silentguy said:
I’m just not really sure whether I should invest money into fixing this bike or just leave it with the crappy PAS. I’ll probably do it in steps if I decide to in which case the CAV3 might make the most sense.
depends on what you need the bike to do. if this physical bike does evertyhign you want but is just feature/power deficient, and rides like you want, and is the quality of bike you want, then you might as well fix it up to do the rest of what you'd like.
if there are things you need to do the bike can't, or it's not very good quality, problematic components, etc., then it may e simpler to start over and keep this as a working spare, or sell it to pay for some of the new one.
silentguy said:
The bike is a folding bike The One I bought off indiegogo. It was a bit of a scam and misrepresented and I paid Too Much for the bike it’s being sold on eBay and Amazon for much cheaper.
for that you should talk to indiegogo and file a complaint or whatever process they have. if enough people do that you might get teh scam stopped. dunno how they handle it, so dunno if you can get any sort of compensation.
from the specs in your other post, it's all pretty low quality stuff, so if you have more than very basic uses for the bike it might be better to start from scratch to make the new bike, and keep this one as-is till that's done and then use it either as a spare or sell it to pay for some of the new one. many of us find ourselves with a growing collection of ebikes as we discover that previous ones don't quite fit our needs, sometimes improving one until its cheaper / better to just start over, sometimes just starting over each time.
The controller has very small dimensions and will fit only in a certain space under the bike so I don’t think I am open to installing a larger physical size controller.
if you're space limited it could be tough to find a replacement at all. but a number of 6fet controllers willlikely fit in small spaces.
additionally, since the display is part of the controller system, and you have to change both, you may also have ot change the whole wiring harness and if that's inside the frame it's a pita. if your'e willing to cut connectors and splice wires and trace wiring out, you can probably reuse the internal harness if there is one, if it has enough wires to work with the new one.
the battery is probably only really capable of around the max current the system already draws, so a bigger more powerful controller and motor is likely to stress the battery and reduce it's performance, range, and lifespan.
the motor is actually that entire hub inside the wheel. so if you changed the motor to a more powerful one you would change the whole wheel.
you *can* just unlace the wheel and replace just the whole hub, along with new spokes that are the right length for the new motor's different size, but it's much simpler to do teh whoel wheel, as you also then have a spare wheel you can swap out if stuff doesn't work as expected or you have a failure later on.
but you won't be replacing just the electrical motor portion inside the hub, as it's unlikely that any other motor you find would fit inside there the way the old one does, and would require modifications ot hub or motor that make it too much work or expense to be worth doing, and that's assuming you already know what to do instead of having to figure it out by trial and error.
so at this point, of all the options you have to make the pedal control smoother and more bike like, and the likelihood you'll end up building another bike anyway, i'd go with the ca v3 to just use your existing pedal magnet sensor to run the throttle input of the existing controller.
the ca will do more than just give you better pas, it'll also let you monitor power usage in a more useful way than the simple meter the bike has now, useful for troubleshooting problems and for knowing what it really takes to do what you need to do, so you'll better be able to judge how much of a system improvement you'll need for the next bike.
if that turns out to be insufficient, a torque sensor can alter the way your pedal input is used to control the throttle. mostly this is likelyt o be helpful for hilly terrain; if you ride on the flats i expect just the pedal magnet sensor will work fine.
for ease of setup and installtion, you can buy a 24pole pas sensor along with the ca v3 from ebikes.ca all at the same time, and then it's all plug and play besides the battery and throttle connections. that's how i'd go in your case, as it's one less thing you have to figure out wiring on.
i owuld get the ca v3 sa model with it's own wheel speed sensor and external shunt, so you don't have ot mess with any of the existing controller wiring, beyond disconnecting the existing pas sensor itself so that the existing controller doesn't attempt to do any pas control and it's all done by the ca instead..
the ca does have to connect to the biek battery...and the way it needs to do this to monitor power usage means you have to cut the two thick wires between battery and controller completely, and then splice the ca's shunt between them. that can be soldered or you can use connectors. ebieks.ca has various options for this; i'd talk to them about the best one for your bike.
the throttle connector...you would disconnect the existing throttle from the existing controller, and isntead plug it into the ca's throttle input connector. then you connect the ca's throttle output connector to the controller's throttle input connector. this may require making cabling or cutting wires on the bike; it's not that complicated but as with all changes stuff can go wrong and cause problems. it's still less complicated than changing out the controller itself.
the one critical thing you have to know about the bike is: does the throttle work even when you are not pedalling at all?
if it does, then the ca will work to do this with the existing controller.
if it does not, then you have to change the controller since you can't turn off pas control inside the one you have, and that will interfere with the ca making it do what you want.
