'Nother update:
Spent a lot of time today on the bike.
First went to Fry's. Picked up a length of 1" and 1/2" heatshrink, 25ft of 10AWG wire, a strawberry Fanta, and a chocolate orange.
Went to Wal-Mart. I want to put pegs on my back wheel. I don't pedal a lot (
) and for some reason resting with my legs on the pedals makes them stiff after a while. I can use the pegs as a footrest. Well, I could if they weren't designed for a 3/8" axle. I'll have to drill them out to 1/2" if I want to use them.
Spent loads of time working on the backpack-bike plug. It had to be both the power and throttle connections, so it took some work. My g-ma got a new phone (after 12 years of her old one
) and it has a decent camera on it. If I can get the thing to interface the computer, I'll get some pics. That's kind of a big "if" because it doesn't have an SD card slot and I don't know if it came with a data cable. The pics will describe how I worked out the plugs easier than I could. Suffice to say, hot glue rules.
I (mostly) ditched the speaker cable. It's only being used for the between-battery connections and inside the backpack-bike cord.
The keen-eyed will notice that I used 10ga wire with 30A PowerPoles. However, 30A PowerPoles only accept 12ga max. I had to leave a few strands out of the connections.
Now here's something interesting: I get everything all nice and running and test it. Works fine. I zip-tie the cords to the bike and saddle up with the backpack. I turn the throttle a little. A fraction of a second acceleration and then nothing. Needless to say, I was both pissed and confused. Everything had worked a few minutes earlier. It got even more confusing when I started testing things.
At first, I thought it was the throttle. I had similar problems with the first. The hall sensors signal and negative legs kept touching and stopping the motor. I opened it up and used a little (you guessed it) hot glue to hold them in place. Got me nada.
I knew it couldn't be the breaker or Doc Wattson, because the Doc Wattson was giving its readings normally, and it's behind the breaker.
Worried now, I figured it might be the controller, or worse, my very labor-intensive wiring job. Unplugged the motor and attached a voltmeter to it's leads. Turning the throttle varied the voltage just like it should.
Now I'm starting to thing I did something terrible to the motor, somehow. I hooked up the voltmeter to it and spun it a little. Luckily, I got voltage out of it, so that wasn't the problem.
By now I'm almost completely at a loss, but I decide to go back to checking the wiring. Throttle signal is getting through. Voltage is present, so the wires have connectivity. Motor works fine.
I go through about every test I can think of, and eventually I figure out the problem. Guess what it is. I'll make another thread for it, because I find it kind of interesting, even though I have no idea how it managed to do this.
EDIT: EMF got it. Freaky resistance thingy going on in the SAE connector that attaches to the motor.