ebike

43 Articles

Ebike Charges In The Sun

October 16, 2022 by 38 Comments

Ebikes are slowly taking the place of many cars, especially for short trips. Most ebikes can take riders at least 16 kilometers (10 miles) without too much effort, at a cost that’s often a single-digit percentage of what the same trip would have been with an internal combustion engine. If you’re interested in dropping the costs of your ebike trips even further, or eliminating it entirely, take a look at this small ebike with integrated solar panels.

While any battery can be charged with a sufficiently large array of solar panels and the correct electronics to match the two systems together, this bike has a key that sets it apart from most others: it can charge while it is being used to power the bike. Most ebikes don’t have charging enabled during rides, so if you want to use the sun while riding to extend the range of the bike you’ll need to find one like this. This bike uses two 50 W panels on the two cargo areas of the bike, attached to a 400 W MPPT charge controller. The Lectric XP 2.0 ebike has a motor with a peak rating of 850 W, but in a low pedal-assist mode the solar panels likely output a significant fraction of the energy used by the electric drivetrain.

Even if the panels don’t provide the full amount of energy needed for riding around, the project’s creator [Micah] lives in Florida, so just setting the bike outside in the sun for six to eight hours is enough to replenish most of the battery’s charge. It’s probably not going to win any solar-powered bike races anytime soon, but for an efficient, quick bike to ride around town it’s not too shabby.

Skarper E-Bike Conversion Kit Simplifies Electrifying Your Bike

August 24, 2022 by 65 Comments

If you’re a Hackaday reader, it’s a good bet you could figure out how to convert your bike to use an electric motor. But you might have more important things to do, so a start up company, Skarper, wants to help you with a conversion kit and the folks over at [autoevolution] took a closer look at how it works. The interesting part is that it transfers power from the motor to your wheels through a disc that substitutes for the bike’s disc brake. You can see a promotional video about the product from the company below.

Unlike some conversions, it looks like with this kit you can easily snap the assembly on the bike when you want it powered and take it off when you want it to function normally or if you want to take the electronic part inside with you.

The company claims that the 250-watt motor can to propel a bike to nearly 20 miles per hour. But we’re willing to bet you can’t go that fast and get the claimed 37-mile range. On the plus side, a 30-minute charge will net you another 12 miles and a full charge only takes 2.5 hours. The battery and motor weigh a bit more than 7 pounds. Obviously, you’ll need a bike that has disc brakes.

Cost? About $1,200, so it isn’t quite an impulse buy. Especially if you have the time and wherewithal to roll your own solution. For example, try a skateboard motor. Makes it easier, too, if you have a 3D printer.

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Revamping The Camping Trailer With More Power

August 16, 2022 by 13 Comments

Pulling a trailer behind your bike has an aspect of freedom and exploration to it. However, the reality is that pulling a large, heavy box behind your bike is incredibly draining physically. So [Drew] returned to the drawing board for his bike camper and added a motor, making some tweaks along the way.

We covered his first attempt at a bike trailer; this update encompasses everything he mentioned as future improvements. First, he strengthened the axle, and the trailer mount bolted straight into the chainstay arm for added strength. Then he built a custom battery pack out of 18650 cells clocked in at just under 3kw. Next, he installed a hub motor kit into the bike’s back wheel. Finally, a flexible 100W PV solar panel was added to the roof and routed to a small battery bank inside that provides USB and a few AC outlets for laptops and phones while camping. [Drew] does note that he could charge the big e-bike battery with the smaller bank, but since the e-bike battery is much larger than the small one, it would take a few cycles.

[Drew] takes a journey to a music festival and is happy to report better stability and the battery having fantastic range even without him pedaling. We love seeing a good project revisited, and we hope [Drew] gets some good use out of his camper. Video after the break.

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Hoverbike Turns Hoverboard Into Ebike

April 21, 2022 by 1 Comment

Hoverboards were a popular trend with the youths and in-crowd a few years ago, and now that the fad has largely died out there are plenty of them sitting unused in closets and basements around the world. That only means opportunities to put the parts from these unique transportation devices into other builds. A more practical method of transportation is a bicycle, and this build scavenges most of the parts from a hoverboard to turn a regular bicycle into a zippy ebike.

This bike build starts with a mountain bike frame and the parts from the hoverboard are added to it piece by piece. The two motors are mounted to the frame and drive the front chain ring of the bike, allowing it to still take advantage of the bike’s geared drivetrain. Battery packs from two hoverboards were combined into a single battery which give the bike a modest 6-10 km of range depending on use. But the real gem of this build is taking the gyroscopic controller board from the hoverboards and converting it, with the help of an Arduino Due, to an ebike controller.

Eventually a battery pack will be added to give the bike a more comfortable range, but for now we appreciate the ingenuity that it took to adapt the controller from the hoverboard into an ebike controller complete with throttle and pedal assist. For other household objects turned into ebikes, be sure to check out one of our favorites based on a washing machine motor: the Spin Cycle.

