KS16 Breakdown after 1022 Km(*)

[RenaissanceMan]

(*) Km measured by Kingsong :-)

This was my last ride for a while: starting with the odometer reading 1003 km, real distance of today's ride 15km (Kingsong app shows 19km), flat terrain, asphalt and gravel paths with the occasional bump and a few short steep climbs at bridges crossing over the highway, firmware 1.18B, battery level starting at 80%, 63V  finishing at 63%, 60V (idling), pedal setting player's mode, max speed 22km/h, riding time 1:30h, KS temperature starting from 34°C and finishing at 46°C, rider's weight 85kg. I used runtastic Pro and WheelLog 1.4.2 to record the ride as well as snapshots from the latest Kingsong android app.

Luckily, everything went well during the ride. When I finally sat down at a bench at my destination as usual I lay the wheel down on one side and started checking the recordings on the smartphone. The wheel beeped 5 times and went silent, as usual. Then I noticed that the Wheellog recording had already stopped which normally it does not until I press the logging icon. When I'd finished taking screenshots I reached for the power on/off button to switch off the KS16. But it did not. One long push at the button and the green LEDs indicating battery level just didn't stop glowing. Another long push at the button, nothing changed, the green LEDs were still glowing. It just would not switch off. After another few unsuccessful attempts I decided to pull the wheel in its limp condition to the car, trolley bar extended. And there, while pulling the limp KS16, it revived suddenly and jumped ahead and back, really frightening and beeping all the time. Then I tried the switch off button again and this time it worked. The wheel went limp (no balancing), the beeping stopped and the LED lights went off.

After some experimenting I can now reproduce the following behaviour. When the wheel is laying on one side and I turn it on, it starts beeping and on each side four read LEDs go on (see the picture). When I push the on/off button again, it goes silent and the LEDs go off, the wheel appears to be powered off.

When I turn the wheel on in an upright position, it starts spinning with great power either forwards or backwards and then suddenly changes direction until I turn it off (see the movie).

I talked to Scooterhelden in Berlin and their first guess was a defect gyro but I'll have to sent it in for them to take a closer look. Too bad, just as the summer started coming back :-(

I learned euc riding on this KS16 so it certainly had taken a few crashes but not within the last month or so. This was the first and only defect so far. Luckily, it showed up only after the ride and not during ... Being a defensive rider and also getting better over time the last crash was at least one month ago. Of course, it could be that a crash some long time ago had damaged some component that finally broke down today but that's speculation. Let's see what the autopsy will uncover.

 

 

 

[EricGhost]

Sorry to hear that, I have a ks16 680Wh with 1022km by app, and started to hear some noises, could be the FW 1.22 but let us know what's the doctor response.

wish a short unriding period 

[RenaissanceMan]

1 hour ago, EricGhost said:

Sorry to hear that, I have a ks16 680Wh with 1022km by app, and started to hear some noises, could be the FW 1.22 but let us know what's the doctor response.

wish a short unriding period 

Will do! - Thanks for your sympathy!

[HEC]

8 hours ago, RenaissanceMan said:

This was my last ride for a while

I'm sorry to hear that and I hope it will get resolved quickly with the supplier. Two possible causes spring in mind after reading your detailed description - one already mentioned (damaged or "confused" gyro chip other some loose plug(s) rom controller board. Could be some pin(s) for hall sensors. I don't know how knowledgeable or confident you'd be opening the wheel (unless it's already on its way back to seller) but it might be worth opening it and performing a simple visual inspection at least. Another possibility is that the plug going inside of the motor got loose a bit - have a look at the video from @Jason McNeil below:

If you'll open the wheel taking the picture and posting them here might help to identify the source of issue as well.

[RenaissanceMan]

On 24.8.2016 at 10:54 PM, EricGhost said:

Sorry to hear that, I have a ks16 680Wh with 1022km by app, and started to hear some noises, could be the FW 1.22 but let us know what's the doctor response.

wish a short unriding period 

My KS16 is back!  :-) The first careful test today on a deserted schoolyard went fine. Scooterhelden said they had not seen such problem ever before and apparently neither had Kingsong. Their first guess was, as I wrote earlier, a defect gyro. But Scooterhelden were puzzled by the reproducible behavior that I had described above. They also found that my KS16 was missing its device ID. So they spent quite some time in trying to reset or update the firmware of my misbehaving KS16 and eventually succeeded. That seemed to be all that was necessary to get my KS16 up and running again. No hardware was exchanged or repaired. The test ride by Scooterhelden was reportedly uneventful. At the time of breakdown I was running firmware version 1.18B, updated by myself a few months ago from version 1.13B. Now my KS16 has firmware version 1.22.

As an EUC novice I was worried whether after a break of 1 1/2 weeks I would be still able to ride as before. I therefore was surprised to see that my riding even seemed to have improved. Right from the start I was able to do stable slow riding, mini slalom and confident take-off and full stop as well as accelerating and breaking; although I did not go over 15 km/h as a precaution during that first test.

I had the impression that doing mini slalom was much easier than before. In my opinion, there is now more pedal softening on tight turns than there was before with firmware version 1.18B (both in "Player's Mode"). Small bumps are easily crossed, maybe even easier than before where I might have had to apply more force to keep on rolling. Scooterhelden said in their opinion firmware version 1.22 was a significant improvement with respect to riding stability.

As to the original cause of the breakdown of my KS16 there are so far only guesses. Scooterhelden suggest that some firmware / software failure might have materialized.

