There are a lot of traditional features of a bike that rarely change. The spokes, the chain, and the inability for it to take off like a rocket, to mention a few. None of these are features of the Reevo, a bike that tried, and mostly failed, to innovate the traditional electric bike. [Berm Peak], an individual with more time on two wheels than the entire Reevo team ever had, tried his hand at fixing the Reevo’s many problems.
[Berm Peak] has had a go at the Reevo before, but this time he had to go a lot deeper. Before any real work could be done on the Reevo, the controller needed to be jailbroken since the only way to use most features required an app that wasn’t available. Surprisingly, the controller boards were found to be well labeled, and with some trial and error, the protocols could be reverse-engineered.
Past the controller, most of the physical shrouds and buttons needed to be overhauled. A digital touch display made short work with the help of the prior jailbreak. But the shroud needed complete replacement of the fasteners and holes. Even the brakes on the bike fail compared to even the cheapest alternatives, but those had some squeaker issues.
This doesn’t even touch the surface on how much time went into the complete overhaul done by [Berm Peak], but if you want to work on your own Reevo you won’t have to. All the work done on this bike can be found on GitHub here. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen some of [Berm Peak]’s work here on Hackaday, and if you want more bike fixing action check out some e-bike restoration work here!
Well, that’s what they are supposed to do.
Brakes on the other hand…
Breaks? c’mon HaD.
It is intentional, to obfuscate the fact that the text has been generated.
people just go on the Internet and say things, huh
Eh shit happens, it’s a web blog not the NYT
“I know there’s good in you.”
Still a terribly dangerous half-baked contraption but some love did apparently go into it here and there. Obviously that’s not how engineering works, but still. Interesting.
Such flagrant disrespect against Keep It Simple Stupid cannot go unpunished. The bicycle is one of the world’s most marvelous optimal designs, it doesn’t change much because it doesn’t need to. Its elegance lies in the fact that almost nobody, no matter how talented, can add or remove anything to it in a way that doesn’t detract from its function.
This is like putting IoT on a garden hoe
Not true, it could definitely be improved by telemetry and a screen to display ads, brb making a startup now
I would take noisy breaks over bad breaks any day, so putting the old ones on feels like an odd choice. Noisy breaks also can have the advantage warning other road users that you are there.
honks brakes in agreement
Yes. Nobody wants a bad break. But the word you are looking for is “brake”. You’re welcome.
Your right, I cannot spell. Sorry.
Lol got’em
won whay twoo spel ah werd, knoe emadgeanation…
Useless where I live: no mudguards! You would have dirty water squirting in your face and a muddy stripe up your back.
Also: road salt. This would not survive a winter in Norway.
It’s not intended to. These were marketed squarely to tech-bros and equivalent, who are not going to ride in rain, mud, snow etc.
FTFY 😂
It probably would self destruct in sunlight as well… this thing is a bike shaped cybertruck.
No disc brakes? it’s a no-go
What hubs are you going to bolt the disks to?
They could have added a ring to the part of the wheel that turns. A bit similar to Buell motorbikes, but then hidden under the plastic rim. Seems to be space enough.
Anyway. It will add a lot to the cost, and have no advantage over ‘normal’ wheels, so it’s all folly anyway.
Wheels are not only used for drive and suspension, but also for their flywheel effect, which helps you to stay upright. If you want to be able to change direction quickly, you want the mass as close to the center of the hub as possible. I guess this bike keeps you upright quite easily, but will need a bit more weight to change direction than a normal hubbed wheel. There must be a quite large sprocket in that wheel (I can’t imagine it’s friction-driven), and that wil have quite a large weight.
“Anyway. It will add a lot to the cost, and have no advantage over ‘normal’ wheels, so it’s all folly anyway.”
This is a pretty good, if possibly unintentional, epitaph for the Reevo: “all folly anyway”.
Absolutely nothing wrong with properly designed and set up rim brakes. They’re really not worse than disks
Up to a point… Wouldn’t want them on a motorcycle, ha
So you propose to add a large ring to act as the brake disk to the rim, the rim that can be clamped onto by the caliper directly just like would be done with this additional ring which adds cost, complexity and weight?
Or one could just…. not add that ring and simply clamp onto the rim, like so many bikes have done before and continue to do to great effect? :)
Some sort of drum brakes then.
The big hollow one that the wheel rotates around. Just because it’s a huge diameter and has a hole in it doesn’t mean it’s not a hub
Long term I visualize the side loads on the wheel attach points being failure points. Long lever between the attach points and the ground.
Support the (silent but insufficient) brakes with motor throttling?
I watched the video a few days ago. I suspect he put the original brakes back on to give the owner a choice (the bike in question was borrowed from someone else.) The owner may well have put the better ones on.
Actually the Reevo, as delivered, is quite undepowered, barely able to make it up a slight slope. One of the the things Seth did was de-nerf the motor.
Yeah, i meant, still using the old short brakes, but assisting them with the motor, especially since there’s a large gear translation to the wheel.
On the other hand, i guess the motor/electronics has no reverse power?
Most E-Bikes don’t have a reverse mode. The standard shifters wouldn’t appreciate it. Most back wheels have a freewheeling mechanism to allow the bike to coast.
On the couple that I have, the motors are three-phase and you would need a beefy resistor or charging setup to be able to sink the energy back in from something like regenerative braking.
Ah btw, the repo is here: https://github.com/setha-maker/Reevo-Hubless-E-Bike-Screen
So you don’t have to try to load that godawful site with a tracking redirect on the link.
You’re all consooming the bait of a major clickbaiter. Shame on you!
I’m not sure I’d call what was done here jailbreaking per se, given how trivial the effort was (if you had some knowledge of microcontrollers.) The first thing I noticed when he showed the control board was the clearly-labelled debug port (SWDIO & SWCLK test points clearly labelled) as well as a UART (again, TX/RX clearly labelled.) The firmware itself emits the BT pairing code on the UART.
The control scheme seemed pretty clean, too, but that’s a different point. I thought the video was pretty good, and I don’t feel like it was clickbait. I’ve also seen the two prior Reevo videos by the same person, and I would characterize them more as techtuber stuff, but it’s easy to make accusations.
The big question is why there is a CAN output. Maybe this card was a repurposed dev kit?
I’m not going to go back and dig through the video but I vaguely remember seeing marking on the PCB that would suggest it was made by Reevo or the parent company. I couldn’t tell what MCU they used but perhaps it was just that it supported CAN, and the devs decided to break out anything that might be useful.
The trafficator doesn’t make a “tick-tick sound” – but – it could have (a piezo beeper, user selectable?).
So the runaway bike with bad brakes is still dangerous as feck but it looks and sounds nicer. Great job.
/s
To be fair, it’s probably LESS dangerous, especially with the timeout on the pedal assist, to lessen the chance of engaging runaway.