Sam testing the motor on his ebike

E-MonoWheel

November 24, 2021 by 16 Comments

Generally, monowheels are that wacky, wildly futuristic transport that we lump in the same category as hoverbikes and jetpacks: strange, currently impractical, but very cool. Not content with waiting for the distant future, [Sam Barker] made his own electric monowheel. (Video, embedded below.)

The hardest part of any monowheel is that the outside rim needs to stand enormous abuse. It supports the weight of the vehicle and provides most of the structural integrity, but also is the means of propulsion. [Sam]’s first thought was to use a trampoline frame as it is a round and reasonably sturdy tube steel. He 3D printed the rollers that connected the subframe to the trampoline frame. Flat bar stock was used to make the angles inside the subframe and straight tube steel connected the inner frame into a trapezoid. The trampoline frame was welded together and on the first test spin, it broke apart from the stress. It simply wasn’t strong enough.

Not to be dissuaded, he found a company that bends steel into custom shapes. He stole the e-bike kit from another bike he had converted earlier, and the wheel was turning. Some handles and foot-pedal later, it was time for a proper test drive. Overall, the result is pretty impressive and the double-takes [Sam] gets while riding down streets in town are wonderful. If you’re looking to scratch the monowheel itch, check out this wooden monowheel.

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Battery pack of e-bike being welded

Extending An E-Bike Range From Good To Wheelie Good

November 15, 2021 by 25 Comments

It may not look like it in some parts of the world, but electric vehicles are gaining more and more market share over traditional forms of transportation. The fastest-growing segment is the e-bike, which some say are growing at 16x the rate of conventional bikes (which have grown at 15% during the pandemic). [Jacques Mattheij] rides an S-Pedelec, which is a sort of cross between a moped and an e-bike. There were a few downsides, and one of those was the pitiful range, which needed to be significantly upgraded.

The S-Pedelec that [Jacques] purchased is technically considered a moped, which means it needs to ride in traffic. The 500 watt-hour battery would only take him 45km (~28 miles) on a good day, which isn’t too bad but a problem if your battery runs down while in traffic, struggling to pedal a big heavy bicycle-like thing at car speed. You can swap batteries quickly, but carrying large unsecured extra batteries is a pain, and you need to stop to change them.

There were a few challenges to adding more batteries. The onboard BMS (battery management system) was incredibly picky with DRM and fussy about how many extra cells he could add. The solution that [Jacques] went with was to add an external balancer. This allowed him to add as many cells as he wanted while keeping the BMS happy. The battery geometry is a little wonky as he wanted to keep the pack within the frame. Putting it over the rear wheel would shift the center of gravity higher, changing the bike’s handling. After significant research and preparation, [Jacques] welded his custom battery back together with a spot welder. The final capacity came in at 2150wh (much better than the initial 500wh). An added benefit of the extra range is the higher speed, as the bike stays in the higher voltage domain for much longer. In eco mode, it can do 500km or 180km at full power.

It’s awe-inspiring, and we’re looking forward to seeing more e-bikes in the future. Maybe one day we’ll have tesla coil wireless e-bikes, but until then, we need to make do with battery packs.

DIY Solar Ebike Goes Around The World, We Hope

October 7, 2021 by 47 Comments

[Mark Havran] is on a mission to complete a solo trip around the world on his bicycle. For such a long and arduous trip, unsupported by anything other than what he and his bike can carry, he has devised a unique vehicle with everything he needs to accomplish his journey. This bike has plenty of things we’ve seen before, such as solar panels and an electric motor, but plenty of things that are completely novel as well.

For such long-distance trips, the preferred style of bike for most is a recumbent. This allows the rider to take a more relaxed position while riding and is much more efficient than an upright bike as well. [Mark]’s bike also uses a hub motor in the front wheel powered by a set of lithium ion battery packs. The bike also utilizes four solar panels with three charge controllers (to reduce the impacts of panel shading) laid out with three of the panels on a trailer and a single panel above the bike to give him some shade while riding. [Mark] also built solar tracking abilities into each of the two arrays, allowing the solar panels to automatically rotate around the trailer and bike to more efficiently capture sunlight than a statically-mounted set of panels would be able to. They can also be manually controlled in case of high winds.

From the video linked below, we can see a number of other added features to the bike that will enable it to make such a long trip. First, he is getting a new motor which has a number of improvements over his old one, which he put over 30,000 kilometers on. Second, there are some safety features that deserve a mention such as his lighting setup borrowed from emergency response vehicles, and even includes a fire extinguisher for any catastrophic electrical failures. Of course, if you aren’t optimizing your recumbent electric bike for long distance there are some other modifications you could make to it as well to improve its off-road abilities. Best of luck, Mark!

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