Cycle Analyst 2.0 - Happy Host

[knightmb]

It finally came in today, straight from Canada. Like a kid on Christmas morning, I ripped the box upon to smile up the shiny new "Cycle Analyst 2.0" smiling back at me in the box.

Ripped off the old speed computer to replace it with the stealthy black box. Got it hooked inline with the battery, set all the options. I played around with the menus, doing wheel spin test, giggling as I watch the watt's go up and down.

Finally, reset everything for stat reasons and took it for a quick 5.5 mile speed trip around town. It's really fun to have so many stats at my finger tips. I would see how much I regen by pedaling, I could see how much head winds were eating into the wattage, and even the speed reading itself was so much faster on the updates. The green screen has a back light, will be great for my many night time rides. Everything clear and easy to read.

Here were the stats for my ride (@ 48 volts, 20A, 406 motor)

Distance: 5.5 Miles
Max watts used during any time: 908 watts
Total trip was 142 W/hr or 25.8 Wh/mile
Max current: 24.1 A

It was interesting to see how much power it uses on level ground at 35 MPH, was hitting about 640 watts, when I went around some places and hit a head wind, it would rocket up to 900 watts. It's amazing how much power the wind will drain. It's also just as interesting to watch how much power I could put into it.

The snag, I got so excited about hooking everything up. I didn't notice that when I turn off the power, the CA stays on. It's because I followed the wiring too closely and did it right off the battery, LOL instead of "after" the switch. *bonks head*

At least I can watch the batteries charge to the full 56 volts :x

 

[xyster]

That's great, knightmb. Can we see pics?

It was interesting to see how much power it uses on level ground at 35 MPH, was hitting about 640 watts, when I went around some places and hit a head wind, it would rocket up to 900 watts. It's amazing how much power the wind will drain.

The other day, I rode around in an ~30mph east wind. On level pavement, riding west at 25mph required 400 watts. Riding east at 25mph required 1600 watts! In calm weather, riding 25mph requires ~700 watts.

 

[knightmb]

I can't capture the splash screen, can't turn it on and off yet, LOL. Hopefully it won't drain my batteries before tomorrow when the electronic store opens.

 

[Dalecv]

I still haven't explored all of the options that my CA has, I purchased it with the controller prewired to connect together so it does shut off.

One thing I found was using the wheel circumference input into the CA the result was a too high of a speed reading. I used a GPS to calibrate mine.

Max speed 43.8 ???

Have fun with your new toy!

 

[Lowell]

I still haven't explored all of the options that my CA has, I purchased it with the controller prewired to connect together so it does shut off.

One thing I found was using the wheel circumference input into the CA the result was a too high of a speed reading. I used a GPS to calibrate mine.

Max speed 43.8 ???

Have fun with your new toy!

If the speed reads wrong, the pole count # could be off. Try adjusting the # of poles until it reads correctly.

 

[knightmb]

Ok, did another short ride today. Basically, went to return some movies to the rental store. This time, I decided to do a 72 volt run. Here are the stats of that ride. Plus, finally got things wired up correctly, so that the CA turns on and off when I use the front power switch. I wish there was a way to set the mileage on the CA, but for now I might cheat by setting to the wheel size to 100000 mm and spin the wheel until the mileage matches up (LOL).

And finally a picture of the splash screen now that I can turn it on and off, hehe.

As you can see, I burn 4 watts just sitting there with it on, hehe. My maximum wattage during the ride hit about 1440 watts, fun fun!

Enjoy!

 

[knightmb]

For more CA fun. They don't have an option to manually set the odometer setting, so I decided to do it the fun way. Setting the wheel size to 9999 mm and using string to keep the wheel straight while it sits off the ground, some duck tape to hold the throttle "full" open. I'll hit 2300 miles in no time

You'll notice how fast it thinks it's going at that wheel size :lol: :lol:
One can only dream... :|

 

[Ypedal]

Awsome !!!

Great to see you diving right in.. you will find yourself going thru bouts of anxiety if you ever go without one now :lol: .. but you learn alot about motor behavior/power used/voltage sag/ etc... and makes riding alot easier !!! ( No worries about over-drain.. and you can closely gauge how much power you can use on long trips to make the best of your batteries ! )

My collection of CA's stands at 5 ! lol.

 

[D-Man]

Hey Knightmb,
What's the deal on the fork? You using front brakes or is that a 700c mountain biking fork?

 

[knightmb]

Hey Knightmb,
What's the deal on the fork? You using front brakes or is that a 700c mountain biking fork?

