Way Cool Experiment
Holy Ribiliciousness them's was tasty. Looking forward to doing them with ya'll again. Thanks for posting up. I had leftovers last night while doing this.
Way Cool Experiment: HH Minis
If you recall some time back I noticed that HHM's warmed up to ~150F when plugged in and sitting still. There was much debate as to how to solve the problem or if it was even a problem. It's not a problem but any electrical engineer will tell you that cooler electronics run better. Several pages back I noted that at a fixed throttle input (after warmed up) my set of minis jumped in speed probably 25% when I hit them with a compressed air hose. That convinced me that HHM's, like all other electronics, would perform better if cooled. Enter one aluminum skid. If I was not convinced before, I am now.
For the record I have had my rear ESC (bottom) at +4 on subtrim so that it keeps up with the front (top) ESC once everything is warmed up and I'm driving. This is because it was sandwiched between a delrin (poor heat conductor) skid and another hot ESC, both wrapped in plastic. The rear ESC is always warmer so it needs a bump of +4 to keep up with the cooler front ESC. Note in my pics from yesterday that the lower (rear) ESC is glued to the skid at the cap and along the entire rear margin of the lower board. So I started driving yesterday. After a few minutes my rig acted odd. I picked it up and feathered the throttle. The rear ESC was
way faster than the front and the entire skid and TVP bases were warm. This was the smoking gun. The cool, lower, rear ESC dumped a huge amount of heat into the skid and was much faster and more responsive than the front. I had to go -5 on the rear subtrim to reel it in to mirror the front ESC speed and, very importantly, the initiation of wheel spin. The rear axle spun way before the front too. So, I stopped running (1.5 packs) and went home. The rig was undriveable.
So I'm now going the road of unsmashed, unwrapped, vertically mounted ESC's. First version is the easy one, no soldering required. I'll drive this tonight and then separate another set of HHM's and spread them out on the skid, position them vertically with FETs out and likely attach them to the skid with my own custom micro heat sinks that will be attached to the FETs.
Yesterday's starting configuration.
Today's starting configuration.
Yeah COG blahblahblah. Dial your rear ESC up +9 vs your front and tell me the performance loss is outweighed by lower COG. Compared to BRSL's the vertical minis are still lower COG even with my receiver cool and high on the cross brace. The scary thing about the differential heat thing is that it's constantly variable. After you've done a hard dig or bound it up the ESCs have to recover. If the ESCs have been differentially heated (or cooled) they will be doing their own mixing of your wheel speeds even if your mixing is at zero on your radio.
It just may be the best aspect of an aluminum skid plate is it can double as a very efficient heat sink for any ESC. This aspect alone outweighs any performance enhancement due to reduced coefficient of friction or any performance loss due to increased weight or COG. Time to drive, get soldering and crank out some micro heat sink/esc mounts. They'll weigh a gramish each but man I can't wait to see what these HHM's can do when chilling out.
J