2WD Semi-Recumbent Recycled-Parts Cargo eBike: "CrazyBike2"

[amberwolf]

Based on the replies there, it appears the above is workable; it's been done before (as I figured). Now I just have to locate a suitable donor rotor to reconfigure.


Last night I decided to try an experiment with the 50W halogen and the "13Ah" 12V NiMH pack, which due to the thermal damage it's had plus it's age was previously figured to be around half it's original capacity at anything like a normal load.

It turns out that at the ~4A the 50W halogen takes, it is pretty close to the original, at around 10.8Ah (126.6Wh) run down over 3.5 hours or so, to 10.63V (11.15V unloaded). It probably has more capacity, but I was only checking it every half hour or so, and didn't want to either sit and watch it for the rest down to 10V, or forget (or fall asleep) and leave it and end up with cells killed by running them down so far they reversed. :lol:

The pack was pretty warm by the end, though, almost as warm as it gets during normal charging. It was in fact so warm that when I hooked up the charger to recharge it afterward, it only got about 1.5Ah in it (only bringing it up to around 11.5V) before it shut off charge, presumably for thermal reasons.

I had to let it sit with a fan blowing on it for a few hours before I could recharge it for today's work commute. One more disadvantage of NiMH, I suppose.

Fan probably would've worked faster, but it was still about 85F in the house even at nearly 4am, with no wind at all overnite to take the 65F (by this time) air outside and blow it thru the house. I ended up turning on the evap (swamp) cooler without the water system, just to blow the cooler air thru the house for a while. (Tonight is even worse, at about 90F inside when I got home after 10pm, 85F outside, and even now at 12:30AM it's still 85F inside and 84F outside, with a very very slight movement of air--not even enough to call it a breeze).


So anyway, the NiMH pack will work for lighting just fine, even with this heavy drain on it, for just about any night ride I'd be doing.


What I think I will probably do when I remove the CFL is:

A) Put one of the 20W halogens on there as "low beam" and the 50W as "high beam", completely switching between the two.

B) Put the car headlight on there that has high and low beam built in, and switch between those.

The latter has the advantage that it is designed to make a beam for lighting up the road surface a distance away, yet still give enough light closer in to see things there, too, and it is also a halogen type (Sylvania, I think; the little ones I would use in option A are GE, IIRC?)

Both of them will need mounting hardware designed and built, that's strong enough to not shake all over like the CFL's does right now.


If there was any way with stuff I have to focus the CFL into a usable beam, I'd much rather do that, but I have played with all the lenses and parabolics I have or could make, to no avail. It's just too diffuse a source, I guess, with what I have around here.

 

[texaspyro]

One thing to consider is those small MR16 bulbs are not "rough service" bulbs (i.e. designed to be moved while lit up). They will probably have VERY poor life on a bike. Unless the bulb filament is designed for rough service applications it will fail when subjected to vibration or movement. Even the vibration of a garage door opener will cause normal bulbs to fail if used in it.

 

[amberwolf]

I dont' really expect long life from them. Most things don't have a really long service life on my bikes, if for no other reason than changing them out as I experiment with different things instead. :lol:

When I worked at Honeywell, we once dealt with a severe problem with incandescent filaments breaking in alphanumeric displays in an MD-80/8x annunciator panel, during our burn-in's vibration testing. It was only 1G for 15 minutes out of every few hours, but sometimes we'd have 50% failure rate (at least one filament of 16 in half the display units would either break or sag really badly, as they had to be in-operation during the test).

I don't recall how it was solved, exactly, but there had to be a change to the filament material as well as the mounting spikes for them. Being just the tech that swapped stuff in and out and tested them, I didn't get told much.

So since that time I've at least known about the problem, but never delved too deeply into it.


I'd rather use LED solutions, but until I can afford good ones, or at least figure out a focusing mechanism I can make with what I have for the ones I already do have (a varied bunch), they're out.


That's one reason why plan B) is up there--using the headlight off the car.

 

[Solcar]

I've had trouble with regular bulbs blowing in trouble lights. Indeed, rough service bulbs come in handy.

One of the flashlights I have places each LED in its own unusually well-concentrating reflector. The beam is pretty comparable focus-wise to that of a regular incandescent type flashlight.

