Cross-Canada by Ebike

[EVnewbie]

Love the semi-recumbent way you did that...brilliant!

Can't wait to start to hear about your thrilling ride across Canada...include pix please and good luck!

[mvadventure]

Justin, Thanks for all your recent help re my drowned 5304. (It's back on the road and survived a brief storm this afternoon) This brings to mind, what will you do in the event of rain you simply cannot escape? Likely you've figured out a way so that you can continue without dismantaling and drying with a hair dryer.
Mike, Florida

[Doctorbass]

Hey Jsutin!

your ride seems very confortable!.. I like the aerospace sized controller too!!

I think the 5304 will give you more fun!

That is a real hard test for ebike equippment and we are impatient to know the results!

If you need xtra battery when crossing Quebec to fight the wind alog the fleuve St-Laurent i can arrange you something begining by kWh .. that would be a pleasure to me to bring you some Sony konion pack for the end of your trip!

That would be cool if you could get a GPS emetter to allow us to locate you on a map!

-Where did you got the dc-dc for the led that can accept 100V at input??? i'm searching for some!.. have you built the circuit?

-How do you plan your trip about the schedule over a day? mow much time do you plan to ride every day? have you a planning or you feel free?

-did you brang some spare pieces in case where you could have some ebike failure?

Have a nice trip Justin! You are the man!

I wrote you at the ebikes.ca adress


Doc

[fechter]

Hmm.. previous post didn't make it...

Anyway, nice job on the controller.

I think you found my list of desirable features and actually made one. Current mode throttle rocks, so does adjustable regen and cycle by cycle current limiting. I'll be real interested in how you implemented the sensorless mode too.

Next challenge will be to make a fully sensorless one that can start from a dead stop just like a sensored one. Think about that one as you are pedaling across the country...

I'm split on the epoxy. Great for water proofing. Sucks for future repair. If the smoke gets out of one part, the whole thing will be scrap (except for a few of us armed with pans of boiling water and dental picks).

[Stevil_Knevil]

Hey Justin,

For your Mojo Bag yet another offering of praise, well-wishes & good luck on your C-C adventure!

You -and your ebikes.ca team- are an awesome force of (r)EVolution.

[Dee Jay]

What a bike!

Upright *slash* semi-recumbent, that iz hot!

And I thought I would never :heart: another . . .

[Xase]

In place of the regular seat tube I've stuck another set of handlebars that links up to the front handlebars. In a pinch, I can slide the 2nd handlebars out, remove the linkage, put the regular seat back in and be back to an old fashioned upright bike, and then the recumbent seat at the back can be used for a passenger. Who's to say I can't pick up hitch-hikers along the way!

Wow! Awesome idea! This has got to be one of the top 5 best ebikes on this site!

I wish you all the luck on your massive endeavour. Have fun meeting the ebikers, weary road travellers, and hopefully some media rats out there on the road.
I'm almost finished reading Jack Kerouac's On The Road. Great book about North American coast to coast travel by a man of French-Canadian decent. You should pick it up; it'd be an excellent and relevant travel companion for sure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Road

[Lock]

Good luck Justin! Hope you drop down to southern Ontario (Toronto) on your way across... Curious whether you are legal all the way? Good to go in Ontario now as you are 500w max <wink wink>

I know you are Wet Coast so our record-breaking wet weather in Ontario this summer will be no problem

Dunno how much pedaling you will be doing (or do) but I pedaled Halifax to Kingston once in seven days (eighth day was last ten miles.) Best day was 160 miles up the (lower) St.John River valley and the Gods dumped three inches of rain that day.

Day Three my feet went numb. Turned out my leg muscles had grown so much my pants were tight and cutting off circulation!
This after two months of 100+ mile weekend day trip prep rides...

Hope you see nice katabatic winds at your back coming out of the Rockies. Drove a car once headed east through the foothills and couldn't figure out why we were getting such terrific gas mileage until we eventually stopped for gas and the tailwind almost blew the door off the car when I opened the car door!

Amusing to see so far on the prairies... watching clouds in the distance dropping rain as they goes...

Manitoba where you start to see patches of forrest that eventually merge into one big woods (Ontario.)

First sighting of Lake Superior at Thunder Bay. If you stay on Highway 11 EVentually it turns into Yonge Street and Lake Ontario...

La Belle Provence! Est-ce que tu parle francais un peu?

St.Laurence River will take you all the way to the Gaspe... next time bring a bike that floats if you want to try a different current...

And the St.John River valley is just gorgeous... The road meanders with the river like a giant slalom course...

There'll be one day when you will realize how much you have missed the fresh salt air.

Have a fresh lobster for me!

