Multi-Platform, Modular, Powerful Electronic Speed Control
Decent power (18 FET, so 100-300A should be possible depeding of FET choice, Bus Bars, and cooling)
Relatively compact design, fitting for ebikes / medium-large electric scooters, and cheap to order
Modular, with easily replaceable modules (both bluepill and blackpill compatible hardware wise, 12V and 5V DC-DC stages are modules also)
Standard footprint parts, so replacement parts can be found easily in case of original parts out of stock or out of production
Optimized for low cost production by JLCPCB, including SMT assembly.
Possibility to buy the SMD parts pre-soldered: All SMDs are on the same side, in large stock at lcsc (at the time of writing), so the board can be ordered with SMDs pre-assembled by JLCPCB for a decent price.
To our knowledge, important feature that is not available on most open source ESCs:
- hardware overcurrent proection (triggers at 430A)
VESC with STM32F405 pill
VESC with GD32F303CG pill (Netzpfuscher mod, note CG)
EBICS with F103 Bluepill (Stancecoke)
SmartESC V3 (Casainho)
SmartESC V2 (Netzpfuscher/Koxx3)
MESC with F401 Blackpill (MxlemmingFOC)
STM32 Motor Control Workbench (F401, F103)
The circuit design tool used for this project: KiCad.
https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=117045
The high amperage and compact design of this board means that it is inherently prone to arcing. For this reason we urge you to engage in the following safety precautions:
- Remove all sources of power when operating on the board. This includes soldering, mounting the board, connecting wires, or plugging in the pill
- Use an USB isolator when connecting to your computer
- DO NOT USE LIPO BATTERIES INDOORS
- The board stores considerable capacitance -- a spark when you connect to your power supply
- Ideally you should use a current limited power supply when testing
- Before powering up follow all recommendations in our building tips section.
Soldering, assembly, safety and testing are here.
Bus bars are recommended for anything else than very low current. (extra copper wires/bars/plates soldered to the exposed copper strips of the PCB, or at very least a ton of solder on the exposed strips, but this last variant only for low phase currents). See this document for examples.
We recommend a total of 2000uF for low phase currents (up to ~150A) and 3000uF or more for high battery currents. There are 2 smt pads at the ends of the Vbat bus bar, and another 6 on the top for usecases where a lot of capacitance is needed. General considerations: You need more capacitance the more phase current you plan to use, and the longer (and thinner) your battery wires are. So you can probably also get away with less if you have short thick battery wires.
Choose voltage rating ~ 1.5x your max battery voltage for a long lifetime. For 48v nominal (54.6V max) battery voltage, 80V or more is recommended. Or just use the same rating as your FETs.
The total capacitance of the electrolytic capacitors is more important than the exact combination of values. More smaller capacitors probably have a slight advantage over fewer large ones: lower ESR, lower parasitic inductance, and redundancy in case of failures.
As much as possible. These need to compensate for the high frequency weakness of the electrolytic capacitors. Overrating voltage rating is recommended.
Values are consolidated for easy buying. Voltage rating is 25V or higher regardless if they are on the 12v, 5v, or 3v3 rail on the default design, however you can choose a smaller voltage rating for the 5v and 3v3 rails..
These are RC snubbers. They are here only for the footprints. Do not fit them (yet). The real values (if necessary at all) will be computed after we build the controller and see what ringing we get. Purpose of the snubbers is to dampen that ringing. (if you choose different parts than the one we compute the snubbers for, you might need to compute the snubbers yourself). These components are not present in the pick-and-place or BOM files.
The default MOSFETs are available from lcsc at the time of writing. They are cheap and have good specs. (low Rds on, low Crss, 100v, etc). You can use a FET of your choosing, but please be aware that old FETS (such as the famous 4110 or 3077) have huge Crss, leading to a tiny Ciss/Crss ratio. This ratio needs to be bigger than roughly your max battery voltage, so you will need to compute and add the optional Cgs capacitors (OCx). Small Ciss/Crss results in ringing / parastic turn on (which leads to failure). That being said, it’s best to just use FETs with Ciss/Crss > ~100, nowadays they’re easy to find. See the section with alternative parts below.
Some additional material on MOSFET selection and testing is here.