 

[amberwolf]

For a long time, I've been trying to locate the right diameter clear plastic rod, so I could cut it in half and use it as a lens. It's been done before and suggested to me as a way to make a bunch of separate LEDs focus better into a beam. All I have around here that I've found so far is 1/4" and 3/8", but I woulda swore I had some 1" stuff that would be a starter for this kind of thing. I'm still hoping to run across it while I'm doing this cleanup for the city (now deadline extended to June 15th, thankfully).


Regarding the cleanup, part of what I have to do that is taking a lot of time is moving all the stuff off an area of carpet (destroyed by the roof leaks created during that big hailstorm last year, not repaired until very recently) and then cutting out and removing that carpet section.

Then I get to move all teh stuff back onto the bare peel-and-stick-type tile, and do the next section. I am typically only getting one small section done each day, sometimes only every couple of days, as it is painful and exhausting work right now. (I've got a lot of stuff, and a lot of it is heavy). Plus it's really hot, which doesnt' help at all.

At first I was also trying to scrape off the remains of the foam padding under the carpet that's now stuck to the tile, but that's even more hard work, trying to scrape from a kneeling position that doesn't involve bending my ankle or twisting it or pressuring it in any of several ways. It's pretty difficult to do, and usually winds up throbbing by the end of a few minutes.

So I gave up trying to remove all of the foam, just the bigger chunks, using a wire brush passed over the surface to tear it apart but not deep enough to scratch up the soft tile. The rest will just have to stay there, mold/mildew/etc and all, under my stuff, until much later when I might be able to deal with it.


I have to do all this now, so that I can then pile up more of the stuff in the back room on top of what's there, and in front of it, to clear the outside yard so it will pass inspection, without tossing out all of the stuff I've collected for my projects over the last several years (and longer). But I have to do it in a wya that lets me still use the room, and access the stuff, so it takes time to do.

I don't want to have the messed up carpet and padding under it all, helping to rot away the boxes it's in, and smelling up the house (and probably making me and the dogs sick), so it has to go now, before I put the stuff in there.


Anyhow, today, instead of doing more of the back room that will be storage, I managed to do all the areas of the living room that don't have furniture on them, necessary because in addition to the roof leaks, at least two of the dogs (don't know which ones) have taken to using the already-bad carpet areas as an occasional potty. Never can catch them, but I suspect it's Fred and Hachi, or maybe Loki. Bonnie and Nana have never done this yet.

I am tired of suddenly finding wet carpet when walking around, plus the mold and mildew already in it, not to mention the smell (it's getting pretty hot now and that makes it all worse). Plus the carpet is insulating the floor from absorbing the heat in the room into the cooler under-house area, and making it warmer in the room than it could be. I'll find out by how much once I get the remnants of padding off the tile, though that will take a while.

That padding is a real PITA right now. If I didn't care about destroying the tile surface, I'd just take a wire brush tool on adjustable-speed angle-grinder (polisher, actually), on the lowest setting, and use that on it. :lol: I already do that to clean some of my pans that get burned-on stuff on them during cooking, once enough builds up to be a problem.

At least the carpet was real quick, about 30 minutes and I had all but maybe 15 square feet of it out, which is under furniture I can't move by myself right now.


Sorry nothign new on the bike, though, as all the stuff I had to do for cleanup took up all the time I wanted to spend on the headlight and things.

 

[Solcar]

Cripers, if the communities knew better, it would be they who should apologize about your and my inability to progress on innovation desperately needed by the world. My story was similar; when my foot had a nasty infection that laid me up for several months, the drop-off in property upkeep resulted in meddlers pactically seeming to be ready to bring in the backhoes and dumpsters. :wink: All that trouble from (my slightly altered term which removes specificity for my location: village people) the community leaders and sheeple is one thing that leads me to conclude that if people don't start understanding what is and isn't important for our futures, a lot of needless hardship is certain for the average world citizen.

I think it might work to try to place each LED in an oversized fiber optic tube about one or two inches long. Based on the way my tight-beamed flashlight works, the light from each LED gets corralled to force it straight forward. The flashlight basically places each of 5 LEDs in its own tube-shaped reflector (with some parabolic shape included--i'm not sure, but i think the simple tube-shape without parablic quality might be gotten to work acceptably with some finagling).

 

[amberwolf]

Mmmm... I don't have enough fiber optics to make a tube big enough to help, unfortuantely. I also don't think that it will do much to focus the light, because all it will do is bounce around inside the fiber just like it did orignally (angle of incidence = angle of reflection, with no lensing or curving actions involved), and then exit just like it started.