But again, hope to see you enroute

Lock

[ZapPat]

If you do come all the way to the eastern coast, stop by to see me here in la baie des chaleurs! (southern gaspé peninsula - close to Maria to be specific)

I would really love to talk about electronics with you over a beer or tea, like about that really really cool looking controller you made! (alone, or with others?)

I'm sure your trip will help people think about alternatives to the giant metal cans we call cars.

Patrick

[Harrington]

Good Luck. Not sure your route. I am in Kamloops just off the highway in Dallas (subdivision 10 km east of town on the Trans Canada Hwy) Welcome to crash if you need to.
Rod

[justin_le]

The very best of luck, Justin, and take care; you're too valuable to lose!
One thing bothers me: Do you have enough weight over the driving (front) wheel?

I had a chance to weight the vehicle this morning, with all my gear but without me aboard; 173 pounds. So, it looks like there's enough weight to spread around between the front and rear wheels that I should be pretty OK for traction!

Justin

[justin_le]

Hopefully you will pass through the capital region and meet some folks from the ottawa electric vehicle council, perhaps get some press attention here.

Definitely going through Ottawa, and it looks like there's a chance I might make it there in time for the August monthly EVCO meeting, so if you guys have space for a guest speaker there are a few things I could talk about!

It would be cool if you had a CDMA EVDO modem, camera and gps, and could load live images and location to a web server, wouldn't be too hard to setup and there are nation wide EVDO data plans. For example, I have internet nation wide EVDO with Bell Mobility.

Actually, thanks to my friendly host and solid ebike/velomobile enthusiast Bernhard who let me stay at his place in Whiterock last night and charge up, I've now got a GPS mouse on hand for the remainder of the trip. What I didn't mention before is that the CycleAnalyst is setup with the V2.1 beta code with a serial output port, so I've been logging my energy usage and speed statistics over the entire trip so far, with the data saved to a laptop once per second. Initially I was going to simply attempt to overlay this information with my known route in google earth to determine the position coordinate for each data point, but now with the GPS unit that process could be automated. Also not visible in the picture is that I have a digital camera setup on the handlebar, taking a snap shot once every 60 seconds, so at the end of the trip we'll have a 6-7 minute video of the country from coast to coast.

In any case, there is going to be tons of raw data to share and pour over, and when we get a blog space setup I'll be uploading this info regularly with the hopes that some of you guys can do some creative analysis and graphical display of all the numbers.

Justin

[justin_le]

Good Luck. Not sure your route. I am in Kamloops just off the highway in Dallas (subdivision 10 km east of town on the Trans Canada Hwy) Welcome to crash if you need to.
Rod

Hi Rob, and thank you for the offer. Unfortunately I am going up via highway 97 so I won't be going through Kelowna. The plan right now is to make it to Penticton by tomorrow evening, and then through Kelowna to Vernon on Sunday, and then to Revelstoke on Monday. So if there are people reading this anywhere along that route who want to meet up, please send me an email to info@ebikes.ca You could be a small part of ebike history. I'm interested to hear everyone's story here, whether you are a longtime EV aficionado or a total newbie.

Justin

[mikereidis]

Definitely going through Ottawa, and it looks like there's a chance I might make it there in time for the August monthly EVCO meeting, so if you guys have space for a guest speaker there are a few things I could talk about!

Justin

I would hope they could make space. As a techie, I'd vote to hear all the details on your latest controller. I WANT one ! Or two

Of course, you'll have harrowing road stories to tell by then, and reams of data.

There are quite a few Ottawa area board members it appears. The bike trails around Parliament and the Canal are quite nice. I presume you can still ride bikes, including e-bikes, on Parliament hill. RCMP might ask you to go through the car bomb scanning area if your bike looks out of the ordinary...

[justin_le]

Hi Justin,

Good luck with the trip. Sounds really impressive - the journey and the new equipment.

If you make a serious navigation error, then do feel free to drop in.

Nick

Ha ha, admittedly I have better skills at navigating traces on a circuiboard than roads on a map. But winding up in england by mistake that would really be something/

[justin_le]

Hmm.. previous post didn't make it...

Anyway, nice job on the controller.

I think you found my list of desirable features and actually made one. Current mode throttle rocks, so does adjustable regen and cycle by cycle current limiting. I'll be real interested in how you implemented the sensorless mode too.

Right now the sensorless is simple crossing detection of the back-emf voltage equaling half the battery supply voltage, with various levels of digital filtering, and that works good enough down to about 5 kph, but for really low speed and/or low duty cycle measurements I'm going to try implenting measuring the back-emf during the PWM off phase as well, looking for the point when it crosses ground, and that should enable operation down to just 1-2 kph, effectively a standstill.

