Gotta getta pie!

[Kamilion]

Howdy, folks.

I spent most of the evening reading the bulk of the recent posts, back to about may or so.



I've got a 26" 2009 Giant Boulder. Unfortunately it's got the 7-speed wide gearing rear cassette, and I'm not inclined to change it.



I'll take some pictures of the bike tomorrow at work.

I'm pretty low on cash right now, can't afford a car, so I pedal my bike five miles to NASA ames every morning with a 55-liter mountaineering backpack on, which can reach loads of 70-80 Lbs on occasion (I've fit a laser printer in my backpack! HAH!   ) when I go grocery shopping. I weight just about 110Lbs, at 5'10".

I've got a rear rack installed, with a plastic crate bolted onto it, and recently I tore a bunch of decent SLAs out of some decommissioned UPSs. Best of the lot: twin B&B EVP20-12-B2: 14 pounds each, and they look to be in decent condition with stickers from late 2009, which is what spurred me to seek electric drive. Finding the pie was a magic coincidence, universal input, separate from the control wiring!

I've got a PowerStream 2 amp SLA smart charger that I use to rejuvenate UPS packs, but I'm unsure if it'll be enough to keep up with the bike. Should I get a second one, or a larger charger? I've got about 8 hours to charge 'em at work, but I gotta climb a couple hills. Still, 24V, 20Ah deep cycle; could be worse. I doubt the 6Ah packs @ 48V would last long enough to have a decent ride.

I know my way around small motors, servos, and electronics and I've got a decent temp controlled soldering station, but this is my first motor over 20w, and I decided absolutely had to have regen if I went with a brushless drive.

My options? Either a 1.6HP 4 cycle rear friction drive from staton-inc.com for $400 that I've had my eye on for six months, or the bionx, and $1800 was, um... Waaaaay. Too. Much.




Then I lucked out and hit a goldenmotor.com link searching for other regens, found the active forums, great community, and I'm already sold.

 Eventually, I'd like to pick up a lithium pack and add the gas friction drive to the back and use the front regen to charge the pack on the fly for a extended range hybrid bike. I had a little gas scooter that got ripped off using the same subaru engine, and was quite happy with it, did about 25mph on little stubby wheels but had weak pickup. Only pic I can find's the twostroke though.



Gary seems to be very connected with the community, so I filled out a shopping cart for an internal controller frontwheel drive magicpie with two torque arms and a USB cable to check the shipping; sorta gasped a bit, and fired off the email this post was edited from.

I got a reply from Gary at 1AM, bundling them into a new kit link on his site.

Actually its 4am here, I got up for a drink of water and to answer a few emails.

Now that's impressive service. I'll be making my order on friday.

Nice t'meet y'all. I'm Graham from California.

[GM Canada]

Hi Graham

Hey, Your giving away my secrets!  I do have a habit of getting up at 4am every morning to read my messages that come in from China. That way I can respond to them before they go home for the day.

Nice bike and great pictures. I'm trying to figure out what the closeup is of though, what are we looking at there?

Enjoy the Ride!
Gary

[Kamilion]

Hi Graham

Hey, Your giving away my secrets!  I do have a habit of getting up at 4am every morning to read my messages that come in from China. That way I can respond to them before they go home for the day.

Nice bike and great pictures. I'm trying to figure out what the closeup is of though, what are we looking at there?

The first closeup's just of my 7-speed wide cassette.

The second closeup is of the gas friction drive that Staton sells.


Here's some more (clickable) shots of the bike.






Hopefully the front fork will be able to take the torque with the additional two torque arms hoseclamped on.

Looking at the existing controls, the brakes are integrated into the shifters. What are my options here?

[GM Canada]

Now that Im at my desktop again the pictures make sence. They were a little hard for me to figure out on my Blackberry. As for your controls you should pickup a new set of shifters that don't have the brakes integrated in. I had to do that for one of my bikes. I think it was ony about 20 dollars.

I see you have a New york Kryptonite lock. I must get a few of those. I want them for when I have my bikes on my rack on the van. They really look awesome and seem to have the best reviews.

Gary

[Kamilion]

Now that Im at my desktop again the pictures make sence. They were a little hard for me to figure out on my Blackberry.

Heh, I see. I snapped 'em with my motorola droid and uploaded 'em to picasa from there.
Posted from the PC though.

As for your controls you should pickup a new set of shifters that don't have the brakes integrated in. I had to do that for one of my bikes. I think it was only about 20 dollars.

Right, I'll stop by The Off-Ramp, my local shop where I bought the bike, then.

I see you have a New york Kryptonite lock. I must get a few of those. I want them for when I have my bikes on my rack on the van. They really look awesome and seem to have the best reviews.

Gary

Yeah, it's a great lock, just a pain to mount on this frame, it's offset to the side. Wish I could have gotten the mount flange on the bottom of the U.

On occasion it's been... Surreal, trying to find somewhere to lock it to. I'm probably going to pick up an additional 6'-10' jacketed steel cable loop with nooseends large enough to fit the New York's U.

I was thinking on how the existing twist throttle could be improved.

It should be possible to fit a DIP8 PIC and four RGB LEDs into a plastic ring inset into the end of the grip itself; one each at 0 degrees, 90, 180, and 270 degrees. Then you can get rid of the bulky nasty voltage-specific lightbox and have what appears to be only a compact grip.

With a little pie firmware and 2-wire i2c, you now have a full message light, for battery status and error codes (with 8-bit color!)

Blue Blue Purple Green for 'wait five minutes and try again', anyone?

[Kamilion]

Wheee, just made my order with Gary. $499 well spent.