[Qer]

People may buy Warp drives because they feel they are better "matched" to the popular Warp motor. (Are they?)

Nope. No such thing as matching controller and motor when it comes to series wound motors. For AC-motors, SepEx and a few others you have to match the controller and motor, but for series wound there's no such problem since the controller can't affect the way the motor work anyway.

Just set reasonable max current, voltage and power so you don't blow the motor, that's all. However, in most cases the problem is to figure those values out...

 

[Qer]

What he meant is a marketing perception based on word "Warp" being in the name of both motor and controller,

I know, I just responded to that little 2 word question in the parenthesis.

 

[Qer]

It saddens me when the Solitron factory and their fans pile on in thread after thread about competitor's products.

Hm. Should I take that as a direct reference to my post earlier or should I just be considered collateral damage from your verbal cluster bomb?

 

[Qer]

The WarP-Drives were designed to fill the void that was left in the market by the Zillas disappearing. I think they do that very well. They have very similar continuous current ratings, and require about the same volume of installation space, weigh about the same, and all for about the same price as a Zilla was.

So there's two situations - a controller that can't full utilize a particular motor, and a controller that can fully utilize it, and will go into thermal cutback before it can destroy the motor. On the other end of the spectrum, there's the Soliton1.

Well, as you said yourself, you have to look at it from the right perspective.

• At least one (maybe two?) zorched in the dyno when it was deliberately pushed to the limit and apparently a bit beyond it, a Zilla Z2K could torture a motor equally with it's continuous rating.
• Two simply melted because they ran at too low RPM for the built in fan to be able to keep it cool (a blower fixed that) and that at currents that both the Zilla and WarP-Drive could produce with their respective continuous ratings.
• One blew at the racing track and I'm not sure there were ever a good explanation why because it's twin is still in good shape.

The rest I don't remember the reasons for, but personally I think that one big reason we haven't seen so many blown motors with the Zillas has more to do with that most people ran Lead-Acid batteries until pretty recently. Unless you have pallets of Lead-Acid (which is hard to fit in a car but not so much a problem next to a dyno... ) it's probably a lot harder to zorch a motor with Lead-Acid than with Lithium. However, pretty much any controller can overheat a motor. It doesn't take that much current, especially if the motor is stalled or runs rather slow.

I was a bit surprised by a thread somewhere earlier this year stating that the Soliton1's hadn't been used in any racing applications to date.

Well, now there is. I know of at least one guy, twin controllers with twin motors.

Not to be picky but the WarP-Drives were designed well before the Zillas disappeared. They were is direct competition for a while. So I can't really agree with this statement.

No, he's right. The Zilla disappeared which led to the start of both the Soliton and WarP-Drive. Then it turned out that the Zilla was a Norwegian Blue ("It's not dead, it's just resting!") and popped back to production at EVC until everyone figured out that the only reason EVC was looking lively and strong was because someone had nailed it to the.... Ehrm. Well, anyway. Zilla was gone, both Soliton and WarP tried to fill the gap, Zilla got back (with worst possible timing too) and then did an encore on the exit from the market and it's future destiny is pretty much anyones guess.

It would be neat if when you ordered a controller, on the online form you could set the max current, max rpm, etc. and the controller would be delivered preprogrammed, or have check boxes for "Warp 9 Settings," "Kostov 11 inch Settings," etc. You could also have "maximize range," "average," and "race" settings.

Yep. Definitely a cool feature. Just very hard to pull off, I'm afraid, since you have to take current, voltage, rpm and time into account to try to estimate how hard you can push the motor. Don't hold your breath.