Drop outs solved for me - GT Carbon :}

Thank you for this post, I believe I finally found the solution to this issue. I faced about 10-20 connection drops in a 14 km ride. I also had a few cases where the board kept throttling while the remote was in neutral, one of those got me crashing at 30 km/h, not funny...

Sent back the board and the remote to Evolve France, which was very helpful as always. They gave me a new remote, but after not even 1 km, I had drops again...

Yesterday I bumped into this post, did the wire twist thing today and did a 14 km ride. I DIDN'T HAD A SINGLE DROP!

Now I want to know: was I lucky or is it indeed solved? To know, I will straighten out the wires again and see if I can repro the issue again (I guess I'm a good test candidate because I have it this frequently, probably because of my weight and AT setup). I will ty multiple times and will let you guys know the results.

Meanwhile, @Obie1 , can you provide us an update if this still solved your issues for most cases? It has been a while since your last post, so I am curious...

 

Hi
BjornDouchy, thanks for your post. To answer your question my board has been quite solid. I did have to replace my remote as the charging port fell of the mother board. Be really carefull plugging in to charge it is a real weak spot for the remote. Once I finally paired the new remote connection was great. I did have one complete drop out whilst riding and had to restart the remote with no breaks. Since then i have travelled over 100km with the new remote with no issues.

 

Thx for the response. I did some testing by straightening the wires back and twisting again, but I wasn't able to reproduce again. Guess it was a good day... I did had a ride with twisted wires where I kept having drops, although it seems to be better with twisted wires. I am in contact with Evolve and waiting for a response on how to continue from here...

 

Okay, I think I have some awesome news.
I think I finally found a way to fix most if not all of my connectivity issues: I figured out that it is my smartphone that is causing the connectivity issues. Makes sense if you know that bluetooth and wi-fi are also on the 2.4 ghz band. Since I put my cellphone into airplane mode before I go riding, I didn't had a single cutout anymore! That's after about 100 km of riding so far.
I always ride with my right foot front, left foot back, remote in my right hand and smartphone in my right pocket. This means that the remote is most of the time only 20 cm away from my smartphone. The one time I experimented with the wire twisting, I wasn't able to reproduce the issue anymore. All makes sense now, since I didn't had my smartphone with me during those tests!
So as a wrap up, here is what I changed from the factory board up until now:
- twisted the battery and engine wires: issue was seemingly reduced, but still occurs
- do the responsiveness test as explained in the youtube video on the Evolve channel before I start riding, this solves the responsiveness issue but didn't solves the connection drops
- replaced the carbon cover plate with a custom made one out of 4mm multiplex, still had connection drops
- set my cell phone to airplane mode: solves all my issues until now!
I communicated this to Evolve France and I hope they spread this word.
Finally starting to trust the board again and starting to enjoy rides again. Thanks for the support guys!

 

Glad you sorted it BjornDouchy. For me they still exist unfortunately. As a trail over the weekend I either removed my phone or put in airplane mode but they still happened...

 

Interesting.

 

Obie1... Thanks for posting your experience & this solution!

I opened up my Bamboo GTX a few weeks ago to measure for an 18650 pack, 3D printed spacers. Since reassembly, disconnects have been getting more frequent, with both the original LCD and newish R2 remote. I had reinstalled the battery upside-down, which bunched up the battery wires, and just like in the Carbon, one set of motor wires runs right past the nRF radio board. I twisted both sides of all 3 bundles just like you did, went for a couple mile ride, and had NO disconnects / dropouts. I'm headed for a much longer run after a top-off charge with high expectations. I certainly hope that new boards are shipped with the wires twisted. Such a simple fix for such a dangerous problem. Thanks again! Eric

BTW, I linked this thread in the Motor City e-skate facebook group.,

 

Hi, I had dropouts on my carbon gen2 board in 2015, once it happened and I launched off the front, busted my hip shoulder and skinned myself up pretty bad, the remote banged into the ground and the led's started to flash faster than they usually did when I first got it, as in, their default speed whenever the remote was powered on was a slow blink rate, and when I banged it into the ground, the default blink rate somehow set itself to a faster blink rate, that is the yellow red and green led's. And since that day, I never had a drop out since. It has been 4 years and god knows how many thousands of km's I've done on it. All I know is that whatever happened in that remote, it was definitely a pairing issue between the board and remote. With one caveat. I did have the evolve app at the time, and I'm not so sure if the app had anything to do with communicating with the board simultaneously with the remote causing issues, because I never used that app again after that crash as I thought it might have been related. So maybe it was that.