Attach the FETs to a heatsink: the FETs need to be electrically isolated from the heatsink, but well connected thermally. The options for this are:
- Mica glass (“traditional option”, cheap, easy to find)
- Ceramics (saw this as a new option, never tried it)
- Polymer pads
- Kapton Tape
Unfortunately in focusing on making the board small we crammed the FETs very close together. This means some mica or ceramic pads will not fit - and it’s very hard to cut them afaik. So for this version we’re probably stuck with polymer / kapton.
- V0.1 build has been tested by mxlemming with MESC FOC firmware on F401CC black pill board, and by Netzpfuscher with his VESC port, in lab conditions.
- V0.3 has been tested, and reached 280Phase amps on a Surron, with maximum power draw 10kW. There were no overheating problems (though cooling was good, and it was winter). Over 280 Phase amps there were random BRK errors (a fix is being tested)
- Pills have very few ADCs, so some sacrifices have been made (choice between analog brake and Motor Temp).
- Gate drivers are not as popular and readily available on lcsc as the other SMD parts
- Having the MCU on a separate board (the "pill" development boards) is a questionable idea from PCB design point of view. In our testing it seemed to work, but we know it's not without drawbacks (main one being pill pins "catch" noise).
100V:
- CRST030N10N - Default, cheap, tested, available at lcsc.
- MDP10N027 - Cheap, tested, available on aliexpress.
- IPP023N10N5 - Good, more expensive, not tested.
80V:
- CRST030N10N - Very cheap, not tested, lcsc.
- IPP019N08NF2S - Good, more expensive, not tested
- IPP016N08NF2S - Very good, more expensive, not tested
150V:
- CRST073N15N
- NCEP15T14
- NTP5D0N15MC - best of the 3 listed here, not tested.
Generally: There are a lot of TO220 fets to choose from (probably the only real advantage of TO220). If you want another, make sure it has low RDSon, gate charge ~ 160nC, low Crss (Ciss/Crss > Vbat).
- L6498DTR - ST micro. default. not tested yet
- EG2181D - EG micro. not tested, cheap on lcsc
- TF2190M-TAH (TFSS) (LCSC PN: C2917161) -> tested. probably has problems with ulvo, which result in shoot through. not recommended anymore (used to be the default.)
- NCP5183/NCV5183 (On Semi)
- FAN7390 (Fairchild)
- FAN7191 (Fairchild)
- DGD2190M (Diodes Inc) or any other "replica" of IR2181
- NCS20034 (On Semi) - tested
- GS8634-SR (Gainsil)
- COS724SR (Cosine) - tested. current default recomendation due to specs and LCSC stock
- TSV914 (ST)
- TLV9054 (TI)
- F405 Pill - LINK
- Black Pill
- Blue Pill
- We recommend isolated:
- PQDE6W-Q110-S12-D preferred (CUI devices)
- RD5-110S12W (Rui Da Kang)
- HLK-10D11012 (HiLink)
- RDE20110S12 (XP Power)
- THN 10-7212WIR (TRACO Power)
- Less desireable: unisolated
- P7805-500 (CUI)
- Or wire on some random cheap stuff
- Tons of options in "TO220 Replacement" format - like this random example
- VXO7805-500 (CUI)
- VX7805-500
- 7805SR-C (Murata)
1N5819WS - These are ubiquitous, but it is important you use these due to very low forward voltage. Using anything else will probably result in hardware overcurrent not working.
We recently changed from XX4007 in SOD123 package to higher speed diode (US1M). Anything with 100V+ or 150V+ will work... but generally many 1kV diodes are available in common packages, so use them. High speed are preferable, but really most diodes will work...
- Gathering motor parameters [LINK]
- MOSFET selection [LINK]
- Pin mappings between MP2 and the F405 pill [LINK]
- MP2 assembly, testing and firmware [LINK]
- MP2 bus bar methods [LINK]
- MESC Firmware on the MP2 -- getting started with STM32CubeIDE [LINK]
- Some (bad) examples of connecting the MP2 to a motor [LINK]
- R17 of the opamp comparator changed to 22k -> back to actual 430A overcurrent protection, was 375 out of an error
- removed vsense 2 - hardware overvoltage also limits battery choice, and is of limited usefulness
- changed default bom to accomodate 32s max battery without modifications. See most below changes.
