While I’m waiting for my last stepper motor, I’ve been pondering my electric motorcycle build. While eyeballing batteries, I ran across a really impressive human/electric recumbent bike project. [Bob Dold] built this for his M.S.M.E. Thesis project. The frame was built from bonded aluminum. The flat parts were cut via waterjet service, and the rest were machined by the college’s machine shop. The 1000w motor (and controller) came from a Schwinn X1000 electric scooter. Looks like a four link suspension (plus steering and shock linkages). Interestingly, he’s using some USB data loggers for voltage and current(with a shunt) and combining it with GPS data to track real world performance.
Transportation Hacks1668 Articles
Balancing One Wheel Scooter
Fresh off the tip line, [Ben] sent in his one wheeled balancing scooter. It’s a nice simple design – I just might have to build one myself. The steel frame surrounds a pair of 12V 12Ah SLA batteries, a 400w 24v DC motor, one of the ever handy OSMC motor controllers, rate gyro, accelerometer and a PIC 16F876A. I love the entire concept! (For some reason, I’m thinking it needs a brake light on the rear…
Check out the video after the cut. He walks through the hardware at the end.
By the way, Eliot and I’ll be at Shmoocon in a couple of weeks. We won’t have boards from the Design Challenge yet, but we should have something to give away to people who find us there.
DIY Electric Car Heater
[lgtngstk] was tired of driving his cold Honda Civic to work. He built an instant on electric heater for his car from a toaster and an ATX power supply. The toaster elements were mounted to one half of the case, while the fan was left in it’s stock location.To get the fan blowing hard enough, he whipped up a DC voltage doubling circuit. To finish it out, he added relay control and plenty of new holes in the case.
O2 Sensor Simulator
[Bob Blick] built this simulator from a 555 and few other common parts. Just when I thought I’d seen all the uses for the 555. The oxygen sensor on a cars exhaust is used to determine how efficiently the fuel mixture is to an engine. These can be a real pain to replace, so it can be helpful to fake the signal to the ECU.
Bad Boy Charger
This is one of those hacks that scares me a little bit. The ‘Bad Boy’ charger was created by Tom Martin to charge EV battery packs. [Pictured is one built by Mike Chancy] You can find the schematic under austinev’s tech files. This thing is a bare minimum power supply – it’ll deliver loads of essentially unregulated power into a set of batteries. If you check out the circuit, you’ll see just how scary this thing really is, but according to its users, it works.
Siamese Electric Motors
I’ve been meaning to post something about these for a while. Jim builds motors for EV hobbiests on the side – one of his cooler creations is the siamese electric motor. Some others have used belt drives to combine motors, but Jim actually builds the motors into a single unit. He built this set of 8 inch twins for the White Zombie drag racer.
I pumped Jim for more details, but he’s not done tweaking his next set of siamese motors. So, why is this even a hack? It’s a nice piece of machine work, but it gets interesting if you consider some stock specs. Most EV cars get 9″ motors – these are rated at 19hp or so. They take some monster hardware just to drive – high amperage, high voltage. Running a pair of 8hp motors can produce similar power with significant cost savings – everything gets cheaper. To generalize, you need a $1500 motor and $1000 controller just to get in the game. Not to mention that rebuildable forklift motors can be had for a song.
Electric 7 EV
Yup, more EV stuff today. This car [Cache mirror]is just so impressive that I think it’s definitely worthy. The car is a Birkin S-3 reproduction kit. Instead of the 4 cylinder, he put in a 3 phase 100HP, yes, 100HP electric motor. That’s pretty kickin. The *really* interesting twist is the battery pack. Multiple hybrid car battery cells (think prius NiMH) were salvaged to provide the juice. It runs around on tires designed for the EV1.
