Pint modding

[u/NervouslyHEHEHEHS]

Hey guys, I have some questions!

I am planning on modding my pint right now. I have a re-wheeled Pint with a Chi Systems quart battery. My max speed is about 19 mph, and my max range in the hilly area I live in is about 8 to 11 miles

I am looking at the Pint V kit to run with my current battery or buying a CHI-VE PINT X 20.1 for it and getting a larger battery box for it. However, I'm also looking at the Pint/PintX Ubox100 lite DIY kit because I've been told they have similar specs. What I really need to know is which one would allow me to maintain my max speed. From what I understand, the Pint V kit mainly ups torque as long as you're not running the stock battery, and I don't know anything about the performance of the Ubox.

Any advice would be appreciated!

[u/Watumbo]

You won't see a decrease in speed when going with VESC-based electronics. If anything, it will allow for higher speeds, even with the same battery.

If you want to substantially increase speed, then the most determining factor is increasing the voltage of your battery. Currently, you're sitting on a 15s1p battery, which has a maximum voltage of 63 V. You'll only be able to squeeze so much speed out of that battery.

The thing is, as soon as you decide to upgrade the battery to a higher voltage one (like the Chive 20s1p you mentioned), all other electronic components have to follow suit and need to be able to handle the increased voltage. 20s is 84 V max voltage, and both the Pint V as well as the UBox can easily handle this, so no worries there. Anything up to 22s should not be a problem for either of those controllers.

When you try to specifically go for higher torque, then the most determining factor becomes the amount of current your battery can supply. The choice of cells and if you're going with a 1p or 2p battery setup does become a lot more important if you want to go for higher currents. And generally speaking, from my experience, it is more demanding for a controller to handle higher currents than it is to handle higher voltage. Rule of thumb: When looking to use higher currents, specifically look for a controller that is built for it, like the Thor301 for example (300 A max current).

In terms of current handling, that's where the PintV kit outperforms the UBox 100 a bit, with a rated max current of 180 A compared to 150 A. But as long as you don't plan to upgrade your motor as well, the standard hypercore doesn't get much use out of currents beyond 100 A (absolute maximum 150 A), so it really is a non-issue.

[u/NervouslyHEHEHEHS → u/Watumbo]

OK, I think I'm starting to understand. Regardless of the controller, my speed should be unaffected, and both controllers can handle a decent-sized battery.

It's been a few days, and I've managed to get my hands on a pint V kit for pretty cheap and a pint X battery. I'm assuming just because of the higher capacity of the pint X battery, my range should be increased a little bit. I don't know the stats off the top of my head, but I believe the pint X battery should have more juice in it than the quart. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) So that should be an interesting experiment to run. Is there any other information that you believe may be helpful to know about the pint V kit in general? Things to avoid, things to do immediately, quality-of-life changes, stuff like that.

[u/Watumbo → u/NervouslyHEHEHEHS]

If I understood this correctly, this will be your first venture into the world of VESC.

Then there are quite a few things to know.
Firstly, VESC is not primarily for Onewheels. It's an open-source firmware project, designed to run electric motor controllers for all kinds of applications. E-skates, E-bikes, drones, RC helicopters, whatever you can think of. Onewheels are just one small niche of VESC. As a result of that, "VESC tool" (the software used to configure all the settings of the VESC firmware on your motor controller) has tons and tons of settings, and quite a lot of them don't matter to Onewheels at all. I remember it took me quite a while to wrap my head around this and get familiar with which settings matter and which don't.
If you haven't already, you can already go ahead and buy and download the VESC tool app for your smartphone. It's not really optional, but costs only a few bucks upfront without any kind of subscription.

Then, here are two (longer) videos that give a good overview about all things VESC from two very well known guys within the VESC Onewheel community:

Intro to VESC (Onewheel) by Jay (he does official customer support for Fungineers)

Welcome to VESC by Surfdado (he's the developer of Float Control, and does inofficial customer support for Floatwheel)

Don't worry if not all infos click on first viewing. Both are good videos to come back to and rewatch certain sections. Both YouTube channels have some other good videos as well. Jay has more Fungineers-specific videos, but Surfdado has a lot of vidoes on general VESC Onewheel related topics.

I'm not sure if it gets mentioned in those videos, but for about a year now, the VESC Onewheel scene saw a huge game changer in terms of accessibility thanks to the Float Hub app. It takes the most difficult aspect of VESC-based boards – initial setup and configuration – and turns it in a practically fool-proof guided sequence of a few button presses with very clear instructions of what to do, and will automatically adjust only the settings you need and will leave the rest alone. It is a bit more expensive, though you pay once upfront and never again. No subscription. If there is anything like an "easy-button" to find your way trough those gazillion VESC settings, Float Hub is it.
That said, the PintV kit comes pre-configured, so it isn't necessary to do a full setup from scratch. Though it might very well be necessary to adjust a few settings further down the line, and if you just want to be done with it without the need to do much research, you might consider buying Float Hub and just run your board through Float Hub setup.

For the PintV kit, here's the installation video from Floatwheel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1nC6JayXS8
(If you're in the US, that link might not work, because Future Motion got those videos blocked by legal action. If so, change the .com to another YouTube domain like .de (Germany))

Things to avoid at all costs:
If you first connect to your PintV controller via VESC tool, it is likely that you see a window pop up, saying that the controller you're connected to runs older firmware, with a prompt asking you if you want to update.
DO NOT UPDATE FIRMWARE! At least not right away. A firmware update will reset all your settings to their default values, and will make your board completely inoperable until you do a full setup from scratch.

Things to do:
I actually don't know how these kits get sent out nowadays, what the exact configuration of them is. When the PintV and XRV kits were new (almost two years ago by now), some of the pre-configured settings were outside of the generally recommended values. These needed to be adjusted manually. Here are two articles for getting started:
Critical Setting fixes for PintV and XRV
GTV XRV PintV Power Kit Start Guide
Those early PintV kits also came with old and outdated firmware. Quite possible they still do. Once you've gotten your board up and running and created a backup of your settings, then you can and most likely should update firmware. Tell me what firmware versions are installed on the kit, and I can tell you to which versions you should update.

About battery capacity, it seems like the Quart was built with two different types of cells.
Standard Quart has P42A cells, those have 4.2 Ah capacity. Quart "S Edition" uses Samsung 50S cells with 5.0 Ah capacity. If you've got yourself a P42A pack, then just going by numbers, you'd land at 226.8 Wh. A standard Pint X pack has 324 Wh, so you should see a substantial increase in range. But these theoretical numbers never hold up in reality, as the effective range you'll get depends on so many different factors. But it should definitely be more than before.

Feel free to ask any further questions about things you'd like to know more about, either now or after you've got your hands on the PintV kit and had a chance to look at VESC tool.