Using just a regular tube might help, if it's black inside, as it will absorb most of the side-lighting and allow all the straight-out rays, but that wastes a lot of light and I don't want to waste it, but rather redirect it.

A white or silver tube doesn't help much, for the same reasons the FO doesn't.

For what I want, either a parabolic or a lens or both is needed to refocus the light, so the side-scattered light is re-aimed into forward straight rays. The simple lensing action of the cut clear rod would help at least some.


For now, I am working out a mount for the car headlight. Not going quickly, as I think the brackets I need are now buried under a whole bunch of stuff I had to bring in from outside, and I can't move that stuff just to look, until I first finish the whole cleanup project (or I will not get it done in time).

 

[amberwolf]

Still havent' run across the brackets for the headlights yet.

I just about finished getting the carpet and padding up in the front room; teh back room is gonna end up requiring I actually take everything out to get the padding off, because I discovered the only easy way to get it off is to soak it with water.

I was just mopping up on the tile areas around the huge foam swaths left behind, and had to go outside after doing some soaked-with-mop areas to see what the dogs were doing. When I came back, mopping at the edges just lifted the foam right up, so I poured the mop bucket over all the foam and worked it in with the mophead, waited half an hour, and peeled up almost all of it very easily (although very heavily as it was filled with water).

Then it was just a matter of mopping up all that water and the dirt washed out of the foam. That took another 3 or 4 hours, with lots of breaks for my ankle to rest.

So now I have a loud echoey tile living room, but it's clean and doesnt' smell like mold, mildew, or dog pee. :lol:

Oh, and the bike doesnt' take off trying to climb the wall if I hit the throttle by accident, as it has almost no traction on the tile, unlike on the carpet. Nice skid marks, though.

 

[amberwolf]

Also, today, I sat outside a while with the camera while the sprinkler was running, just to catch Hachi at this:

More over here:
http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6727&p=413537#p413537

 

[Solcar]

Yeah, I see I poorly presented that idea a few posts back. It ought to be possible to direct the light into a reflective tube and curve the inner surface in such a way that the angle of incidence of successive reflections decreases as the light travels down, so that the light rays are fairly parallel at the exit end of the tube. The reflectivity of the tube has to be very good to lower losses.

Not quite using that approach, one of those LED flashlights I have put in the box I intend to send over uses the specially shaped tube idea in a little different way, more like the classical parabolic reflector. The beam stays tight at a distance like a decent flashlight.

 

[BikeFanatic]

HA HA HA, that was a riot, made my morning. Hachi VS the sprinkler MUST see video

 

[amberwolf]

Hachi is often a riot to watch....the rest of them have their moments, but Hachi more than all of them combined.

It ought to be possible to direct the light into a reflective tube and curve the inner surface in such a way that the angle of incidence of successive reflections decreases as the light travels down, so that the light rays are fairly parallel at the exit end of the tube. The reflectivity of the tube has to be very good to lower losses.

That sounds like a parabolic dish. If not that, then I'm not sure what it would look like.


I lost a few hours tonight trying to revive my poor ancient Microsoft Trackball Explorer 1.0. It's gone thru several cable transplants, and occasional internal wiring grafts, and a couple of PCB repairs necessitated by the many wiring repairs, over the years. No one makes anything like it nowadays, that fits my hand and fingers so well (the old Logitech Marble FX was even better but has no wheel), and of course the MTE isn't made or sold anymore.

I don't suppose anyone here happens to have an old one (even broken) they'd consider selling cheap?

 

[amberwolf]

I forgot to post my ride info from today. I knew I would be likely to run low on power before coming home from work, as I had a lot of stuff to get done around the area, little short hops that in total might be up to 20 miles, leaving me with little or no spare power for the last 2.5 mile ride home from work, definitely not enough for the last store run I wanted to do.

So I brought my charger along with me, and an extension cord/powerstrip in case I couldn't leave the battery next to the outlet. I knew I could not reach it from the bike itself, as I currently have to lock it up to the handicapped sign out front of the store, since with my ankle the way it is there's no way I can walk the bike thru the store back to the warehouse area I normally would park it in.

I can't run a cord from inside the store to out front, either, as someone would probably trip over it--I know they dont' pay attention, as some have tripped over dog leashes where people are walking their dogs in or out of the store, and people on the sidewalk just walk right thru them, not even noticing until they are on the ground, entangled in the leash with an unhappy pet owner and an unhappier pet.