Next challenge will be to make a fully sensorless one that can start from a dead stop just like a sensored one. Think about that one as you are pedaling across the country...

That's going to be required if I want this controller to work with the internally geared/freewheeling motor setups in sensorless mode (required for some hubs like the Tongxin units), so it's on the agenda for sure.

I'm split on the epoxy. Great for water proofing. Sucks for future repair. If the smoke gets out of one part, the whole thing will be scrap (except for a few of us armed with pans of boiling water and dental picks).

Can you get through epoxy with boiling water? I seriously tried just about everything including acetone baths to not much avail. Certainly at this stage potting in epoxy was a bit premature, and I fried both my primary and backup controller when the golden motor overheated and (presumably) shorted the 5V hall line to one of the motor phase windings, and there was no way to do a repair. So when I rebuilt earlier this week I left the controller circuit serviceable, sealed in a nice polycarbonate enclosure.

Polycarb Controller.jpg (38.67 KiB) Viewed 3844 times

-Justin

[nutsandvolts]

Definitely going through Ottawa, and it looks like there's a chance I might make it there in time for the August monthly EVCO meeting, so if you guys have space for a guest speaker there are a few things I could talk about!

That would be great! I will talk to the EVCO executive about this.

Passing through this region, I recommend checking out the beaches in gatineau park quebec (just across the river from ottawa). Beautiful riding territory and a great place to cool off. The park is 365 sq km, 165 km of hiking trails, 90 km of mountain bike trails, and the trans canada trail passes through the park.

http://www.canadascapital.gc.ca/gatineau/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatineau_Park
http://wikitravel.org/en/Gatineau_Park

logging my energy usage and speed statistics over the entire trip so far, with the data saved to a laptop once per second.

Cool!

digital camera setup on the handlebar, taking a snap shot once every 60 seconds, so at the end of the trip we'll have a 6-7 minute video of the country from coast to coast.

Yeah, thats the kind of thing I had in mind. I used to be very into "wearable computing" and wanted to do this kind of recording all of the time, and make a software multimedia player that would allow me to fast forward and rewind through any of my days

I am close to downtown ottawa, been buzzing all over this area today, it is most excellent biking territory, good bike paths, lots to see.
If you need some alternating current, you are welcome.

[pwbset]

Justin you're an inspiration. Period. Best of luck on your adventure. Should have plenty of tailwinds this time of year. If you happen to swerve off course about 60 miles south of the border below Cranbrook into Northwest Montana let me know and you've got a free bed and charging port. Hell.. I won't even be there so you'd have the run of the place.

[bspalteh]

Here are a few pics from Whiterock.

Did you make it to Hope? How is the charging situation where you are?

[justin_le]

Here are a few pics from Whiterock.
Did you make it to Hope? How is the charging situation where you are?

Hey Bernhard, that's great, thanks for the Pics and for all the hospitality. I owe you at least 1.6 kWh!

Anyways, the road to Hope was really wonderful at first, huge tailwind and I was sailing along for much of it at 40kph without any help from the motor at all. But then it rained pretty much the whole way from Abbotsford onwards. Total trip stats were 128 km in 3.5 hours, using 31.6 amp-hours with 4.9% regen. The charging situation is good here, (and the free unsecured wi-fi too). Most of the buildings have outdoors outlets but of all the options for stealing electricity I thought it would be most à-propos to fill up at the Petro-Can gas station.

Drive an EV and you too can score some free gas!

Filling up at Petro Can.jpg (62.46 KiB) Viewed 3824 times

[Lessss]

You are going to write on the back of that box.. TRANSCANADA BY ELECTRIC right?

[Bill Best]

Justin, how fast can you charge your batteries? What type of charger are you using?

Thanks for keeping us updated! I'm as excited as you to see the outcome of your adventure.

I'm sure you have plenty of friends in Toronto, but you can add me to the list of people willing to provide a place to crash & charge.

[Eric G]

....Good Luck to ya on this Cross Canada Trip Justin !!!!! You're an inspiration to us all.
... STAY SAFE ...

Eric

[mikereidis]

Most of the buildings have outdoors outlets but of all the options for stealing electricity I thought it would be most à-propos to fill up at the Petro-Can gas station.

Filling up at Petro Can.jpg

ROFL. Be discreet or Petro-Can will start putting coin boxes on the outlets like those pay air pressure stations.

[Lock]

...but of all the options for stealing electricity I thought it would be most à-propos to fill up at the Petro-Can gas station.

I *used* to do this but the fumes at the stations just smell sooooo bad now. Restautant/Bar patios are way better and more numerous...
tks
Lock