Endless Sphere

About three weeks ago, one of my e-bike's controllers wasn't working. It wouldn't even attempt to power the motor and appeared completely dead. Opening it up, it was soaked with water. After washing it down and drying it thoroughly, it powered the motor again, but there was a weird vibration when ac...

June 2019 Update The "Cycle Analyst" device is largely finished and I have uploaded the code to my Github repo at https://github.com/thorlancaster/electric-bike-controller . The documentation is not quite there yet, but all the code and a few sparse schematics are in the repository. The three contr...

I was expecting to finish the bike sooner, but with college and finals and whatnot, it got pushed to the back burner and I have just now finished it. The wiring clutter of last year's setup is long-gone, with only a serial cable and battery power running the length of the bike. I've also nearly doub...

That's quite the build!
Have you considered putting a chain guard over the mid-drive chainsaw mechanism?

It was definitely a good idea to put zeners on the power rails. During testing the regen brake, I was spinning the wheel with the pedals and heard a faint pop. It's likely that the few-volt spikes generated by regen, plus a nearly fully charged 12s battery, pushed the Chinesium LM2596hvs over the ed...

I've got a power zener across the output and a low-value low-watt resistor on the input, so if it fails it shouldn't take out more than the resistor and possibly the diodes. If that happens, I'll just buy a genuine one from Arrow or Mouser and replace the dud one. The one in my (currently front) con...

I had finally got it working. The motors were spinning up at the same time, the sensors were calibrated, the PID loops were tuned, and the regen brake was smooth and the FETs for the regen were barely getting warm. After making a few last-minute tweaks in the code, I spun the wheel to test the regen...

This thing is starting to look more and more like an electric car build. Definitely one of the most street-legal fast setups out there.
How many KWh of battery do you have for the main pack? With that vehicle, I'd personally go for at least 2 KWh of battery.

To control and monitor two hubmotors and all their associated paraphernalia, a simple Cycle Analyst was not going to cut it, never mind how expensive it is. At the heart of my build is a waterproofed LCD display secured into a waterproof box with copious amounts of GE Silicone II caulk. The whole th...

A few final exams are out of the way, and I've upgraded the front controller with a hall-effect current sensor and soldered a copper wire halfway down the shunt to increase the max current to 65 amps (which I'll never use, just keeping built-in cycle-by-cycle limiting as a fail safe). Unfortunately,...

The microcontroller you listed would not be suitable for the task at hand, as it runs off of 3.3 volts and all ESCs I've ever seen run off of 5 volts. Get an Arduino Nano, those things use less than 10 milliamps and even less if you break SMD power LED off. You can get a clone off of eBay for less t...

Do you have any Arduino experience? An ATTiny85 microcontroller could do the job. Just run one of the hall signals to an input pin and power it off the 5v line from the controller. It only draws a few milliamps, so it would be fine. Take a transistor, hook the emitter to ground, hook the collector t...

I haven't seen many other people put compression on LiPo packs like that. I've heard it improves cycle life and prevents puffing and increasing IR. It'd be great if you could post how the pack is doing in a year, my RC Car's Turnigy got slightly puffy after 6 months with no pressure on it. There is ...

I am majoring in computer science and minoring in electrical engineering. With those two skillsets, the possibilities will be endless once I graduate from college.

I build my packs by soldering. I use a high-power temperature controlled iron with a fat tip, along with 16awg copper wire to make connections. Before soldering the negative wires on, I tin all the negative terminals using aluminum flux and a temperature of 350°C. As soon as the solder starts sticki...

Wire heating doesn't depend on voltage whatsoever, the losses are (current^2 * resistance). The higher voltage battery you run, the more watts any given wire can carry. I'd personally go with XT60 connectors for currents above 40 amps, they'll do 10 gauge (with a good soldering iron and trimming bac...

There are two ways you can go about this: I'd suggest doing what you were suggesting in the first post, it will work as long as the controllers are identical and the lengths of wire from battery to each controller are the same or nearly the same. If the wires from battery to controller 1 are a diffe...

It's nice having a bike with room for lots of batteries in the frame triangle. From the picture, I'm guessing that you could put upwards of 2 KW in there and get upwards of 60 miles of real range. Have you considered building your own battery packs? I get my cells from NKON and they are about twice ...

That's one of the tidiest, best looking LiPo enclosures that I've seen on an e-bike. When the batteries finally go bad, what do you plan on replacing them with?

The Samsung 25R and 30Q seem to be quite popular nowadays. I use 30Q cells and they work great.

Placeholder for improvements, coding and electrical tweaks, and the much-awaited test results.

Rear hubmotor from bike, it's spent a winter outside and even gotten frozen once. Thanks to the plastic waterproofing spray on the windings, there is virtually zero corrosion. The black stuff on the rotor magnets is just hardened brake pad dust, it came off easily with alcohol and a brass-bristle br...

The battery is made from 12s10p of Samsumg 30q cells, along with the 24 2600mah Samsung cells that had the lowest IR from my old pack. So far, it hasn't even got the slightest bit warm, as my setup only draws around 45 peak amps and this pack should easily do 100 continuous. Total usable capacity be...

Here are some photos of my old setup, with a comparatively whimpy 40 amp max battery and one motor. It still got me up to 30something on the flats. The battery: https://i.imgur.com/sFua8HY.jpg The motor: https://i.imgur.com/xPQcnMt.jpg?1 The disgusting Flex-Sealed controller: https://i.imgur.com/0A2...

Last summer, I built an electric bike to take me 12.5 miles from Medicine Lake, Montana to Froid, Montana. Using a simple hub motor kit I purchased off of eBay, it had a 28 MPH top speed, 1kW of power, and ran off of a 12S9P pack of 26R cells. It got me to Froid easily, but struggled to get me back ...

I'm not sure what I'd do about the fried charge plug, but if you posted photos, I'd have a better idea of what to recommend.