It's a mountain bike 26" front fork, but the wheels that use to be there were nearly the same size (when you included the knobby tires) as the 700C wheel was. So one day, got curious and decided to see if the wheel would even fit. It did! So, I have shocks in the front finally and the fork is uber beefier than even my steel forks (came off of a Hard Rock MTB). That coupled with the torque arm, I haven't had any problems going full throttle @ 72 volts. I'm using only rear brakes right now, no front brakes yet because I had to order some special brake arms to reach up high enough to contact the rim. It's amazing how much stopping power my rear brakes have, but they won't last long at this rate.

It's really fun to just tear out on this bike at 72 volts, LOL. I can certainly give the drivers a good run for their money until I hit 45 MPH at least.

The fork came from my first e-bike conversion, when it had a 36 volt WE brushless motor.
Details here: http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7

 

[knightmb]

I did a full discharge test of my batteries. It's great to have the CA to measure what my true battery AH is under load conditions. It took about 5 hours to finally get them to the discharge voltage of 40 volts, but that's what string and tape are for

My NiMH are giving about 9.5AH now (or maybe they always have because I haven't noticed much of a distance decrease)

On a side note: It appears that if your trip distance meter isn't reset before it hits 199.9 miles (or kilometers I assume), it will stop and quit adding distance to your odometer mileage/km. I'm going to do another wheel spin after the batteries charge to verify this.

 

[D-Man]

Interesting about the 9.5 ah. I wonder how much capacity the new ones actually have. Got any new batteries to test?

 

[knightmb]

Interesting about the 9.5 ah. I wonder how much capacity the new ones actually have. Got any new batteries to test?

No new ones I'm afraid. I did a comparison test a while back with my brand new 12V 12AH SLA, they (NiMH) beat them in a capacity test, which either means new SLA are like old NiMH or maybe the SLA didn't have enough good charge/discharge cycles yet. Still waiting for the NiMH to charge up before I do another full discharge test.

 

[knightmb]

On a side note: It appears that if your trip distance meter isn't reset before it hits 199.9 miles (or kilometers I assume), it will stop and quit adding distance to your odometer mileage/km. I'm going to do another wheel spin after the batteries charge to verify this.

Just confirmed this. If you max out the tripometer to 199.9, then your odometer readings will not continue. It also will mess with your Average Speed because as the time increases, your mileages does not, which throws your average speed way out of whack.

I'll e-mail ebikes.ca about this, only a minor bug I guess, but if anyone is using this unit and doesn't clear out the tripometer every now and then, your odometer readings will not be accurate.

 

[knightmb]

I got a reply back. The 199.9 tripometer limit is just a programming limitation of the type of number used. It's hard to explain here, I understand what they mean though. 199.9 anything is more than enough for any e-bike distance wise on one battery charge.

Not sure what to do about the total distance except the workaround I listed above. Be sure to reset the unit before it hits 199.9 miles/km/anything or else your "odometer" reading will be off big time if you don't reset beforehand.

 

[xyster]

I got a reply back. The 199.9 tripometer limit is just a programming limitation of the type of number used. It's hard to explain here, I understand what they mean though. 199.9 anything is more than enough for any e-bike distance wise on one battery charge.

Not necessarily -- especially for Velo's, recumbents, trikes and such. 199.9km is one 124 miles. This guy supposedly rides 200 miles per day:
http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1736&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15

Is Justin planning to fix this oversight?

 

[Dalecv]

I will start to worrying about the 199.99 mile limitation on my CA when I figure out how to put 150 Ah worth of batteries on my bike. 8)

Call me a skeptic but if someone commutes 200 miles a day on an electric bike I wonder what they are commuting to. At a 50mph average that would be 4 hours spent commuting, at a more reasonable 20mph average it would be 10 hours in the saddle everyday.

Maybe he is the daddy of the fellow with the " Fastest E-bike on the planet"

 

[xyster]

Call me a skeptic but if someone commutes 200 miles a day on an electric bike I wonder what they are commuting to. At a 50mph average that would be 4 hours spent commuting, at a more reasonable 20mph average it would be 10 hours in the saddle everyday.

Sounds excessive, but possible. Maybe he uses the vehicle as part of a business for pick-ups or deliveries (of small stuff).

 

[knightmb]

I will start to worrying about the 199.99 mile limitation on my CA when I figure out how to put 150 Ah worth of batteries on my bike. 8)

Call me a skeptic but if someone commutes 200 miles a day on an electric bike I wonder what they are commuting to. At a 50mph average that would be 4 hours spent commuting, at a more reasonable 20mph average it would be 10 hours in the saddle everyday.

