Cycle Analyst V3 preview and first beta release

My 2 bikes with torque sensor + ca is running fine without any problems, one with version 3.14, the other with 3.15b. So it should be possible to address? Do you mind posting all your settings (just print screen from PC), maybe someone is able to help?

Also, running the torque signal from the torque sensor directly to the throttle input, and scaling it correctly works fine. You can even wire it parallell with the throttle (you will get a bit of dead play as the scaling needs tonstart at 1.5V, though). But it sucks. Without the rpm signal to calculate power output you get less assistance the faster you pedal, as you are not able to put a lot of torque into the pedals while spinning fast.

john61ct said:

Which devs do you think you are addressing with your suggestions?

I suspect there are more effective channels, they are likely not reading these threads.

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Which channels Grin developers read? I sent email to Grin support like a month ago about power surge issue, no response what so ever. Feels like CA3 is yesterdays news and they not care anymore, electrifying wheelbarrows is more interesting.

Yes I think it unlikely CA will see further development. I bet there is only one, that being Justin, and

indeed higher priorities occupy his time.

You should be able to get normal user-level support if needed, but enhancement requests might only be of interest to those working on new replacement "meta controllers"

john61ct said:

Yes I think it unlikely CA will see further development. I bet there is only one, that being Justin, and

indeed higher priorities occupy his time.

You should be able to get normal user-level support if needed, but enhancement requests might only be of interest to those working on new replacement "meta controllers"

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Would be interesting if Grin were willing to open source the CA firmware. I could see a new wave of development stemming from that.

if wishes were fishes

I'm sure it's a nice milk cow still selling plenty, would be very unusual for any for-profit company to do that.

john61ct said:

if wishes were fishes

I'm sure it's a nice milk cow still selling plenty, would be very unusual for any for-profit company to do that.

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Generally speaking, when there's no longer the desire and/or resources to develop a product internally, companies will open source some or all of it to keep development going. The companies get to keep selling hardware while the community gets to implement the features that it's interested in. Also, the risk of forever losing the work that went into the product almost disappears.

But so long as sales are good without requiring any time or effort from management...

Properly managing an active FOSS community takes a lot.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be great, in an ideal world.

Just that I think it is unlikely in this one.

Great to hear that at least you guys are willing to provide a helping hand!! I guess we will have to find some kind of work-around for the power surge issues, without dev support.

Besides the pass through open loop solution that we discussed before, what would also work in my opinion is if we could set a custom max safe voltage (saturation level) that the power control logic would be allowed to achieve for torque sensors. For example 50% or 3 volts. The handlebar throttle should be allowed to go to 100% or 4.2volts. In that way, there would be a safety net for torque control and full power available for throttle.

I will try to get a cable to hook up my ca to a pc and get some screenshots. Meanwhile, here is some additional info:

- hardware: 8+ kW ebike, 130/350 battery/phase amps, 72v 27.5Ah battery.

The behavior I am trying to get is immediate and powerful throttle response up to full power (enabling wheelies). Preferably also immediately response to torque sensor within safe max power limits (eg 50%), up to 8x human power, to get immediate ‘super human’ response to pedal input from standstill up to at least 70 km/h.

By taming gain factors (Again, Wgain), slowing down ramp up rates for pas, and using low waiting times for pas start and pas stop, I have managed to achieve somewhat sluggish although generally useable torque behavior. HOWEVER… in certain traffic situations, generally with a lot of start and stop pedaling action, the ca occasionally still slams the throttle to 100% briefly (when it thinks power should be high when it briefly was not), immediately sending my front wheel to the moon which is extremely dangerous and scary in busy traffic. It really needs some sort of safety limit (max throttle level) other than ramps rates because it clearly does not respond to that quickly enough.

I will try to focus on solutions outside the ca now, to provide a safety net. First experiment with a slower ramp up rate of the controller itself (soft throttle). Any hardware suggestions to limit the max torque sensor voltage are also welcome?

The problem should not be so hard to tackle, right?

Yes, the issue is clear now. You need to design the motorcycle Analyst for 8+ kW eMotorcycle with peddles.

8)

And the safety features/net will be useful for every other bike as well of course

There is quite a few threads about touchy throttles when you get into higher power ebikes. Don't know why you think the CA is causing this issue. Most seem to add the CA to smooth out the throttle. Using pas on a 8kw ebike, don't get that at all if you have only one gear and peddle very little. I'm sure this group is so small the market is just not worth developing for. Best make you own and we can see how that goes.

Has anyone here set up the CA3 with PAS using the CYC X1 pro kit?

ZeroEm said:

There is quite a few threads about touchy throttles when you get into higher power ebikes. Don't know why you think the CA is causing this issue. Most seem to add the CA to smooth out the throttle. Using pas on a 8kw ebike, don't get that at all if you have only one gear and peddle very little. I'm sure this group is so small the market is just not worth developing for. Best make you own and we can see how that goes.

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The bike is actually still a very normal looking and riding bike with 7 useable gears (60t chainwheel, 11t smallest at the rear). I can pedal with proper cadence from standstill all the way to 85 km/h. The throttle is not touchy at all; with the right settings it is very controllable from 0-8000w. Also, the torque sensor in power multiplier mode is well behaved and useful for riding along cars on the road up to legal speed limits - that is until you pause for a brief moment and the ca timeout still waits for the next input and provides a full throttle signal briefly as soon as you start pedaling again.

I am convinced that the ca power logic combined with some hard coded pass timeout setting is the problem here. The ca is a piggyback control system that should incorporate some user definable lower and upper boundaries for the ‘throttle’ output signal/voltage, that is derived from the torque * cadence calculation. It doesn’t (at least i have not found a safety setting that allows a fast initial response but also a saturation limit for the output voltage). A piggyback control system should not rely on slow hardware to dampen its responses, but should incorporate proper safety precautions.

I have ‘solved’ the problem by reverting to simple pas mode (no torque), where the sempu t4 only provides the 48 pulses pas signal. In this mode, you can select direct pas through (not power control!) AND set a saturation limit for the highest pas level, e.g. 40% throttle. This works flawlessly; you can start and stop pedaling at the highest pas level without any wheelies, and still use a thumb throttle to achieve maximum acceleration at 100% throttle. The only downside is that the torque sensor is not used at all this way, which was the whole reason i invested in the expensive ca.

So if only those saturation limits for maximum voltage output for power control mode for a torque sensor could be set in a future firmware version, than torque mode could safely be enabled again. Well, something to keep dreaming about. For now, the bike already rides very well.

I get what your saying. I have only used PAS and have seen the behavior not to often. When has been off or not assisting at all and when it comes on it's at least 500% more power than set. For me it's a jerk before settling down. Think about upgrading to a torque sensor. I could find a few threads were members have been trying to adjust that behavior out of the CA.

so just ordered the new 3 button MF switch

but also found out the 3rd button isnt actually wired in its got seperate wiring in the sleeving

has anyone managed to wire this into the CA , i actually wanted to to use it as a toggle button for profiles etc


if not what have you used it for

BVH said:

Does the CA V3 remaining battery capacity graphic represent empty as the cell being 100% discharged or does it represent the cell being 80% discharged or?

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Found a good Li-Ion cylindrical cell pack capacity remaining v resting voltage table from an E-bike pack rebuilder.

Use the Volts Per Cell column data times number of cells in-Series to apply the table data to larger and smaller Series packs

izy said:

so just ordered the new 3 button MF switch

but also found out the 3rd button isnt actually wired in its got seperate wiring in the sleeving

has anyone managed to wire this into the CA , i actually wanted to to use it as a toggle button for profiles etc


if not what have you used it for

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I don’t know if this answer is really what you are looking for, but maybe it helps:

Grin tech has a pdf file that describes how to implement a digi-aux on 1 analog input signal, using a combination of resistances and schottky diodes to create different ‘regions’ of operation. Your third button could be one of those regions, similar to an analog button that would be in its fully open state.

See the pdf document named: Cycle Analyst DIY Custom Digital Aux Controls Instructional Notes

Copyright of Grin Technologies of course

Have mine plugged in with a digital switch. Had used it for 3 speed switch and changed it to 3 power levels. The digital switch is used for PAS levels. Did not need to brake out and connect any wires. Just plugged it in and allowed three settings. Which at the moment is 35%, 66% and 100%. It's been 3 yrs last time looked at the wiring. Have you plugged it in yet?

by izy » Oct 18 2021 4:40pm

so just ordered the new 3 button MF switch

but also found out the 3rd button isnt actually wired in its got seperate wiring in the sleeving

has anyone managed to wire this into the CA , i actually wanted to to use it as a toggle button for profiles etc


if not what have you used it for

Click to expand...

ramstadt said:

My experience with CA3 is that you need both cadence and torque before it engages the motor.

