Captains Log / KOBO Testing

KOBO Smart Motor

Why you want a Smart Motor

INTRO

When developing the KOBO Power Reel we quickly realized one of the main problems with electric reels is the thermal performance of the drag and motor. We also started hearing stories of BIG fish being lost after long battles. Fish would get lost due to reels overheating or drags failing. We attacked this 2 main ways:

1. Overheating the reel would cause no catastrophic failures
2. Reducing the thermal build up as much as possible

Catastrophic failure could be the drag locking up, the lack of drag being applied, motor failure, board failure - anything to leave you dead in the water. Reducing the thermal build up would improve our drag consistency and ensure you have the best success to land your seas monster.

To reduce the thermal build up we wanted the drag and motor to work as little as possible. We created a software feature that would control the motor. When line is coming in, no drag slipping, the motor will run at the commanded speed. As the drag begins to slip though, the motor will try to match the slipping speed and even slow to its minimum speed when no line is coming in. This is putting the least amount of power through both heat generators - the drag and the motor.

We find this very useful for swordfishing but more recently started using it while deep dropping. When drifting for bottom fish, sometimes we'll drag our baits across the bottom, creates tension in the line, and other times we only keep enough tension in the line while continually letting letting out.

The latter method we found the smart motor to be very useful. At the time we were running the reel on 24V and with a max speed of 850FPM, it was easy to pull hooks out of our tilefish. We set our target speed on the reel to be 300 FPM. Then engaged the motor with just enough drag to remove the slack. As the boat rocked the line would come in and out seamlessly which allows for the rod tip to indicate a bite. As we started to get bites we would only need to slowly push the drag up till the drag started to engage and then set the hook.

This allowed us to not worry about having the correct set speed, visually have the rod tip as an indicator, and improve our catch success.