Maybe he is the daddy of the fellow with the " Fastest E-bike on the planet"

The 199.9 miles might be high, but if he was using km, then 199.9 could be done in under 5 hours regular bicycle speeds. With the e-bike adding more power, they time could drop quite a bit if you were doing twice the average speed. This may affect those using km distance readings more than the mileage distance readings.

My only concern was that you have to remember to reset your CA before it reaches 199.9 otherwise your total distance won't increment properly. I can live with a 199.9 trip limitation.

199.9 km is 124 miles, so the km distance people would encounter this sooner than the mileage distance people.

 

[knightmb]

Is Justin planning to fix this oversight?

I'm not sure, last I spoke with him, he suggested maybe doing a 2000 limit by using one less decimal place (so the limit would be 2147.48 instead 214.748) It's just that it would lead to noticeable integration errors when traveling at low speeds since it's missing the thousands decimal location (which considering how long 1 mile or 1km is, that could potential be quite distance missing from the calculation). I don't know how much memory his CA has available for expansion, but he would probably need to a second 32 bit number that would be a rounded version of the first and would have to keep resetting the first number before it reaches max (or it would go negative). Actually now that I thought about it, maybe not a simple change to do, LOL.

But anyway, I'm sure that's easy compared to all the work it took to code all the other features.

 

[xyster]

My only concern was that you have to remember to reset your CA before it reaches 199.9 otherwise your total distance won't increment properly. I can live with a 199.9 trip limitation.

Seems he should be able to separate the tripometer count function from the odometer count function without adding memory or processor, or removing digits -- but I don't know much about digital processing.

 

[knightmb]

My only concern was that you have to remember to reset your CA before it reaches 199.9 otherwise your total distance won't increment properly. I can live with a 199.9 trip limitation.

Seems he should be able to separate the tripometer count function from the odometer count function without adding memory or processor, or removing digits -- but I don't know much about digital processing.

Well right now, the tripometer is accurate because it's calculating out to the 0.001 decimal place. 1 mile being 5280 feet, so every 1 decimal place is 5.28 feet. On the flip side, 1 km being 1 meter per digit. So if he cuts out the thousand place, to move it over to a bigger 2000+ number, the accuracy gets chopped down to .01 in which case that's 52.8 feet or 10 meters per digit of accuracy. In the grand scheme of things, 52 feet or 10 meters might not make a big impact on accuracy for a 30 mile or 50 km trip. It would for a short trip though.

I did verify one thing, the counter used for the total distance is separate from the trip, so as long as the trip is going, the total distance does too. The bug seems to be, once the trip hits max, the total distance stops as well until you reset the trip.

 

[Dalecv]

I reset my CA almost every time I start a trip after charging my batteries. This way most of the information on the CA relates to the current ride and how that ride is consuming battery power. Because of this I don't have any problem with the 199.9 limitation.

Other than adjusting your overall odometer to a given mileage is there another reason for not reseting the CA before each trip on a new battery charge? Am I erasing some good information?

 

[knightmb]

I reset my CA almost every time I start a trip after charging my batteries. This way most of the information on the CA relates to the current ride and how that ride is consuming battery power. Because of this I don't have any problem with the 199.9 limitation.

Other than adjusting your overall odometer to a given mileage is there another reason for not reseting the CA before each trip on a new battery charge? Am I erasing some good information?

Not often, but every couple of weeks or so, I'll ride more than 199.9 miles in week. While having the readings for each ride is great, having for a week, 2 weeks, etc. comes in handy for me. It's just as easy to write them down and reset, but if I'm not paying attention before it gets to 199.9 it will affect my odometer readings. I like to keep my odometer readings in check because it helps me gauge the life of the motor, batteries, controller, etc. Right now, my cyrstalyte 406 motor has over 2300 miles on it. Just this morning I did 20 miles (grocery, errands, etc) I have a bike club ride today that is 35 miles, plus the 5 miles to get to the "meeting" point, then the 5 miles to get back. So today I'm going to do 60 miles on the battery and today is a "normal" day for me. I've had weeks in which I was doing 80 to 100 miles a day (when the weather isn't so dang hot, hehe)

I've done a 100 mile ride on my batteries before, they are only 12AH (well at least they use to be, hehe), but one day I might upgrade to some Lithium packs that are twice the AH and while it seems crazy, I might actually have a problem with the 199.9 limit. But that's in the future, the CA works great for me minus the mileage bug. I call it a bug not because it stops at 199.9, but because when you do reach 199.9, your odometer stops (which should be completely separate, and at least the variable for it is separate as far as I can tell)

So, despite my complaints, I still love my CA

 

[BiGH]

100mile ride!!! there would have been a lot of peddling without the motor i'm guessing? or did you use the motor the whole time?