# Q: What happens when a Soliton tries to run a locked motor?



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

A: Not a damn thing.










The current curve is generated by the new idle start (for those with automatic gear boxes) which will be a feature in the soon to be released version 1.1 software. Just press a start button and the controller will automatically ramp up the current to 200 Ampere. If there's no RPM feedback by then the start attempt is aborted, otherwise it can use up to 300 Ampere to reach the desired idle RPM setting.

Anyway, in this case the motor had locked up due to too much abuse and therefore couldn't spin. The Soliton ramps up the current to 200 Ampere but since the motor won't spin (ie no tach feedback) it aborts the startup.

The driver tried several start attempts, but despite being close to completely short circuited the controller didn't take any damage and could even control the current ramp pretty darn good, if I might say so. 

Lesson of the day: Make sure the motor doesn't overheat. Many automatic gear boxes force the motor to run at dangerously low RPM's. If you can't modify the gear box to run at higher RPM's than it did with the ICE, make sure to add a good blower to the motor...


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## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

From the thread title I was expecting to see flames and melted stuff


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## Woodsmith (Jun 5, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> From the thread title I was expecting to see flames and melted stuff


Same here!

Anti-climax really, but in a good way.


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## TX_Dj (Jul 25, 2008)

Love that datalogger. Qer, that's my most favorite feature of the soliton so far. And the "other guys" (some of them at least) claim to have this feature, but they don't show it off like you guys do.


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## Qer (May 7, 2008)

TX_Dj said:


> Love that datalogger. Qer, that's my most favorite feature of the soliton so far.


And yet it was only developed as a debugging tool since I can't really just "pop over" to Tesseract and measure things on site when there's a problem. From the beginning I hadn't even planned for it to be in the release version of the controller, but Tesseract, Dimitri and a few other convinced me to keep it. I guess it's a good thing they did.


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