Heck, one person on a celphone already walked right into the bike...not like you could not see it if your eyes were open and your brain was working, but celphones definitely cause momentary brain rot, even if not cancer. :lol:


Anyway, my solution was to just undo the hose clamps securing the battery box to the bike, and just take the box in with charger to the back in the warehouse, where I could leave it charging while I worked. Didn't end up needing the cord/strip. Didn't meter the charge, but I used up more than 9Ah, closer to 10, over the 19-ish miles I'd gone so far.

I lost the paper I wrote the trip data down on for the day, so that's gone. I'd done it in legs, so I would have data on various short hops, clearing the CA each time so I'd have fresh stats on each part. Oh, well, I'll get that data some other time, I guess.

I do have the data for just the trip home, as that's still on the CA now:
11m 12s trip time
2.601miles
26.2mph max
13.9mph avg

23.1Wh/mile
1.143Ah (1.1851)
61.86Wh
62.21Amax

59.4Vstart
53.5Vrest
49.3Vmin

3.5% Regen
0.0407Ah Regen
-7.01A peak Regen


Even run down to near-empty, I still can't get that 15-16A regen current like I did before. Still no idea why, either.

 

[Solcar]

amberwolf wrote:
That sounds like a parabolic dish. If not that, then I'm not sure what it would look like.

Indeed, the curvature is definitely not like that of a sphere. :wink: A parabolic surface definitely does the job with a point source. Yet, to get a diffuse light source to end up parallel might take some interesting combinations of curves and pretty many reflections to do it. The fluorescent bulb might have to be mounted at the rear by the time it gets straightened out as is exits above the front wheel. Definitely impractical. Or, you could just put a two foot parabola on your bike so that the relative reflector to bulb size of the fluorescent is small. :wink: I can see why you use the halogen!

 

[amberwolf]

Yeah, at work we have CFL bulbs for the UVB for reptiles, and at some point I tilted one in it's large 18"-ish parabolic-ish reflector toward the far wall. It does a great job of getting the light toward teh wall, but it doens't make any kind of a beam of it. The dish appears to be a great parabola, but I cant' tell for sure if the curve is the correct one, and there's no need for a beam in a reptile habitat. Either way, it probably means the CFL is just too diffuse, and would need a huge parabola, then a tube (to mask off side lighting), and a fresnel lens to further focus it, at whatever focal length that works out to.

But it'd probably be bigger than my bike when I'm all done. :lol:


So...inefficient, hot, and likely to break filaments or not, MR-16 halogens it is, for now. :|


They do at least work well enough, and are certainly bright enough far enough away to be useful for seeing, as well as letting me be seen. I am pondering a partial reflector/mask around it though, to deflect the wasted light going up beyond horizon-level back down, which should also cut down on night-blinding people I pass going the other way.

 

[Solcar]

Yeah, at work we have CFL bulbs for the UVB for reptiles, and at some point I tilted one in it's large 18"-ish parabolic-ish reflector toward the far wall. It does a great job of getting the light toward teh wall, but it doens't make any kind of a beam of it. The dish appears to be a great parabola, but I cant' tell for sure if the curve is the correct one, and there's no need for a beam in a reptile habitat. Either way, it probably means the CFL is just too diffuse, and would need a huge parabola, then a tube (to mask off side lighting), and a fresnel lens to further focus it, at whatever focal length that works out to.

But it'd probably be bigger than my bike when I'm all done. :lol:

:lol:

So...inefficient, hot, and likely to break filaments or not, MR-16 halogens it is, for now. :|


They do at least work well enough, and are certainly bright enough far enough away to be useful for seeing, as well as letting me be seen. I am pondering a partial reflector/mask around it though, to deflect the wasted light going up beyond horizon-level back down, which should also cut down on night-blinding people I pass going the other way.

I've carried a small LED flashlight with me for when I thought that I might be riding after dark. Then I could aim it where I thought it was most helpful. That was on a non-electric bike, tho, when tying up one hand doesn't matter so much.

That additional reflective shielding might make people less annoyed which is usually a big plus. :wink:

 

[amberwolf]

I have often had a small LED flashlight attached to my helmet, that I can point wherever I want without having any hands tied up with it, but it simply doesnt' have the power to send light far enough out to help my eyes nowadays.


