Balance Loop

To self balance the Vibe, we need some sort of control loop that will take in the IMU positional data from DMU11 and proportionally apply motor current to keep the wheel under the rider. This is the working principle of the Vibe, as described more in detail here.

Software choices

From a software perspective there are two options for the VESC based controller Vibe uses:

• Bake in a PID loop into the Vibe VESC firmware
• Use an existing package that can be installed and independently configured.

I considered going with option 1 and expanding on my experience of having written a PID loop for self-balancing vehicles before, but during my research I realised that the open source self-balancing community has come far since I last dabbled into it in 2017 and there are multiple VESC Packages that get the job done for now.

It is worthwhile to note that the VESC packages were designed for board based OneWheel-s in mind and I have found that even though most of the mechanics translates well, there are some bike specific experience related tuning that I would like to add to the loop such as how the Vibe behaves on down-hill vs up-hill climbs and the braking behavior. Going forward, based on the feedback I receive, we may choose to fork a package and build upon.

PID Parameters - Refloat Package

Vibe currently uses the Refloat package for the PID loop. Lukáš Hrázký, the author and the community has done an excellent job building and maintaining this package.

I have found the following PID and IMU filtering parameters to work the best for the Vibe: