Intense Brushless DC Stage Brings More E-Bike Power

July 7, 2015 by Nava Whiteford 17 Comments

[ZombieSS] wrote in to share the latest iteration of his new open hardware Brushless DC motor high power output stage posted on the Endless-sphere forums. The thread is a gold mine of useful information on designing, building and debugging high power electronics and the whole thing is worth reading. This includes the story of issues he faced with common mode noise picked up by the probe leads on his Rigol, which sidetracked the project for a while.

We’ve covered various ebike hacks before, but the guys at endless sphere appear to be developing a number of solid open hardware designs in this area. This includes the Lebowski controller which [ZombieSS] used in conjunction with his design.

He has installed the controller and output stage on his electric bike, and you can see one of the first test runs in the video below. We look forward to hearing more from the awesome hackers at Endless sphere!

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Wall-wart Retrofitted With A High-power LED Supply Circuit

February 13, 2013 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

high-power-LED-wall-wart-supply

This custom circuit board picks up some of the pieces from a wall wart to drive a high-power LED. The basic concept is to keep the high-voltage components and swap out the low voltage ones for parts that will be able to drive the 10W load.

The PCB is custom designed, but you can see that it was shaped to match the wall wort’s original board. To the right is the original 500mA transformer. The low-voltage side uses an LM393 because of its dual-comparators. This provides feedback for both current and voltage and is a perfect compliment for the TOP242. We haven’t seen that part before, but [Mincior] says that it’s nice for this application as it has safety features that lock down the chip if power or temperature are above spec. Once the replacement is nestled inside of the plastic case it looks stock and makes sure that your custom LED fixtures will stand the test of time safely.