Please on the split off. I shouldn’t have hijacked the ops thread.
No problem, I moved it over here. If you want a different title, you can edit the first post of the thread to change it.
Your thoughts on the Delta config are welcome as some of my mock ups are certainly Tippers. Some of it is my brother drove a sports car most of his life and has a hard time being cautious, despite a bike crash being the cause of his woes.
Some people take a lot to adjust to new conditions and abilities; I've known some people that would only become cautious in any way once they were busy interacting with the fungus and bugs and dirt, and not even then if they had a choice.
You could design a mobility system that had sports car handling, but it would probably have to be a quad with equivalent suspension design to said car (albeit designed for the lighter weight of the mobility system instead).
I'm insufficiently conversant with suspension designs to say much about that sort of thing; my few attempts at suspension designs have been fairly complete failures, and my present ride (SB Cruiser) has no suspension at all, but handles fine this way in most situations I am in; I try to avoid those that would require it.
Would love to add suspension, but because it is a heavy-cargo carrier, it's unloaded and loaded weight ratio can be as much as 1:2, and most suspensions don't seem able to compensate for that without some form of serious adjustments, which in my case would probalby have to be manual...I don't really want to adjust things everytime I load it up. But any suspension that was rideable and helpful most of the time, when it's just me, would not be useful when loaded down....
Grin is who recommended I start a thread here. Their all axle would be my choice for main wheels, except for speed unless I locked him out of it
. Driving the 3rd wheel, whether delta or tadpole is easier, especially if the wheel is freewheeling enough for manual operations.
Speed is easy to limit.
You can do it with the Cycle Analyst for more control over how it works, or some controllers can implement it with a locked-out or hidden menu. A fairly simple external circuit can be built with some 555 timers and a transistor that could do it, or if coding is more your thing than hardware, Arduino Nano or PIC / etc can be used.
You can also pick a motor with a kV (RPM/volt) that just won't go any faster than a certain speed at a certain battery voltage in the size wheel you want to use.
Or use a non-hubmotor and then just pick gearing that gives the top speed desired given the wheel size and voltage and motor k/V. (doing this also increases torque by decreasing speed but keeping same power, and that might be helpful in adverse terrain/etc).
trying to keep the design compact enough to enter a store, but we have talked about two setups, one for parks and one for city.
It's fairly likely that anything "stable" at higher speeds is not going to be all that small; it depends on the specific job it's going to have to do to get to the store, at what speed, under what riding conditions (terrain, etc), and what specific dimensions you won't have control over (seat height, angle, position) because of rider requirements.
Any thoughts on trikes are welcomed
The lower you can keep the seated rider, the better for stability.
But lower is harder to get on and off of, which is why I picked just a bit above regular chair-height for SB Cruiser. (I actuall picked chair height, but the "perfect" seat solution (StadiumChair) for me that I accidentally came across added a bit of height, and I needed a bit more cargo space in the box under the seat, and it's a wooden lid, so it all comes out a couple inches or more higher than I would really like...but it is still easy to get on and off of (compared to my old CrazyBike2 that I had to get "down" into the seat of, or Delta Tripper that I had to kinda climb up onto).
You can compensate by putting the entire trike mass as low as possible. If it doesn't have to clear anything in particular, you can have it hug the ground.
Having larger diameter wheels makes a better ride, but if you have the trike riding above their axles, that makes it tall and easier to tip. So you can "hang" the trike from the axles like this, where I first experimented with the idea on my big MkIV trailer (which can carry an upright piano):
I did something similar but with camber to give a wider track and more stability without making the trike wider, on my brother's Raine Trike, which has a lot of compromises in design because of physical requirements he had for it I had to work around.
