Nucular motor controllers:
AVOID AVOID AVOID
Learn from my far from good expereinces with Nucular and avoid them!
There is fairly new group of smart people in Moscow Russia that started making 100v FOC motor controllers. I have been aware of them since they first showed prototypes in 2018. As soon as they had a 12 fet controller ready for release, I bought 3 of them. Same for 24 fet controllers. I have since bought 5 more of the 24 fet controllers...which I now regret!
NOTE: Nucular has decent success in the DIY EV market..
1. Their technical support 100% sucks. SLOOOOOW and unhelpful!
2. They charge you for warranty issues! Once they decide you did it, do NOT expect them to care about anything you might say to the contrary!
3. I sent back the 3 original 24 fet controllers I got from them since they all had issues. 2 months later they got repaired.
4. Expect them to be atrociously sloooow in addressing problems and to vague at best with answers! After I got the controllers in place on the Zap, I immediatley noticed a motor stuttering issue. I told Vasilly at Nucular about it and a week later I was told I "have an interesting motor". Not a fix, not suggestions for a resolution..."interesting motor". As far as I know, I was the first person to report this problem in August 2020. 10 months later...still no fix for the problem and many people are reporting the same problem with their motors and Nucualr controllers!!! It happens with any kind of motor. People report 25% to 50% motor power. The problem involves phase amps and PIDs. So far Nucular is 100% ignoring the problem!
5. When I had enough of their crap, they just banned me. No effort to apologize or to fix their issues...ban the victim! Ban the guy that has been buying your products since the day you relased anything and has personally bought 11 of your controllers!!! GOOD JOB Nucular!!!
GRRR!!!!!! AVOID NUCULAR!!!
I knew I needed 2 controllers to run my 6 phase hub motor and I knew I wanted to see how far I could push the motor...so I dropped $1200 for 2 of the 24 fet Nucular controllers so I could find out. They are rated for 300 battery amps, 500 phase amps and 20kw. This seems like a lot of money until you consider that most everything else in FOC at these power levels costs 2X more per controller. They "seemed" like a good option at the time.
The controllers and LCD communicate via CANBUS and with a bit of wiring and setup, 16 devices (1 LCD and 15 other things) can all "talk" to each other to share control information. I always use waterproof connectors and so I made up a Y cable so that the 2 controllers and 1 LCD could all communicate with each other. This was all done exactly as described by Vasilly and then later I was blamed for blowing up my 2 original controllers by miss wiring the CANBUS cabling. I know that never happened as all of it got tripple checked before it was ever connected together and powered up. Then issues only emerged after about 100 miles of riding. My wiring and soldering skills or lack of them would have shown up immediately, not 100 miles later!
Hall signals, CANBUS and control signals all get there own IP68 connector on each controller. Phase and battery wires get terminated in 6mm bullet connectors. There's many hours of work in connectors here! My work here is pretty darn solid and unlikely to ever fail. Many builds later, many miss steps and bad ideas later, this connector solution has yet to have issues.
Once that was all done, I could bench mount the hub motor and start testing the dual controllers and the motor together. I originally set up each controller to run the motor individually and then later connected them all together to run the motor from both controllers at the same time. Setup and making everything identical in both controllers was a lot of work!
In the end, both controllers were talking to the same LCD and working as a single unit with the motor. Whew! LOTS of hours spent in wiring and setup!
Here's the dual controllers in place on the scooter. I intended to run the controllers fairly close to their limits, but the stuttering issue never got resolved and the best I can get is about 125 amps per controller or less than half of the capability of the controllers. I see 250 battery amps on the LCD frequently which is 125 amps per controller or about 20kw max...on a setup capable of double that!
Closeup of the 2 sets of hall cables and all 6 phases.