dequinox said:
WOW... Thats amazing Justin, quite a post after what seems like a long-time-no-see!
How does it ride so far?
So far, with just a throttle and an ebrake for regen this one works surprisingly well! You don't go especially fast on a 29" unicycle, my cadence tops out around 20-22kph, so with the electric assist I am only averaging just over 1 Wh/km, and for every amp-hour I use going up hill, about 0.5 Ah goes back into the pack on regen from the downhill. So that little 36V 5Ah LiPoly battery is good for over 150km at this rate. I'm at 70km right now and haven't charged it yet.
The control loop with a thumb throttle controller PWM isn't ideal though, and it will be much better when I finish a custom controller that is motor phase current regulated. That way between the throttle and the brake you can dial in the exact torque on the hub which will stay constant regardless of speed, rather than always adjusting up and down on the throttle as your speed changes in order to maintain the same torque. On a unicycle, you have other things to think about, and so having to hold and focus on the throttle for every change in the road or change in speed is a bit consuming.
Brilliant design, and I can't wait to see how the stabilizer circuits you are probably about to design for it turn out
So, you are right about this too. In the original plan, I thought it would be great to have self balancing circuitry on the electric assist uni - no throttle and you lean and pedal to accelerate or brake. I also thought you could use it as a 'trainer' device, to make it easier to learn, and then gradually turn down the amount of electronic balancing as you get more comfortable riding. That was the idea at least.
The circuitboard was made to fit in the same enclosure box we use for the CA production, running a PIC18F series chip to take the signals from a rate gyro and accelerometer and then use that to drive a 4 quadrant controller:
I struggled for several days with the code trying to get this to work, but found that to have both human operated pedals AND a balancing control circuit running at the same time resulted in the two always fighting each other. The harder you pedaled, the more you injected a disturbance that the motor would correct by braking, and if you tried to stop or pedal backwards then the motor would kick in high gear going forwards. It was a really strange experience, like riding through a viscous fluid where the harder you worked the more resistance you faced.
As somebody who rides a unicycle, the only way I could make it work was either to turn the self balancing gain way down, so that I was basically able to overcome the motor and keep it steady with my legs, or I could turn the balancing gain way up, remove the pedals and just rest my feet and let the electronics do everything. As soon as you had pedals, and the motor, and the balancing circuitry, it was chaos.
I did bring a 2nd orange 24" electric unicycle down to the Maker Faire which had the balancing circuitry to show people though and to see if maybe someone else could figure out the right human/electric mix with it.
But again it was most rideable with the pedals removed, and since my intent was electric assist this wasn't the end that I wanted. That's why in the larger 29" uni, I left the balancing purely to the rider, and the motor is purely there as an assist and a brake, and that seems to work much better. At least for now, there is still a lot to explore here. -Justin