What Strange Build do YOU have Bubbling inside?

Dauntless

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I'm pretty sure I remember an old movie when I was a kid had side hack racing, 'Little Fauss and Big Halsy.' No clip of it on YouTube, but there's one from 'Five the Hard Way.' (AKA 'The Side Hackers.') Just read up on it and they say that's the one realistic looking thing in the movie. (Skip the date after the race, just watch the beginning.)

So I'm trying to think of something interesting enough to bother building; an electric side hack comes to mind. When I was a kid I helped some other kids build one. What rekindled the thought was when I was hiding out earlier I saw someone throwing away two plastic pallets, I found myself thinking of something bigger than a side hack, but I guess still the same thing. By the time I was coming back they were gone, so much for free materials.

Tonight I see this 99media site and some strange short documentaries, including this one on modifying old Vespas in Asia. Oh, to be in a place where they don't enforce street legal. How different would your build be?

[youtube]ZMuF2XvPEO0[/youtube]

[youtube]pPyvUC2UixE[/youtube]
 
I'd love to seen an electric farm tractor for slashing paddocks and the odd bit of mixed small farm work.

A battery electric locomotive seems plausible, with overhead pantograph charging at specific stops.

But an electric sidecar would be great. In fact the roadracing community would probably fund it for you - less oil spills on the track due to overworked 600 cc engines blowing their shit :lol:
 
Building an oil fired steam turbine runabout. 22ft long.

24v oil burner. Hot water pressure washer coil. About 1 gallon / hour. 2+Kwh to start. Flying Scott with the mast and centerboard chopped out, and a prop tube installed.

Also might get the chance to repower a Detroit Electric. Lol. Drive it around. I wonder if you need a license for that.

.. On top of the repower of my ebike from 72v to... 86? 96? v.

... On top of the 134v build.

On top of all the scissorlifts, forks, and powerwheels people have approached me for. And all the other stuff I got my feet in.

Sorry, Mr Jones, my CB750 sidecar is going to stay gasolina. :)
 
I've got access to an old power wheel chair. Can't decide between replacing the footplate with a motor & blade to make a ride on mower or build a Dalek shell over it.
 
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jonescg said:
I'd love to seen an electric farm tractor for slashing paddocks and the odd bit of mixed small farm work.

A battery electric locomotive seems plausible, with overhead pantograph charging at specific stops.

But an electric sidecar would be great. In fact the roadracing community would probably fund it for you - less oil spills on the track due to overworked 600 cc engines blowing their shit :lol:

I'm not sure what you mean by plausible electric locomotive, they've been electric with diesel generators for decades. New York City requires that they run on battery power within city limits. Theoretically they would end up running all trains much like the original hybrids, getting up to speed on batteries then switching over, though in this case the drivetrain would be like the Volt and alternating between batteries and the generator.

And racers just don't want to give up gas engines. They wanna go with what they know.

What's the significance of 22 feet for a turbine vehicle? Oh and, DALEK SHELL, DALEK SHELL!

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I know battery powered locos have been around, but they never get used for more than shunting or underground/tunnel works. I'm curious to know if you had a popular intercity route with stops every 100 km or so, could you run a passenger service on battery power with top-ups at each stop. I presume not, otherwise they'd be all over it by now.

What is cool about that GE loco is that to make a hybrid train, you literally hook a battery loco up to a diesel loco. Can't be any simpler!
 
I've basically had a lightweight 15-20kW e-moped build bubbling inside for a long time, running a custom FPGA-based controller based on the Arty Z7 for the brain and a power stage like ZombieSS's driving a Neumotor 8057, with a 28s8p pack of Samsung 30T cells for juice.
 
jonescg said:
What is cool about that GE loco is that to make a hybrid train, you literally hook a battery loco up to a diesel loco. Can't be any simpler!

The thing is that someone from the future could travel through time with a suitcase battery to do what the rest of the train was capable of doing decades ago. It's still not possible to run trains full time on batteries. But they've long known how to build the rest of the locomotive.

ARod1993 said:
. . . . a lightweight 15-20kW e-moped build bubbling inside for a long time, running a custom FPGA-based controller based on the Arty Z7 for the brain. . . .

So when my career went into long term slowdown I was off to community college to learn to do just the sort of thing you're talking about. It went from learning a little Math, Physics, Plastics for a few AA degrees to maybe I needed an MSEE. Only thing standing in my way was Math, which I barely got an AA in but it kept me from the Engineering Physics classes. (I grew up with 99th percentile scores in Math Aptitude Tests. Go figure.)

Are you someone who works with PLC's? Is this really within reach for you? Why not just go ahead?
 
