Frowny faced Segway pitched me off my ride today
 

Well I guess I should have slowed down when serious (not frowny) face showed up. I was descending a fairly big hill - about 700 feet high - at about 4-5mph and I was going at what I thought was my downhill limit, when Segway seemed to get confused.

It seemed Segway could not figure out how to level itself. It kept slowing me down until I was going backwards, uphill. I stepped off, reset things, and got back on again. This time Segway seemed to purposefully pitch me forward right over the thing and I went tumbling down hill. Thankful for my helmet, wishing I was wearing gloves. I was not on a particularly steep hill, I was going only 2-3 mph, and it just couldn't figure out which way was up.

Has anyone run into a situation where you just could not go downhill? Or the unit just pitched you forward? Or got confused about which way was level? It's kind of made me a bit less confident of going faster until I figure this out.

-- From a first time poster an Segway newbie.

I don't know exactly what happened to you, so I don't know if this is helpful, or not.

But one thing that happens when going downhill with newer riders is that THEY get confused, but not quite how you might expect.

When you're going down a steep hill, the portion of the tire that contacts the road is further back. That means your weight has to be further back.

Now, usually what happens in that case is people feel like they can't slow it down. But maybe you were at the point in your learning process where you have started to incorporate this, but over-compensated, and brought your weight too far back. This may have been combined with pushing it beyond its limits -- did you get a stick shake before it happened? (I hope you know about stick shake and what it means?)

I'm guessing that it's likely you haven't been consciously aware of this shift. Perhaps consciously observing this might help you sort it out, and shouldn't confuse you too much if you have a completely different problem.

Was this a gen 2 model, or an earlier model?

I've actually had this happen, I believe it was on a gen 1, I was going down a hill and it didn't know the pitch, so sometimes it'd lean too far forward or too far back.
The only way I could fix it would be to get to level ground and restart it then let it idle against a kerb for a minute.

This may not be the same thing as yours, and I still don't know what causes it, but, I believe I know what you're describing.

There's another failure mode that might have happened to you. I've only had it happen on level ground, so I didn't think about it earlier....

If you travel over a rough surface, (badly deteriorated asphalt is where I experience this), at the right speed so the resulting vibration is at the right frequency, you confuse the sensors. On my Gen2, what it does in this case is to *drastically* cut speed, to almost a crawl. It recovers after proceeding at a snail's pace for a while. This happens to me regularly on a particular street on my way to work. It's in a low-rent area, populated with a tow company and a redaimix concrete company.

Bob, I have had this same thing occur on cobbletone sidewalks before. If I went a little slower or a little faster it kept it from happening. I thought I had a machine issue while on vacation because of it. Thankfully it was just the sidewalks that caused it.

See my posting (several years ago) about "washboard roads".

I'm also surprised that nobody has mentioned the "prevent overcharging" feature that's operative because Segway charges its batteries while going downhill. Not sure whether that might be applicable here - because the OP didn't say whether the Segway was fully charged at/near the top of the hill.

There was a lot of talk about this when the i2 first came out. There is a shake factor to the balance array software, if I remember correctly...

I recall in the fall of '06 where a cobblestone path was used, and the i2 had a tendency to go into reduced performance much quicker than the gen 1 of the day.

After we were able to produce this reduced performance factor, we found we could do it with rapid movement across some grass fields as well, if there were perceivable 'tufts' of grass that the wheels went over.

Gen 1 will do it, but gen 2 will do it faster.

I never saw anymore than reduced performance however. The machine slows down, and give a flat mouth face, but nothing more.

I suppose if you were not expecting it, and tried hard to ride harder, you might experience something closer to the OP, but I have not tried that hard to over power my machine.

It is kind of like the slow down when going down hills. The i2 is much more aggressive at slowing down on the down slope than the gen 1 was, especially for people who recall earlier software levels. I have seen people over compensate on steep down slopes, because it is kind of counter intuitive, and the problem is the driver, but blamed on the machine...

As I have often witnessed :rolleyes:

I had two shutdowns within a few minutes of one another on cobblestone but I guess it is just because I kept going a moderate speed for so long which was seemingly the ideal speed to cause the problem. I was getting a reduced performance face which never went away prior to emergency shutdown. I also feel it is important to specifically mention that the I2 did indeed do a safe emergency shutdown and did not just kick me off during these instances.

Eniveld, I wish you safe and happy gliding. Please be careful and learn from your mistakes as best you can. WE HAVE ALL FALLEN AT ONE TIME OR ANOTHER and in my case I was always able to find where I did something I shouldn't have. Yes, I fell more than once [B)]

slightly off topic... When is it charging? When the /!\ is on with the frown?