The trike is "finished" for stage 1, rideable on the street "safely", with motor, pedals that sort of work, and lighting with turn signals brake light, etc.
Wiring is all tied down (was too dark to get good pics, so all I got was pics of thelights. I took 2 versions of each pic I think, the darker ones were auto ISO, and the brighter ones were "high" ISO (I don't know what ISO on this camera though it might be 1000).
I spent way way too much time on the controller / motor wiring section, trying to make things neat, which is sort of pointless if I end up swapping over to the new controller...heck, evne ujust testing the new controller will require undoing my neat heatshrunk splices (I soldered all the wires, since nothing had compabible connectors anyway).
In the process, though, I found that the motor's andersons on phases were spliced on there off of some other motor (or controller), as the last few inches of wire were a different insulation type than the motor end of it. I only saw this cuz I unwrapped the tape and covering near the andersons as i intended to cut them off, and would need to splice in...then I saw the covering had been raggedly cut and that's why it was taped. I tried tot ake pics of the splices but everythign came out too blurry to see, and I cant' fgure out why.
Anyway I cut the whole spliced sectin off, trimmed the LOOOONG controller phase wires down by a foot ro two, and spliced in there. Then I did the same for the halls.
Of course, I had to redo the phase wires TWICE, after I'd soldered them, becuase both times I put htem all color to color, isntead of B&G swapped.
Only noticed as I was about to heat up the shrink.
For the handlebar wires I used an old parallel printer cable, with the ends cut off, cux it has at least 25 wires in it, plus shield ground. I used pairs of wires for the turn signals, 12V and ground, and individual wires for throttle and ebrake. The flasher is on the bars for wiring practicaltiy, tied next to the mirror mount.
About halfway thru the wiring I just got too tired to be neat and careful anymore, and started just splicing and electrical taping.
I did run the main power cable from the battery thru the frame, in the 'red toptube" just above the pedal chain. I used a 3-wire 12g (I think) power cord, so that 12V for lighting can go thru it as well as "48V" motor power, sharing the ground wire.
I was going to also run the rear lighting cables thru it, but I couldn't get my hands to work right (kept going numb at the wrong moments) while feeding it thru, and always jammed it somewhere down the line. Have to redo that later sometime. For now it's fed under the tube and tied to it to keep it out of the chain.
Headlight switch was gonna go on the bars, but there's no way those littel parallel cable wires (24g? less?) even doubled up are gonna take the current that thing draws without heating up, and I'm afraid of damaging other wires in the bundle. Turn signals are only momentary 50% duty cycle and much smaller so I'm not too worried abotu them, but th 50W headlight...is another story. So the switch went into the gap between "mixte" tubes, near the base above the cranks.
All the wires are fed into that area where I'd had the controller strappe dwon, and now that is ziptied in place (will make a mount bracket welded on the frame when I know what controller will go there). Wires are tied down to the downtube inside that area, and the bottom/front face of the downtube has the dowlighting flexiLED white strip.
That strip is for 12VDC, and I don't wanna burn it out, so since I use 4s 16.4V for the main lighting, I put a 12V zener and some parallleed power resistors to allow enough current to it without heating up too much.
Turn signals and headlight get straight 16V out of the system, as does brake light. But tailigith has 4 diodes in series with it, and brake llight swithc (an old ebrake handle for now till I build a relay, if I do). basically just shorts across the diodes to brighten the LEDs some. I'm probably gonna add at least one more diode, cuz ther'es not that much difference in brightness maybe 1/3? Where it ougth to be 2/3 (I mean it ought to be more than twice as bright as brake than tail).
It's plenty bright with the triangle lights plus that, so no worries about dimming it a little.
I also tried out the white LEDs in teh trinagle, and they are bright bright. Too bad I can't use them all teh time in teh rear.
I rode around the block a few times with teh lights on to find any vibration/loose wire problems, and found none so far. Ddid find I'd made the headlight wires like an inche too short, cuz an extreme right turn pulled the healdlith connetocr off the blubl. fixec by splicing in another few inches of wire.
Still need to add the toolbox to it, but have to work tomorow before midday and am too tired to do anythign with it now, so probaly not gonna ride it to work. Realy wanted to, so am sad.