I remember in the first note of this thread I wrote I found the bluetooth connection from the wheel to JumpMaster's WheelLog app had unexpectedly disconnected when I checked it at the end of the ride. It turned out that the logging function of WheelLog had nevertheless captured almost the entire ride up to the final stop but it seemed to have disconnected all by itself at the end of the ride (could also have been an inadvertent clumsy click on the logging icon).

Now, I imagine there could be a situation where two apps (in this case Kingsong and WheelLog) talking at the same time to the same wheel might be causing a deadlock or other undefined state that effectively cripples the wheel.

Has anyone knowledge or experience of such malfunction?

[HEC]

10 hours ago, RenaissanceMan said:

Now, I imagine there could be a situation where two apps (in this case Kingsong and WheelLog) talking at the same time to the same wheel might be causing a deadlock or other undefined state that effectively cripples the wheel.

Has anyone knowledge or experience of such malfunction?

First of all - congratulations on "recovery" of your KS-16. As already mentioned in the other thread there is no way that application can cause any "damage" to the wheel or it's firmware (as WheelLog is not writing any data to the wheel at all). It's not possible to have two apps connected at the same time anyway.

[US69]

 

 

@RenaissanceMan

I have some other thoughts:

i think you (unfortunatly) found a "secret hidden Feature" to reset the complete wheel....in doing something like let it laying on the side for a few minutes and then try to Switch of....

Sounds stupid? May Be...but As the "ID" was missing and just installing new Firmware solved the Problem this guess is not so far away!

Also i know there must be some Feature like that, because there have been People enabled by KS to Play on latest Firmware AGAIN...when they were still on latest Firmware.

[RenaissanceMan]

9 hours ago, HEC said:

First of all - congratulations on "recovery" of your KS-16. As already mentioned in the other thread there is no way that application can cause any "damage" to the wheel or it's firmware (as WheelLog is not writing any data to the wheel at all). It's not possible to have two apps connected at the same time anyway.

Dear @HEC,

I beg to disagree here. For one, I routinely used the Kingsong app and WheelLog simultaneously, WheelLog for recording the ride and Kingsong for settings of light, sound etc. I was even able to use WheelLog AND two different versions of the KIngsong app (the grey and the green one) simultaneously from my S5. (I have not tried that since the breakdown for fear of messing up the wheel again.) They also sometimes seemed to reconnect automatically, e.g. after the bluetooth connection was interrupted, even while riding the wheel.

Concerning writing data from WheelLog to the KS16: even if WheelLog cannot / does not write into the firmware's memory it is capable to send commands to the wheel, like blowing the horn, for example. So there is a potential risk of accidentally sending some weird, perhaps undocumented malicious commands to the wheel that might disturb normal operation. Or jamming the wheel just by sending a rapid sequence of commands with no or shorter pauses in between than required, which could easily happen when more than one app is talking to the wheel.

[RenaissanceMan]

9 hours ago, KingSong69 said:

@RenaissanceMan

I have some other thoughts:

i think you (unfortunatly) found a "secret hidden Feature" to reset the complete wheel....in doing something like let it laying on the side for a few minutes and then try to Switch of....

Sounds stupid? May Be...but As the "ID" was missing and just installing new Firmware solved the Problem this guess is not so far away!

Also i know there must be some Feature like that, because there have been People enabled by KS to Play on latest Firmware AGAIN...when they were still on latest Firmware.

I agree, there must be another way to flash the firmware to the wheel and one way it is documented at:

https://github.com/EGG-electric-unicycle/documentation/wiki/MicroWorks-30B4-30kmh-controller-board-with-bluetooth

but it involves physical manipulation of the controller board which certainly did not happen in my case.

[US69]

Just now, RenaissanceMan said:

I agree, there must be another way to flash the firmware to the wheel and one way it is documented at:

https://github.com/EGG-electric-unicycle/documentation/wiki/MicroWorks-30B4-30kmh-controller-board-with-bluetooth

but it involves physical manipulation of the controller board which certainly did not happen in my case.

there have been people that need to be instructed by KS to flash/upgrade again...while their app does not show that option, because they allready where on the newest firmware...they got the instruction...and flashed again...but nobody knows how they done that :-)

 

[HEC]

1 hour ago, RenaissanceMan said:

I beg to disagree here. For one, I routinely used the Kingsong app and WheelLog simultaneously, WheelLog for recording the ride and Kingsong for settings of light, sound etc. I was even able to use WheelLog AND two different versions of the KIngsong app (the grey and the green one) simultaneously from my S5. (I have not tried that since the breakdown for fear of messing up the wheel again.) They also sometimes seemed to reconnect automatically, e.g. after the bluetooth connection was interrupted, even while riding the wheel.

Amazingly - I've tried right now and - lo and behold - it worked! So I stand corrected. Funny part is that I've tried this many times before and was unable to connect with KS app while WheelLog was running or vice versa so I've end up shutting down the WheelLog to be able to change the light modes and restarting it again after leaving the KS app hence my firm believe it was not possible to have multiply apps talking to the wheel at the same time. Maybe it's down to specific FW versions? Even @JumpMaster have experienced the same behaviour ...

In regards of sending "harmful" commands to the wheel I see that quite unlikely to do any real damage to the wheel as only really dangerous would be to (attempt to) flash new firmware and that can't be done while wheel is on move. It's though recommended to (after downloading the firmware) switch off all the communication including mobile network on the mobile phone used to update the wheel apart of BT to avoid any possible interferences or interruptions during upgrade.