Far Driver ND96850 Overview 

Thanks! I never know what people will notice that I talk about in my videos.

Right that's awesome.. I always tell people I've had my TV sitting outside in the rain and snow with no cover for over a year and a half, I don't believe that things can't get wet as long as it's not on

Just don't run your dishwasher full of electronics with dishwashing detergent. Fun fact: maybe 5% of the cleaning action in your dishwasher is mechanical cleaning The other 95% is the corrosive action of the very caustic detergent. Pop enough cascade ultra in a hot bathtub and you can disolve a body.

Thanks

The CPU jsut need the right coding in it for the position sensor

Gentle prodding and picking with plastic spoogers mostly.

I am going to start dishwashing old boards as well nice story

Get on the Watt Wheels web site. There are adapter cables there for far driver to surron. This makes connecting these controllers in place of the factory controller pretty darn easy. If by improvement, you mean more motor power, then yes, this is stronger than the factory controller.

@@de-bodgery yeah I mean will the 90a stock battery improve (some say it does with torp nuclear etc) performance with this controller. Even before I asked the question I assume it would be negligible

@@de-bodgery and thanks for the recommendation will check it

@@je7647 Motor controllers are not magical. They all need more current to make more torque in the motor. You can't configure the factory surron controller, but you can configure after market ones. This will let you set the battery and phase amps higher, assuming the pack can handle more current. Surron, VESC (What Torp uses) or Far Driver are all FOC controllers. They will all drive the motor in a very similar way. This isn't magical, but it does provide better motor control than older technologies. I have yet to take apart a factory surron pack to see the BMS inside. I think it's 80 amps, but I'm not sure. The cells inside are capable of 150 amps, so with a stronger BMS to replace the factory one, you ought to be able to pull that 150 amps from the factory pack. This will raise that current into the controller significantly so that you can pass that along to the motor for more torque. Your pack current limits are your primary limiting factor. No controller is going to change that at all. Torp is massively expensive and they exaggerate the power ratings pretty agregiously! Never mind that they are stealing VESC and are under investigation for intellectual property theft! I can't recommend Torp EVER. There are plenty of legit VESC options that are reasonably priced, decently made and that are not despicable thieves like Torp. Trampa, MakerX, Team TriForce, 3Shul, Spintend, EBMX, Tronic are all good makers of VESC controllers. VESC will provide the best case motor control with the largest feature set of any controller you will find out there. Nukular is a reasonably good brand as well and is not VESC. I don't ever recommend ASI as they are massive control freaks and won't let you configure your controller yourself. *** I don't know this as fact, I'm just hypothesizing. It is possible that the factory surron controller is limited to something like 80 battery amps. If the factory Surron pack is capable of 90 amps, then the Surron controller would be leaving available current untapped. If that is case, an after market controller that can be set to the maximum the factory surron pack can deliver would for sure make a little more power. Again this isn't magic, it's jsut using all the resources you have available. Probably, if you could reprogram the Surron controller, you could also set it higher and get the exact same result.

@@de-bodgery yeah I went fardriver, I was aware the future of evs is in vsec and didn't want to get one of those half ass vsec that are "open source" like torp (I don't believe it will be or will be pro e ot some issue) I'm going to get a good vsec one maybe a year but the 72680 enough atm

What FD controller do you have? The physical size of the ceramic caps will give you a clue to their capacitance. I'd jsut assume they are 2.2uF as that will for sure work. Next detail is the correct voltage. We can probably get that right by knowing what the max voltage of your controller is.

It's actually nd 96680 thank you for your reply. It is one of 4 large size in parallel on the positive side. Thank you in advance

@@BuiltnotbroughtHave you depotted the controller? If so, then you can see the voltage for the large electrolytic caps. If you get ceramic caps with the same voltage you'll do fine. 2.2uF ceramics will probably be OK and more thn what's there now. PM me on FB so you can share pics of your controller. To replace components on the MCPCB, you'll need to heat up the board to the point where the solder just starts to melt. You can use your kitchen stove, but it's critical that to keep a sharp eye on the heat since stove tops are pretty terrible at heat regulation. To make it work best on the stove a 1/2" thick slab of steel or a very thick frying pan can be used. This will distribute any hot spots from the burner evenly. You'd put the MCPCB on top of that to heat it up. Long tweazers are very handy as you will need to reach over top of the board to pull off the bad parts and to place new ones. I've used this method a few times before I got legit equipment, but it can be done. You will need a very steady hand so you don't move parts around or bump the board while the solder is molten. Once the new parts are in place and solder has flowed to them, you can turn off the stove top and let the board cool down without moving it. Other things of high value is flux and solder as you might need both to get the new parts to flow into place.