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Yes, this is required in all of the available beta and release versions. Grin did have a beta version that allowed operation without cadence (pure torque) but it isn't available publicly.

However, if you are willing to use the esk8 version firmware (see Justin's balance-operated board thread), and don't need the aux in, you can use that to operate from a throttle on one input and a torque sensor on the other, with no cadence input.
https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=88901

However, there are a number of potentially seriously dangerous situations that can arise with a bike setup this way, especially if it has much more than a very basic assist power level motor system.

Due to a series of serious life-interruptions that I am still working thru, I have not gotten back to the Nano TidBits thread I started
https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=110497
where development was begun on several hardware bits to work around certain limitations and functional things in the CA3.x firmware, including this one, while still incorporating safety features to minimize risks.

If you are experienced at (or wish to be) Arduino stuff, you're welcome to continue the development there, and I'll pop in as I can. (I'm just barely a beginner, if that).

matmat said:

Generally speaking, when there's no longer the desire and/or resources to develop a product internally, companies will open source some or all of it to keep development going.

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In my decades of product use, I have yet to see any company whose product I used do this with either software, firmware, or hardware. If you have any examples, I'd love to know which companies to support.

As far as I can tell, they'd rather everything be trashed and all that work and information lost forever than let anyone have any access to it.

The closest any of them I've seen ever came to that is when GadgetLabs went out of business, one of the engineers worked with a programmer that was working on a school project to develop windowsXP drivers for the GL audio cards...but the original GL drivers and software were NOT allowed to be used in any way, and no sources or codings, etc., were available. The programmer had to write everything including the internal Aptera DSP code from scratch, only guided by the former engineer's advice. The good news is that the programmer was very good and made better drivers than GL did, so the very expensive audio cards are still usable even now, on Windows10 (after an update to the driver by that programmer), more than 20 years after they were made. I don't know of any other card that's true of, even for those companies that are still in business (because they want to sell new hardware, so they don't make driver updates for their stuff no matter what it cost or how good they were). But it doesn't ahve anything to do with the original company's code or open-sourcing that.


And I have run across a handful of VST effects and instruments in recent years that had their compiled code (NOT the source!) put out there for free when the companies (usually just individuals) that made them discontinued them or went in other directions. But none of them had source code available, and they were not made open-source...just freely downloadable instead of purchasing them.

amberwolf said:

matmat said:

Generally speaking, when there's no longer the desire and/or resources to develop a product internally, companies will open source some or all of it to keep development going.

Click to expand...

In my decades of product use, I have yet to see any company whose product I used do this with either software, firmware, or hardware. If you have any examples, I'd love to know which companies to support.

As far as I can tell, they'd rather everything be trashed and all that work and information lost forever than let anyone have any access to it.

Click to expand...

Yes that is reality, matmat's statement pure fantasy, wishful thinking.

Good "right to repair" laws would require it, but that is also just an idea, even more of a dream.

I'd love to see the solar firmware get a long overdue update - with solar becoming more & more popular with ebikers (me included) it would be nice to see it happen.

Hello, I have a CAv3 but I don't know what this 2 Pin plug corresponds to with the 6pin plug that goes on my controller. I have a 2pin with the motor connection for a probe but I cannot find the other on the diagram. I specify that my CAv3 does not turn on. Is it a connection for an ON / OFF button?

Hi,

In the photo, if the plugs pictured are attached to the CA3, then the 2-pin JST is a duplicate temperature sensor plug

You can confirm this by checking continuity with a multimeter to other temperature sensor plug which is part of the same cable as the throttle/ebrake/aux connectors near the CA3 display.

The CA3 (non WP8, non MFSwitch model) doesn't have any power switch and it takes its power directly from the controller. If your CA3 is not powering on, then it means it is not getting power from the controller, probably because the controller is powered off.

Thanks,
Oli.

A little help if possible please folks. I have integrated the CA3 to my cyc x1 pro 2 along with wiring in the torque sensor. Everything works with help from this site so thank you.

My questions are:

1) The CYC torque sensor has a pole count of 36 but CA3 only allows up to 32 to be selected, I have left it at that which I assume is OK or should it be something else?

2) I am constantly refining the settings to make the PAS more responsive regarding how -quickly it responds (not a fan of the power sensing rather than pure torque but hey it is what it is) and am interested in the "ASST AVG" setting, currently set to 32 again as this is the max allowed...I am not really sure how this changes function in real life?

TIA