Summary

We ended up needing to trailer today, due to the 

We made a pit stop in the McDonald's, where we briefly debated whether or not to take the car through the drive-thru. Then we struggled for a bit to get the car started again, where it seemed like Driver Controls was hard-faulting. We ended up fixing this by rebuilding and reflashing Driver Controls with Link-Time-Optimizations disabled.

We drove for a bit more, before running into the same Motor Controller issues that we were seeing the previous day. Our driver, Micah, noticed that it the issue seemed to happen consistently when the motors controller transitions from the six-step square-wave to the sensorless control mode, which uses a space-vector modulated sine-wave output. This allowed us to rule out an issue with Driver Controls and the Motor Controller Interface.

The convoy pulled into an empty church parking lot, and we proceeded to drive around in circles as we attempted to replicate the issue and debug. We managed to get it into that transition phase at 10km/h, and verified that everything on the System side seemed to be okay. It was likely a Power issue, or the Motor Controllers themselves. However, we were also racing against time in order to make it to the Stage Stop, and so we collectively decided to trailer and make use of the extra time to debug that night.

At dinner, we sat with PrISUm and they offered to help out in whatever way they could, since they were out and had begun coining themselves as "Display Class". It turns out that we were at the same campground that they were staying at, and so they came by afterwards. It's hard to explain an electrical problem and solve it, since there's so many ways things can go wrong and typically that only works when the problem is trivial or there's something obviously wrong, which hopefully we've already resolved.

We jacked the car up, and attempted to replicate the issue that way. Unfortunately, we weren't able to do so, probably because there wasn't enough friction on the wheels in order for the motors to draw enough current.

Anyways, at this point Karl noticed one of the observers (Spencer Berglund) hanging out by our car, and since he wasn't our observer at the time, Karl asked if he knew anything about Motor Controllers. Turns out, that was probably the smartest thing that we did all race. He took a look at our Tritium WaveSculptor 20 configuration, and immediately, he pointed out that the RMS Peak motor current maximum on them was rated for 100A, with a peak current of 122A, but we had set it to 130A. Motor impedance will limit the current at higher speeds, which limits the bus current. He suspected that although we weren't pulling anything near that, flashing a value outside of the valid range of operating values was causing them to fault.

Spencer also suggested that we run PhasorSense and ParamExtract, and since we didn't have anything to lose, we did.

The plan was to find a parking lot and drive around, and see if we could reproduce the issue. However, at this point, it was already past midnight, and so we decided to call it a night and hope that we fixed everything.