@@de-bodgery thanks very much you just answered my next question. Yes iv depotted it and I attempted to change a mosfet with rework hot air but I couldn't get it hot enough and was not sure of heat would damage it. Ok I'm a tig welder by trade so I have a steady hand I'll try the stove method once I have all the replacement parts can I use the 1" aluminum solid heat sink and a way to spread the heat evenly? If not I'll get some steel plate from work. Thanks for your help I will msg you on fb from now on for any assistance needed. Thanks from south Australia!

@@BuiltnotbroughtLeaving the MCPCB on the heat sink is a good idea and then placing that in a thick frying pan will distribute heat nicely so you have no hot spots. I wouldn't do that direct on a burner! You are asking to over heat the electronics and cook them! When I did reflow on my stove, I was VERY SLOW at turning up the heat. I don't know your stove at all so I can't tell you what position of the dial is right for you. Getting the heat right is NOT fast. This usually takes 20 minutes to get it just barely to the melting point of solder. I'd make very tiny heat adjustments with some solder on top of the steel plate until the heat was right. After that, I'd put the board on there to get it hot. With the mass of metal involved, heating doesn't happen quickly so you will feel tempted to turn the temp knob a lot to get a faster change and this is probably going to over heat the electronics before you know it! This type of work takes patience and going sloooooow. To get the components safely replaces takes heating the entire board as a whole. Spot heating like you were doing with just hot air just wicks away the heat before you can get the spot you need to heat up sufficiently. *** When I say "steady hand" I think this is nothing like TIG welding. You are working with components that are often times less than 1mm long! That's a whole other 'nother level of "steady hands" than TIG takes! A 12" square section of 1/2 thick steel plate will work great. When I reflow, I do that at my bench, but I do it on top of a steel plate of this size to make dead sure I spread around the heat no matter what! *** South Australia? You might look up Bruno from the More Poweeeer channel. He's somewhere near you and he can do this kind of work. He and I were talking about SMD repair jsut a few days ago!

So KO is stealing from FD and they don't know it? Sure...I guess that's possible. I'd be surprised if FD admits that they build KO products. Please post what you find.

You can burn out TVS and they may dead short. They may be your issue. Otherwise there isn't anything else other than the CPU.

Parts layout and board layout are just as important as the components you use. The parts used are mostly alright.

Is there any easy-to-upgrade components in a fardriver, after depotting? I dont know much about electronics beyond shunt mods, and building ebikes.​@de-bodgery

They are both based on the exact same CPU and FOC libraries. There is implementation differences between these 2 companies and I've only ever seen the EM-150 Votol controller. I don't know how the others are constructed. Far Driver jsut released a now controller design with a blue plastic cover. The battery and phase posts have been moved which is a strong indicator that they also arranged their power stage in some way. I will be doing a tear down of one of these soon, but I haven't seen it yet. It may be that this new FD design is a large step forward for FD, but I don't know that yet. As far as displays go, I don't know of anything for either one, but then I don't know everything either...so it's possible there is something?

@@de-bodgery thanks. it seems that fardrivers arent really made to work with displays outside of connecting to phone with bluetooth, or using a CT22 model. Checking the price for a unit that does 100v, the price is $450+ the search continues.

@@EVGizmo They aren't cooperating with me yet, but I'm in contact with FD developers to get access to thier firmware and hardware repositories. The idea is to make a display based on the ESP32 CPU that works with FD controllers. NOOOO idea if they will cooperate! This idea may be a dead end before it ever starts.

@@de-bodgery would be good but even looking at the harness sounds like it will be a lot of work on their end - all depends on how much they want more market share or not

@@EVGizmo THere is UART which they use with BT that can be used as is. I'd jsut need to sniff out the commands used and suplicate them in an ESP32 display. Thing is I'd also need to emulate BT and a few other things to make this work. It would be worlds better if I had access to the firmware repos so those UART pins could be changed to canbus.

On Facebook there is a Far Driver forum: Far Drivder Tuning for E-bikes. On Discord is the High Voltage forum with a whole section for Far Driver. Those are good places to post questions. You can also download the FD manual to read.

I don't know that as fact, but it did cross my mind that it might be the same person.