VEC500 regen on a sailboat? Anyone gotten it to work yet?

[Sventropy]

Anyone gotten the regenerative breaking to work on their boat yet? I see a few folks have installed systems, what parameters are you using and what are your results? Thanks.

[Fabio]

i'm trying to figure it out....

[Defuzo]

A Youtuber (The Digital Mermaid) seams to have solved it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN1rcPOXi2w

(I used to have a sailboat myself, but had a rigging failure)

[Bikemad]

The controller in that video is a Kelly KLS-72100N controller that supports variable regen, but I seem to recall that the VEC500 controller does not support variable regen.

Regen on the VEC controller is either On or Off and should engage when the brake switch contacts are closed, and disengage when the contacts are open.

Alan
 

[Pontus]

I did get this to work on my VEC 500, although power was very low at the time; around 190 W when sailing at 6 knots. Bear in mind that this was with a motor directly mounted on the prop shaft - WITHOUT and reduction gear. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to turn of the cycle of 15-beeps when re-gen is engaged. 

I've now rebuilt the transmission with a reduction gear, and therefore expect higher power, since the motor (generator) will spin faster for the same sailing speed. I would estimate the generated power to be about 500 W, this have to be confirmed with real life tests though.

You can read more about re-gen in this blog post