Australia: Hunter Valley EV festival and competition Nov 20t

Anyone planning to go at this stage?

yes

@ whatever: What batteries are you planning on? As I see it on a bike platform, this is mainly a battle of finding the lowest $/wh delivered to Oz. Then throwing it on the most efficient bike you can get your hands on.

I can't make it. Too far to drive and I probably cannot afford a weekend away at the moment. Would have been nice to go though. Maybe if it was a little closer.

i'll be a spectactor, will take some pics/vids

Awesome. Love to see some footage....

Hey guys, just found this thread.

I'm actually entered in this event as Grinmore Pedaless. I've done a couple of blog entries on their web site. http://hunterevfestival.com.au/category/ev-prize/grinmore-pedaless
Mostly highschool teams entered, and they're playing their cards close to their chest - not much blogging apart from mine there.

I'll do a more detailed build log here on ES after the event, only a few days until it's on now so I'm busy track testing and tweaking at the moment.



Some of you may recognise the recumpence drive with Astro 3210.

I'm running it on 8S with some 10C packs I got from Leaders Hobby (cheapest lipo I could find, thanks to gfulton for the tip on that).

If any ESers are there on the Saturday or Sunday, give me a shout!

Hey great to hear you are having a bash. So I assume you managed to get 8 of the 4s packs from leadershobby, that should squeeze you jsut under the $200 (inc shipping). So that gives you nominally 592wh to play with. If I was you I would try over charging them a tad, to squeeze in a bit more, and then run them into the ground for the race if you have to. Any idea what capacity others will have?

Nice to see you putting the recumpence drive to good use. Going to try putting a fairing on, or is that all a bit too fancy.

Good luck,
Adrian

EDIT: PS. Those batteries had a couple of bad reviews on the leadershobby website. So make sure you keep an eye on them, they might be rebranded reject packs.

Thanks Adrian, yes you're right with the battery packs I'm using. I guess that a few people will be running 36V 20Ah of lead.

A few of the cells won't charge above 4.1V, and of course they're different ones in each pack. :? If they don't behave any better after 10 cycles, I'll just avoid cell-level paralleling. You get what you pay for as always.

I'll set the CA current limit to 25 or 30A, so they won't be working very hard.

A fairing is on the to-do list, subject to time. I have some old corrugated plastic real estate signs ready for the job.

Bonus points for lithium fire. It'll give the Murdoch media something to cover....

quite a successful event, in the ditance competiton the winner went 60km no pedalling, I think they had 36v 18ahr sealed lead acid batteries, some pics vids of event will put up when i have time
a few electric motorbikes were very impressive, including catavolt with crystalyte/enertrac modded twin motor in rear

Didn't catch up with you there, whatever.

I really enjoyed the day, it was very well organised. The rain stayed away, but the wind was quite strong and the temp got up to around 30 celcius.

Here's the winning entry in the Schools EV Prize (correct me if I'm wrong somebody!):

Using a brushed DC motor and lead batteries!


In the couple of days leading up to the race, there was some discussion about the rule of adding ballast up to a nominal weight of 75kg. In the interests of safety (most of the entrants were highschool kids) this rule was waived for the Schools Prize. The required minimum speed was also reduced to around 28 km/h to make sure all the entrants were in the race. However, since I was carrying the full 75kg, I actually won the Open Division with 42 laps. There was about seven entrants from schools and three in the Open.


I love the "sprocket" trophy, particularly as both division winners were non-hub systems.


That was a looong time on the track (around an hour 20min), my body would not have lasted any longer even if my battery did.

As it turned out, the dodgy cells let me down. I ran out of time to run some more cycles on the packs, so I wasn't expecting great things from them. I ended up getting around 13 Ah from the 20 Ah packs. One cell went down to around 2.1V, the other 7 in the string were still hanging in there at around 3.6V. I was only monitoring one string, but I'm sure there was a similar story on the other one. I was secretly hoping for some flames shooting out the plywood side panels, but alas, my speed just dropped away.



I enjoyed the first few laps, was hitting it pretty hard and averaging around 33km/h, then when I had almost lapped the tail-enders, I dropped back closer to the minimum speed.

Congrats on your win Grinhill!

Was the bike powered by an Astro motor and Castle controller?

Everything's hidden under that nice aero body!

Cheers, Abraham

Woo hoo. Well done Grinhill.

Pity the batteries were so dodgy. You would have gone 50% further if they delivered their full capacity.

- Adrian

Hey thanks guys.

Yes it was an Astro 3210/recumpence drive, running at about 900W max, limited to 30A by Cycle Analyst with RC firmware. It got a bit warm, the uphill section of the track was quite steep.

I used a Castle Phoenix ICE 100 (hence 8S was my voltage limit). I did have an ICE HV160, but I sent it back for the service advisory upgrade a few months back and I'm not sure when I'll see it again.

Good to meet you on Saturday Abraham, I hope to hear about a Sydney e-vent for next year.

Very good job. Glad to see non-hub systems getting the glory.

Matt

grinhill
your cell log graph, one bar is missing? is that the flat cell? you did well, there was a film crew there making a documentary, i would think there will be some good footage from them available soon

Yes thats right - the cell log was beeping and flashing madly for the last 15 min or so, maybe D is for dead!!!

That's the first time I've used the cell log, will have to read about it some more.

evmotorcycle.org was busy taking vids all day, I'm sure we'll see some soon.

I'm wondering if the cell log graph is only showing down to the lvc you've set, if it went to zero volts I think you would have had a fire or at least a very very hot cell

Just found that Jarrod on the Nanovolt had an onboard cam. Here's some of his footage which was posted on the AEVA forum, which gives some good views of my bike for a few laps. He was quicker than me, but only had 8Ah of Headways so they ran out a bit too soon.

[youtube]x0bprVsMj3w[/youtube]

there is also a video from catavolt ( from cardiff nsw)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf8zuUuq3uY

it shows the lawnmower guy on the track, the lawnmower guy rolled it and hurt his back,
not shown on this vid, I think when the documentary guys finish their dvd there will be lots of good footage

some pics here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/billcollison/sets/72157628068972791/

Just looked at the flicker photos.
That 90kph electric ride-on is hilarious!

It's funny, I asked The Lawnmower Man whether he had ever rolled it while I was chatting to him on the Saturday display day before the track day. (He had just been doing some circle work on the council's public park area).

Good of him to oblige us with a demo of rolling it, however he forgot to warn anyone so there were no videos of his accident.

(Hope he didn't injure himself too badly).

Hope he doesnt bugger up their cahnce of getting reinsured next year. Perhaps a clown on two fronts.