On a slightly-bike-parts-related note, I found a secondary use for hubmotor magnets: Door hinges.

I have been using a card table on it's side, wedged into the doorjamb at one end, with a car battery (or other heavy weight) blocking it from moving at the other end against the doorframe. I can still step over it, but the dogs would have to jump to clear it, whcih I have taught them NOT to do, and I can use it to keep the two groups separated while I sleep.

But Hachi started jumping it anyway, only while I am asleep (won't even try if I am awake, but if I pretend to sleep then if she gets bored she will jump it). This has two problems--the noise of her doing it wakes me up, and it has taught Nana she can do it, too.

Hachi jumping it doesn't create any big problems by itself, but the whole reason for having it there is to keep Nana separated from Bonnie and Fred, without having to close the door (which she will scratch at or dig at, sometimes, and also prevents air circulation into the room so it gets too hot to sleep), or lock Nana up in her kennel (which she is ok with, most of the time, but sometimes makes a lot of noise in there moving around, waking me up). This is just so I can sleep more soundly, without worrying I'll wake up to a dogfight. Possibly on top of me.


So....I have this old futon daybed/couch frame, half of which I've used parts of for some bracing on the new bike.

The other half is intact, and almost big enough to fill a doorway. I have already used it as a temporary barrier now and then, so the dogs are used to not trying to get thru it, but that's just leaning it in the narrow bathroom doorway. For the bedroom, with a wider door, leaning it won't stop them from walking beside it.

Thus, magnets.

A stack of very powerful old hubmotor magnets, some of which got cracked (not sure if it was in shipping or in my own handling trying to get them separated), just stuck by magnetism to the steel frame at one edge, then the frame lifted and moved against the doorframe and the magnets CLICK onto the steel hinges.

I can still swing the frame outward enough to walk thru it, and it stays in place there or in it's "closed" position.

Lead batteries on either side keep the dogs from seeing that it can be moved by them easily, so until I work out a "latch" it'll do fine. Already tested ok last night and today; even with friends over in the living room the door opens onto, dogs looking thru the thing (barking, of course) didn't try to get thru or past it.

 

[Solcar]

The helmet light should act as a beacon to aid visibility to motorists.

The bed frame seems much better than the card table!

 

[Ricky_nz]

They also work as a beacon to hunters too .

As this unfortunate incident involving illegal hunting on public land shows .
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10684940

 

[amberwolf]

That's just...Why would anyone go hunting at night anyway? That's REALLY dangerous for anyone else that might be out there, including your own party members if one should get separated from the group--way too many hunters are already trigger-happy and as the article says, don't verify their target and their aim before shooting.

I have been camping with various people who also liked to hunt while out there, and twice have had bullets fired thru the campsite by them (in daylight!), because they were wandering the woods looking for a target, saw movement and just fired without even thinking. Of course, the movement they saw was us in the camp, and they were simply lucky no one was hit. But it did not teach either of them a lesson, and eventually they're going to actually shoot someone (if they haven't already; it's been nearly a couple of decades since then--and I don't go camping anymore because of people like them).

 

[amberwolf]

I almost hit a jogger today on my commute home from work; I was in the bike lane with cars coming up from behind in the regular lane to my left, and he was jogging on the sidewalk to my right and ahead of me a ways. I glanced at my rearview mirror for a second so I'd know where the cars ought to be when I would be catching up to this guy, then I heard a police siren start on and then off (had been a car just across the road, and I needed to make sure I didn't have to stop to let him pass or anything) so I had to look around for another half a second or so, and then I looked forward again just as I should have had another 20feet+ to reach him, but he wasnt' anywhere close to where I had predicted.

Apparently he'd slowed WAY down and then just as I was about to pass him he jogged right off the sidewalk into the bike lane, without looking or paying any attention whatsoever.

If I'd been driving a car, he'd be under it.

On Crazybike2, another half second and he'd still be under it. But I had just enough time to swing a bit left and avoid him completely. Because of the cars passing us both just at that moment, I didn't have time to look back and see his expression but I expect it was a little surprised....

He was also a little hard to see, as it was sunset, with lots of trees and building shading this area, and he was wearing a tan shirt and medium-dark shorts, and he had skin that was around the same tone as the shirt in that light, perhaps a bit redder but still not very high-contrast from the environment around him in that light. Without my halogen headlight, I might not have noticed him if I was just glancing around (and not keeping an eye out for people like him, like i always try to do).

