Hi Just
So here is my opinion, and it is just an opinion.
For background, I bought an MP3 a long while back, and had two internal controllers fail with very few hours. My third controller was a Lyen. It has been running well ever since.
It was a pain in the neck to implement the Lyen, simply because it was external to the hub motor. It is not a pretty sight, as the sense and phase winding connections are now outside the hub, and I had to find a spot to locate the Lyen box. Instead of having a prebuilt wiring loom, I had to find a good place to locate the Lyen, route the wires to and from the swing arm, protect the cables and connectors from the weather, physical damage. None of it was terribly difficult, it was just a pain in the neck. Once installed, the top speed was the same, the acceleration was similar, the hill climbing ability was similar. The only performance difference was that I had a reliable machine to ride.
And I complained loudly about the GM decisions that put underrated components on the MP3 controller. The design was brilliant, the assembly quality was fair to middling at best. It looked to me that components were selected on the basis of cost, not suitability.
So what?
The current assembly quality is visibly better in photographs, and the complaints about controller failure are nearly non existent with new products. I'm told the component ratings have been increased to provide a greater safety factor. They now have conformal coating to keep any water away from the electronics. All these are good changes that address my previous complaints about the controllers electronics.
The change from square wave to sine wave drive to the motor windings is a significant positive for reliability.. The reason we can hear the MP3 accelerate with a square wave drive is because the motor windings are vibrating from being hammered by the full current pulses. You should not confuse peak pulse current with average current. With normal digital controllers, each pulse is long enough to drive the winding to full current, say 50 Amps. By limiting the ratio of pulse on to pulse off the average current can easily be limited to some value, but it does not effect the current through the windings during each pulse, so the average of all those 50 Amps pulses is limited to 25 Amps average. With the sine wave controller, the pulse width can be made so short as to not allow the current to reach full value. It would be possible to limit the current to a few milliamps during an individual pulse. The pulse can also be made wide enough to allow the full 50 Amps of current. So the windings are treated more gently by the magnetic fields. And that leads to greater reliability. But the average current can be the same, so the total power can be the same.
So, if I were in the market for another system, I would prefer an integrated sine wave driven motor/driver package over a square wave external driver-motor system. The probability is that the reliability would be better.
Of course with my recent luck, I'd crash while doing a burnout and destroy the entire trike.....
Just an opinion.
TTFN,
Dennis
