QUICK START GUIDE

Are you ready to start riding?!

Well, you're not ready just quite yet. Before you start riding you should do some system checks and make sure everything is set up properly first. Don't worry, this isn't hard! Just follow our steps to get familiar with your new ride. Take a look at the video linked below, this will walk you through how to initialize your board and get it all set up in your ride apps.

Now let's ride!

INITIAL CONNECTION

The first time you connect to your board it'll be with VESC TOOL. Turn on your device and you'll see two Bluetooth signals pop up. One will say either Thor, Vesc Express, or Express T, and the other will be a collection of numbers. You'll want to connect to the Thor / VE/ Express T- this is our controller. The string of numbers is your BMS.

Once you connect to your Thor you'll be hit with two messages;

1) LOAD CUSTOM INTERFACE - Press the check mark box here, this is asking permission to load things like APP UI and Refloat CFG.2) FIRMWARE UPDATE AVAILABLE - Press okay but DO NOT UPDATE YOUR FIRMWARE. Updating your firmware will delete all programming on your board and will require you to reprogram it. To block this message from popping up again, press the COG WHEEL in the bottom left hand corner and disable the pop up.

HAND TEST

Now it's time to do some basic system checks to make sure everything is in order (it is, but as a VESC rider you should know how to perform these basic maintenance steps) Go into APP UI, go to the COG wheel and enable HAND TEST. Place your board on the ground and activate it with your hands. Your board should follow your direction in a sluggish manner. If it balances like this, then we can go back into the settings menu and IDSABLE HAND TEST. Now test your board again and you'll feel it at full power, still following your movements. Congrats! You just completed a hand test!

If your board does not follow your direction and is acting "abnormal", like shooting off in the other direction, then your board is misconfigured. Message SUPPORT for help.

BACK UP

With a working config in order, we should make a backup of these settings. This effectively presses "save" on your board incase we fat finger a setting and break something. We should do this now before we regret it later. On the START page, scroll down to BACK UP CONFIGS and press this. Next, go back to the APP UI settings menu and press BOARD BACK UP. Now you're safe, and sound!

RIDE APP SET UP

Let's get our board set up in our ride apps. We have two ride apps; FLOAT CONTROL - IOS only, FLOATY - IOS and Android. We will instruct how to use FLOATY. Your board can only connect to open device at a time, so be sure to disconnect from VESC TOOL. Press the RED BANNER at the top that reads "NO BOARD CONNECTED" or press on the PLUG ICON. Once you connect, you'll need to complete it's profile. Press on this new banner to enter the configuration step.

Give your board a name and estimated range (20 is usually fine). You'll need to select your battery type, refer to our boards documentation to know what yours is. Keep your empty cell voltages at 3v and press save. You might be hit with some board configuration errors here, and depending on what they are you will need to handle them, or ignore them. In most cases motor values can be ignored, these are based on the average of a bunch of collected results. If your board is riding fine and none of these numbers are crazily out of range, these are fine. Any other errors should have a description of what they are, how severe they are. If you have any concerns, support can help fix or explain them.

Now let's get some tunes in our board. Press the hamburger icon in the top left and press TUNES. Press the IMPORT button on the bottom of this page, this will download a bunch of customer VESC tunes the community has made! Now press on one of these tunes and press the star icon- doing this will favorite it and add it to your home page so you can swipe through them.

LET'S RIDE!

You're basically set up at this point, but there's a bunch of other videos you should watch to further enhance your knowledge of your board. The first video we would suggest would be our INTRO TO VESC series where we go through a lot of what we just did but with more depth. Make sure to join our Discord too for more hands on help from the community and our in house customer support rep. Thanks for being apart of our small little community, we're happy to be here with you! NOW LET'S RIDE!

LINK TO INTRO TO VESC

Updated on: 09/04/2026

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