I still have been able to think of no reason for him to get off the sidewalk (he was the only one there), and just continue jogging along, but in the roadway instead. There were no other people, no bikes, no animals, no trees or bushes in teh way, no sprinklers spraying across it (though that would have been a good reason to stay ON the sidewalk, as hot as it was :lol.

I was sorely tempted to just stop and wait for him to catch up, and ask him in some much nicer way WTF DID YOU THINK YOU WERE DOING?, ya know what I mean? I didn't stop because some people have big anger management issues, and I didn't really feel I could deal with that if it happened. (I've been surprised frequently by who will lash out at me when I stop to point out something they ought not to be doing for safety reasons or whatnot, no matter how nicely I am doing it).


But he's not the first person to suddenly step into the road for no reason without looking, so I am usually prepared for it, and I didnt' even get any adrenaline out of it; no heart rate increase or anything; I just rolled my eyes, mumbled under my breath, and kept going.

 

[amberwolf]

Other than working, and browsing ES while confined to bed, I haven't really gotten anything done last several days except house/yard cleanup (and not a lot of that; my hand, knees, and ankle just hurt too much to do all of what I need to do).

I will say that it is easier to move the bike around the room now that the carpet is gone--I can slide it across the floor sideways, for the times I can't roll it back and forth to get it where it needs to go. Can't do that with carpet; the wheel would just drag and stop it. Pic of the bike as it is usually parked, with Hachi and Nana in their comfy chairs:


Day before yesterday, one of the dogs knocked my box fan over while it was running, which somehow snapped one of the blades off. Fortunately I woke when I heard it fall and got to it to turn it off before the imbalance did further damage (it was on high).



View attachment 15

I thought I'd be clever and just swap the fan off of my box fan that died a motor-winding death some months back, but no...the shafts are very different sizes. *maybe* I could make an adapter, but I didn't feel well, it was really hot, and I just wanted a breeze to cool me off.


Can't glue it together; it's like shampoo-bottle plastic, which I have no glue or solvent for. Superglue would last like 10 seconds before the vibration shatters it's crystals. So I got out that little butane torch, set it to really low, and heated the edges of the break on both parts, allowing me to stick them together, then used a flatblade screwdriver and some more light heat to "smear" the plastic back and forth across teh seam, on both sides, to weld them back together.




It seems to be working well enough, though it is louder than before (I'm sure it's not aligned like it should be). And it only took about 10 minutes to do, instead of what might've been hours figuring out something I already have that I could use for an adapter to the fan, especially since the unbroken one has a cracked-off mbit of shaft-holder, and thus doesnt' ahve much left to grip the shaft with.



On Monday (or Tuesday?) I got a care package from Solcar with a number of things:

Some 3-LED flashlights, 3AAA-powered
a 5-LED fl, 3AAA-powered
a larger multi-LED fl, 4AA-powered
a bundle of white LEDs (don't know specs, but if they're brighter than the ones in the FLs I will do some swapping out; might have to swap some just to test that)
3 cigar boxes of assorted electronics bits (some of which are quite old, and most of which should be very useful)
a hacksaw blade (which I will need when I resume the other bike project)
a tube of BUZ110S MOSFETs
a clip-on watch
several rolls of 3M electrical tape, which I had wished I had for quite a while (I have liked the 20+year-old roll I have a little left of enough that I use it very little, except for permanent installations of it; I use teh HF stuff JEB sent me for all of the temporary fixes/etc.)
a roll of another brand of el-tape
a roll of packing tape (always need more of this)
some zip ties (always need those)
2 sprinkler timers

the most immediately useful is the flashlights, though I do not have enough batteries to run more than one; I will have to make an adapter/regulator to use a LiCo cell or else wire them to the bike's pack via DC-DC (cel charger, probably, as I have a couple of 4.5V units that should work, somewhere). But individually, they are not bright enough (comparison with just my CFL, which is itself not bright enough)



although they focus very well.


But I can take them all apart like this:

so that I can use just the LED/PCB/reflector portion, and maybe the faceplate, and put them all in one box on the bike aiming at the same spot a few dozen feet down the road.

If the separate LEDs turn out brighter than the existing ones, I can also change them out.