- changed all ceramic caps on vbat to 250v rated ones
- removed TVS diodes - they only work for a very low voltage interval, so without its more generic
- changed vbat divider network so it's exaclty the same ratio as phase vsense to make it easy to set up the software (just set 150 and 3.3 everywhere)
- added bootstrap resistors to limit current spikes
- reduced gate pulldowns to 10k for faster fet turnoff in some cases
- changed the default gate driver (old one was suspected of bad behaviour)
- 1 gate resistor per fet now.
- bluepill is mostly supported - but due to a pinout bug does not have a cap on RST. Take care if you use bluepill!
- v0.4 not tested at this time. if you do test it, please let us know.
- remove vbat solder jumpers. for 150v the board requires a different BOM anyway.
- remove pill solder jumpers. (bluepill compatibility is a bit complicated because of a pinout mistake)
- make overlimit opamp output LPF better suited to an additional LPF on the pill and reducing pin noise. (cap -> 10uF, move it near pin, decrease R value)
- make power switch footprint more accessible, and less arc prone. (bigger, better location)
- move the protective R pair near vbat ("before" the switch)
- increase margins for Vbat and Phase copper areas to reduce short / arc risk
- replace the 4pin JST with a 7pin one and route more of the pill pins to JSTs
- standardize JST pin layout (GND and Vaux are all over the place.)
- add a power led on 5v rai
- added lpf caps on ADC throttle/brake inputs
- made 12v surface routed
- phase wire pads are now at equal distance from eachother
- adapted to newest F405 pill pinout
- moved to kicad 7
- reduced shunt value to 0.5mR (from 1mR) for lower heat generation
- increased opamp gain to ~22 (from 10) for compensating lower shunt value
- added solder jumpers for configuring power stage vsense
- faster/better bootstrap diodes for better behavior and lower Qrr loss/heat
- many other tiny changes / improvements
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What’s with the many solder jumpers? Except for the hall sensor JST, all others have a solder jumper for connecting its power pin to 3v3 or 5v, depending on your needs.
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Why do the electrolytic caps have surface pads instead of through hole? Through hole pads imply a lead through the hole, sticking out on the other side. This would prevent the FETs from sitting flush against the PCB.
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Can you assemble it for me? There is no plan on selling any assembled PCBs. You can get the SMD side pre-assembled at jlcpcb (at the time of design all parts were in stock for jlcpcb SMT service). So you’ll only need to solder the through-hole parts and the modules.
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I want more power!!! This might not go well. So good luck, you’ll probably need it. Please don't blame us when it goes up in smoke. But do let us know how it goes. Disclamer aside, here are some basic suggestions:
- Review what other people have done.
- Add thick copper bus bars to the board.
- Add more/ bigger bulk caps!
- Use appropriate wires (thick!)
- Overcurrent trips at 430A. If you want to come close to it / exceed it, either cut off the overcurrent circuit by desoldering D4, D5, D6, or be creative with the shunts. But 150A per TO220 fet is a crazy idea.
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I want more voltage!!!! Realistic limit is 30s lipo for 150V rated components. For more than that the ESC will need serious redesign.
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Your part X is bad, I recommend Y! We tried to find cheap but decent parts for this controller. Cheap almost always implies a compromise in some other areas, so you might not like our pick :) It should be fairly easy to switch to other parts on your own: we used mostly standard and popular footprints and packages If you know better parts or have better solutions, please let us know on our ES thread. We like learning new things. ....except if you’re going to suggest 3077 or 4110 mosfets. Those things are dinosaurs. They were the biggest baddest thing around during their time, but nowadays belong in a museum. Or on a t-shirt. Please stop recommending them.
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Where can I buy parts? Lcsc.com, mouser.com. Aliexpress if needed. We designed this with jlcpcb smt assembly in mind, so all SMDs were in stock at lcsc when I designed the PCB. Also most of the Through-hole parts.
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This whole thing is amateur work! Yeah, totally true. We are mostly amateurs working on a generic ESC for free. If by this you refer to any specific mistake / set of mistakes, we would love to know about it! Post in the ES thread. Thanks!
