic, once told me that a single specially built bolt to a chopper can cost >60€ per piece, more complex parts can easily be thousands) and especially on cars, the economies of scale. Some car models are built and sold in the amounts of hundreds of thousands yearly, and in total there are millions of cars built and sold yearly, the entire EUC business is a small fraction compared to that. The requirements are much stricter, and still there are issues with them at times (albeit usually much "milder"). The cycles are longer, and more time is taken to test things thoroughly. While the software is complex, I know that the piece of software I wrote a couple of months ago won't be in real vehicles (not cars, btw) until about two years from now. Before that, it has gone through a lot of testing, and possible bugs should have been found and ironed out (hopefully... )

But maybe a lot of it comes down to us "consumers". We want (demand) more speed, more features and more power on the wheels, and we want it now, not year or two down the road. This puts pressure on the manufacturers to come up with new, faster, bigger and more powerful models, while making it look "sexy" on the outside or something and hasten the development cycle, maybe even skip proper testing, before putting the new model on the market. Unfortunately, this seems to be a somewhat general trend with many products worldwide. I started working professionally in the software-business in the latter half of last decade, when the "agile development" was picking up pace, and while it can produce good software when done "right", it feels like a lot of companies just use it as an excuse to push out their product earlier, develop things in shorter cycles and do the beta-testing on the users. I've heard the term "time to market" a bit too often. And "software can always be updated afterwards and bugs fixed, since nowadays everyone has Internet and everything's online"   At times, it seems this is what's happening with the wheels also. Unfortunately, a hardware or software bug there can have much more dire consequences than with (non-critical) products.

Slowing down the pace might not be a bad idea. More careful design and planning of the entire assembly procedure, proper testing cycles etc. would likely probably bring down the failure rate a lot. But that means that the buyers will need to wait longer, and many people seem to be "conditioned" to always get the newest and latest on everything. Why buy the model that has been proven over a year or two, when the new, shinier and "better" model is available very soon? The marketing on most things seems to be feeding this, you just have to get that new phone model, the 1 or 2 year old one you have isn't that good anymore   I was reading the hardware product design article-series someone linked to a while ago, and while it had good points, it ended with the "planning the product lifetime" or something along those lines, which basically stated that when you're finishing up your current model, most products have a lifecycle of 18 months(!) and you should start planning how to fade away the old model and how to get people to buy your next, better, shinier product... 

Don't know how much of any real use my drunken ramblings are, likely none, but that's my 2 cents anyway... 

[Dzlchef]

I swapped boards today and everything went very smooth. The lights, fan, Bluetooth, and motor work properly.  Definitely need to pay close attention to the instructions but it wasn’t difficult.  It took me 1.5 hours and I felt comfortable with every part of the process. It’s nice knowing that I have a proper board with larger MOSFETS 

I totally forgot about the new board tiltback setting in Wheellog, after testing softly, took off and tiltback!  That got fixed quick! 

Cheers!

[Marty Backe]

1 hour ago, Dzlchef said:

I swapped boards today and everything went very smooth. The lights, fan, Bluetooth, and motor work properly.  Definitely need to pay close attention to the instructions but it wasn’t difficult.  It took me 1.5 hours and I felt comfortable with every part of the process. It’s nice knowing that I have a proper board with larger MOSFETS 

I totally forgot about the new board tiltback setting in Wheellog, after testing softly, took off and tiltback!  That got fixed quick! 

Cheers!

And now your wheel has 0-miles again 

[Eliran]

On 7/13/2019 at 2:07 AM, mrelwood said:

Gotway should definitively annouce how to know the caracteritics of their new batch of boards. 

I want a new Nicola but how do I know that my board is the new one or is the old one?

 

Edited July 15, 2019 by Eliran

[wheelr]

@Eliran All replacement boards I've seen have a build date / serial of 190609.. or June 9th 2019. So that's one way to check.

[Phil McLaughlin]

16 hours ago, Dzlchef said:

I swapped boards today and everything went very smooth. The lights, fan, Bluetooth, and motor work properly.  Definitely need to pay close attention to the instructions but it wasn’t difficult.  It took me 1.5 hours and I felt comfortable with every part of the process. It’s nice knowing that I have a proper board with larger MOSFETS 

I totally forgot about the new board tiltback setting in Wheellog, after testing softly, took off and tiltback!  That got fixed quick! 

Cheers!

It would be really interesting to see what your original board looks like underneath. If your MOSFETs were slathered with glue and you managed 1000 trouble free miles anyway it would be a very interesting data point. I am guessing that the Nikola boards fail readily only when both MOSFETs in at least one pair are contaminated. Great to hear you are up and running with the new board!

[Rudy Sijnke]

1 hour ago, wheelr said:

@Eliran All replacement boards I've seen have a build date / serial of 190609.. or June 9th 2019. So that's one way to check.

Where on the board to check this? Sorry technoob here😊

[wheelr]

On 7/13/2019 at 5:20 AM, Nils said:

 

8 minutes ago, Rudy Sijnke said:

Where on the board to check this? Sorry technoob here😊

On the white sticker next to "Code:"

Edited July 15, 2019 by wheelr

[MBIKER_SURFER]

Looks like 16 th of June!

[Dzlchef]

1 hour ago, Phil McLaughlin said:

It would be really interesting to see what your original board looks like underneath. If your MOSFETs were slathered with glue and you managed 1000 trouble free miles anyway it would be a very interesting data point. I am guessing that the Nikola boards fail readily only when both MOSFETs in at least one pair are contaminated. Great to hear you are up and running with the new board!

I’m planning on pulling it apart to look, just wanted to get some distance on the new board first to be safe.  I don’t have a lot of house space and my garage is 100 years old so there’s not much “clean room” to leave something disassembled.  I’m not ready to follow Phil just yet but soon I’ll rebuild the original. 

[Dzlchef]

2 hours ago, wheelr said:

@Eliran All replacement boards I've seen have a build date / serial of 190609.. or June 9th 2019. So that's one way to check.

Actually mine is stamped June 4th 

[Rudy Sijnke]

8 minutes ago, Dzlchef said:

Actually mine is stamped June 4th 

😒

[wheelr]

2 hours ago, Dzlchef said:

Actually mine is stamped June 4th 

Go figure, that's the date of Marty's initial post. I would however still go with June 6 as most replacement boards appear to have been built from that date onwards.

Edited July 15, 2019 by wheelr

[Marty Backe]

6 hours ago, wheelr said:

Go figure, that's the date of Marty's initial post. I would however still go with June 6 as most replacement boards appear to have been built from that date onwards.

And I let Jason know of the failure a bit before I posted. He immediately contacted Gotway. So they were on to a solution very quickly.