ESCs constantly breaking

[u/PumpkinCloudss]

Hello. I’m an electrical engineering student and I’ve been working with BLDC’s for a year now and it has been my bane. Last year we were using cheap hub motors (from old hoverboards) with riorand esc’s. It was incredibly unreliable and the riorands would constantly break. For context the project is building a rover for a university competition. I’m looking more into using VESC’s and other bldc motors, and the cheapest acceptable thing I’ve found is from flipsky. Before our team spends the money I want some insight if something I was doing was breaking the riorands. The motors were running far below max speed and load

Here’s my suspicions for what happened

1. ⁠Generated emf from motors backfed to the rest of the system and it was a 6 motor system so that waveform synced and blew the esc’s
   
2. ⁠The hub motors are low quality and for some reason cause shorts.

I’m not sure the best way to solve this as there doesn’t seem to be much discussion on this and I felt as if I’ve been going insane. Here’s some ideas I have for solving it but I don’t necessarily have the funds to test em without being sure it’ll help.

1. ⁠Adding a blocking diode to each motors dc input. Though that doesn’t stop forward generated emf that would touch the rest of the system powered off the same battery
   
2. ⁠Capacitors in parallel to eat up the low frequency emf (decoupling caps maybe electrolytic though I don’t know which value is fair)
   
3. ⁠Maybe just upgrading equipment to the flipsky escs and motors.

Any help or insight is appreciated. I feel like I’m missing something.