Lacroix Stormcore VS Focbox Unity | Comparison Chart

Enertion was the first company in the world to produce a Single MCU Motor Controller based on the VESC® motor controller project. This device is called the Focbox Unity. The product development took many months & several iterations to dial in, but in the end the product proved to be extremely reliable and there have been over 5000 sold & delivered worldwide.

The Lacroix Stormcore 60D was the next single MCU motor controller to hit the market. It is designed by Charles & Jeff, former engineers from Enertion. Its fair to say they had acquired some existing knowledge from enertion before diving into the Stormcore project. 

The two brands of products are actually very similar in terms of components, the bill of materials share 95% of the same parts. The most notable difference is the Stormcore 60D has 3 low side shunts vs the 2 low side shunts found on the Focbox Unity.

The Stormcore also uses a newer Texas Instruments DRV chipset that isn't commonly used in VESC® based motor controllers & was only recently made compatible with the core VESC® firmware. As with all new IC's there are the usual teething problems that need to be ironed out over several hardware revisions and the overall product reliability is sure to improve overtime.

DRV issues were the biggest cause of failures in the early days of VESC® motor controllers, These DRV faults plagued the original VESC® design for several years before engineers nailed the perfect layout of capacitors and component positions to minimize noise and improve the overall robustness of the hardware.

This slight design change between focbox & stormcore is mostly not going to be noticed by your average rider cruising around. However, if you are a real performance junky and like to ride around measuring your motor currents & duty cycle you might be able to study the charts after your ride & identify the different characteristics that come from having the 3rd shunt.

The main idea behind the 3 shunt design is to improve the accuracy of the current measurements at high RPM, and/or during rapid acceleration from zero to maximum duty cycle with high KV motors. 

Here is the chart comparing both products side by side