I have a 10kW hubmotor with no hub but with holes and threads for a disk brake lying around. An me602 I believe. I also have a 8kW Honda Wave 110 scooter in which the motor is not a load bearing member... replacing the 110cc unit with the hubmotor and a sprocket (attached using the threaded holes) chain combo to drive the rear wheel... as the chassis is not altered this may be acceptable to the authorities here in Switzerland... combined with a homemade Sensorless From Standatill controller this would be a cool build.

Another one would be to get an old BMW boxer motorcycle and replace the power unit with a homemade axial flux (keep the gearbox)... i would never use a Guzzi for this as that is just sacrilige !
 
Dauntless said:
ARod1993 said:
. . . . a lightweight 15-20kW e-moped build bubbling inside for a long time, running a custom FPGA-based controller based on the Arty Z7 for the brain. . . .

So when my career went into long term slowdown I was off to community college to learn to do just the sort of thing you're talking about. It went from learning a little Math, Physics, Plastics for a few AA degrees to maybe I needed an MSEE. Only thing standing in my way was Math, which I barely got an AA in but it kept me from the Engineering Physics classes. (I grew up with 99th percentile scores in Math Aptitude Tests. Go figure.)

Are you someone who works with PLC's? Is this really within reach for you? Why not just go ahead?

I think it is; I just got my BSEE last year and have experience with Verilog from a class I took a couple years ago, and I currently work at a small radar and power electronics house that builds >100kW things. The idea would be for me to use the Zynq board to let me run the sensing and control loops at the PWM frequency or close to it; the FPGA part would take in raw current sense measurements from the three phases, do the Clarke and Park transforms on them, compare the results with the setpoint taken from the throttle, issue a new Q current command, and convert the result to SVPWM in under 20us, while the CPU part would take in inputs from main throttle, regen throttle, motor temp sensor, and transistor heat sink sensor, and then pass along a Q command (positive for main throttle, negative for regen throttle, limited to keep winding temperatures under 70C and transistor junction temps under 125C). The hope would be that the fast control time would let me build something that can drive some of the more ornery low-inductance motors, and the custom power stage would let me push 15-20kW.

The big thing stopping me thus far has been exhaustion from work and associated attention span issues; I finally have a friend to work with this on, and I have a rough idea of what this would take to do, although pointers from people who've done sensitive stuff next to tens of kW of switching noise are always appreciated :) It's gonna be expensive (the Arty-Z7 is $170ish, the FETs are gonna be $5-10 each, decent gate drives are about that expensive, and figuring out board routing if I try to put a Zynq chip directly on a board is going to be hilarious; it's a 400BGA package taking in multi-MHz signals. (impedance matching the traces doesn't worry me too much; I'm more worried about the troubleshooting). The final build is likely to come to $600-700 in parts in a working controller, and probably $1500-2k when you count all the FETs that are likely to go boom on early attempts.
 
My problem is that the things I'm capable of building or fixing are cheap, but rather quickly it's no longer worth the time and money. I still have a few untouched Curries that I can't find a project for that motivates me. If I'd just ordered a few things from QS as I was getting the ideas for them and had them before they stopped shipping I'd have something to do but even that stuff is no big deal. I'm sure I could afford your project, too much time on my hands even before the shutdown, no clue how to do something so exciting. Ain't that just life.

Oh, but what use do some of these have once you're done?

[youtube]3FIznSec7BA[/youtube]
 
Seen that thumbnail pic for a vid on all my searches on the TV for YT.

What motor is on that thing?
ZL Motor
http://www.zlmotor.net/product/60671839230-804733136/Customized_speed_and_torque_48V_1000W_electric_bike_disk_brake_hub_motor_for_20inch_60V_e_bike_G_M055.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32793110667.html?spm=2114.12010612.8148356.2.75f3a409YoVinz




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motor1.jpg



motor2.jpg
 
Dauntless said:
My problem is that the things I'm capable of building or fixing are cheap, but rather quickly it's no longer worth the time and money. I still have a few untouched Curries that I can't find a project for that motivates me. If I'd just ordered a few things from QS as I was getting the ideas for them and had them before they stopped shipping I'd have something to do but even that stuff is no big deal. I'm sure I could afford your project, too much time on my hands even before the shutdown, no clue how to do something so exciting. Ain't that just life.

Oh, but what use do some of these have once you're done?

[youtube]3FIznSec7BA[/youtube]

That makes sense; I'm corralling my friend and starting work with Vivado this weekend to try to start getting the FPGA core written. If we can get something that estimates position off back EMF and can do the SVPWM in the next couple of weeks then we have a viable core to build outward around. I also found a couple of papers on MOSFET desaturation circuits that I might want to use for emergency shutdowns if things go wrong (and that would need to be on the FPGA).
 
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