2ch VESC Board
Hardware- 2 Devlogs
- 10 Total hours
Modification of the open source VESC6 ESC. This one has 2 channels to use it with hover cruiser.
Waiting on a reviewer. We'll let you know as soon as there's a decision.
TODO
I’m finally finished! 
It was a journey. First of all KiCAD didn’t want to cooperate. It linked to the PCB in weird ways and the changes didn’t wanted to be brought from the schematic. I have managed to fix that through linking references to schematic. Also there were some incombabilities with my newer KiCAD version, but these were minor.
Then I put a lot of thought into making it 2ch because there are some things that can’t be powered by shared power rails and doesn’t need to be. Vcc got renamed to 3V3a to get it separated. 5V got 5Va and supply along with main caps got relocated into it’s own power subsheet.
After that I was able to nest the base schematic inside a sheet named chA and it worked! Duplicated it into Chb and it looked pretty good, but there were a couple of issues as sub sheets can’t be changed for each mastersheet so I’ve used more hierarchical labes and the power is on the main ch sheet.
And now we are getting to the PCB… I’ve used some tools that would duplicate layouts of the same sheets. So I’ve started searching for it and found out that Kicad has newly added support for it. And after a few tutorials the layout was duplicated.
The whole process was do something - it doesn’t make sense - find a better solution - itorate.
And volala we have a beautiful 2x ~2kW VESC controller!
PS: Sorry for not devlogging I’ve got way too locked in. :) Hopefully this long dev log compensates for it.
Observing the schematic.
This is a super necessery step to undestand all of the schematics that may come to play.
I have found cheap focer the first but after tinkering with it a bit I have found out that the designer have done some things in the schematic that aren’t too ideal. So I’ve scrapped it. (It was originally meant to go into hovercruiser)
After leaving it for like two weeks I’ve stumbled onto a much better looking project by craigg96 which has everything SMD and it’s still cheap and availible on LCSC. YAY And also the schematic is way nicer and it works decently well.
So after getting this solid base I went ahead and forked his repo and started getting familiar with it. One little quirk were the zones as I couldn’t see them - turns out it was hidden in one menu.
Allright so next up is.
TODO
work separate global power labels. VSS 3V3
create a higher level schematic that will nest CH a/b
duplicate the current layout
and reroute things