I might also be able to drill a hole in the center, and add a fourth LED kinda like the 5LED version has:
View attachment 5
and that 5LED version can also be taken apart and use just the head:
View attachment 4
since it also runs on 3AAAs. FWIW, it came with 3 alkaline AAAs, but one was almost totally dead, and the other two tested full under load. That pic of the head shows what it was like with the originals; it's many times brighter with the two good ones plus a NiMH AAA:

on the left is the 5LED, and the right is one of the 3LED (which is using 3 NiMH AAA, so it might be comparably bright if both had the same voltage batteries in them). Same shot with the room lights (100W CFL) on:


Then the 3LED fl (right) compared to a 3D-(alkaline)powered 5LED (left) I got at least 10 years ago, probably more:





The FETs are 55V 80A, and thus very useful for 36V controllers, although I'd have to be careful about 48V usage, as the fully-charged voltage of the Vpower would be *just* under that rating, and hot-off-the-charger would be several volts above that. Not to even mention regen.

Even the NiMH pack would be a close thing.

But if I ever have to repair the 36V Fusin controller, for instance, I could easily use these.

 

[Solcar]

Cool!

I was wondering if I had forgotten the zip ties or not.

My present motor control uses 4 of those BUZ110s MOSFETs, and it converts the 12v to 0 - 40v, or so, depending on the load and throttle setting (c. 60w @ 12v rated motor weighing 2lb.).

I got several of those blue 5 LED fls around here for convenience. I have replaced the voltage dropping resistor in some of them with a simple current source composed of a TO92 PNP transistor and a base resistor in order to get about 15mA*5=75mA from the PNP collector.

The black rubber-coated fl is the one that casts a fairly tight beam. I modified one of mine to operate off of just 3 AAs by shorting out one cell slot and adding a current source like I did for the blue Thunderbolt Magnum fls.

I was hoping that you might think of the idea of clustering the 3 LED fls to add their individual outputs as a headlight. I wonder how it would turn out if a certain number of the 3 LED flashlights were wired in series with a c. 60mA transistor current source being used to drop a buffering amount of voltage that would compensate for battery drain. That might be a good way for them to run off of the motor battery. I made my current sources to supply less than the 20mA diode rating to give a safety margin; that's why I opted for about 15mA per LED.

Good fan fix! Get well fast.

 

[amberwolf]

Note: the post below was created about 12 hours ago, but just before it was to be submitted, Cox decided to take down many areas for scheduled maintenance without notifying us. (they almost always do, but sometimes....) Supposedly coming back at 6am (6 hours ago) but it didn't, I waited another 6 hours before calling back as I have stuff to do anyway, but they had apparently fixed the outage on schedule, but knocked out about 60% of the cable modems in the area in the process, including mine.

It no longer gets any upstream signal, so I had to go back to the backup modem that Yoppapamon sent me last year when they bricked most of the Dlink modems on their network with a bad firmware (that they never admitted to and wont' fix). I'd used that Motorola modem fine for a while, then got a Linksys from someone changing to DSL, and changed to that (since I could stack it with my Linksys router easier). Good thing I had both, or I would still be offline.

This time, they're supposed to email me once they find out what happened, and hopefully I'll be able to get them to deal with the problem they created (probably not). If they won't, and go the same route of denial they did last year, then I am going to call this the last straw and ditch them for internet, if I can get a neighbor to share theirs via WiFi, perhaps for sharing in the bill, too. Phone, I gotta keep them, cuz Qwest is the only other alternative, and they suck much worse at taking responsibility, much less actually fixing problems in the first place.

Apologies for the rant; now back to your irregularly scheduled bike blather.


**************************************
I will probably do something along the lines of the transistor current limiter, then, as that ought to be fairly simple, and I have tons of resistors and transistors to recycle from various things.

I hadn't tested the black/yellow multiLED FL yet, but having done so since then, it is indeed more focused than the smaller 3 or 5 LED ones, significantly so. Also much brighter, but I think it is because it is running the LEDs at significantly higher voltage using 4AA in series instead of 3AAA. I haven't looked at the LED module to see if it has any electronics, yet.

At a glance, part of the focus reason might be where the LEDs are within the cones, as they stick out farther into the cone on the less-focused ones, and just barely into the cone within the bigger better-focused one. I can easily experiment with depth in the reflector to see about that.

If instead is is the angles of the reflectors to each other, I can also warp the plate to play with that, too.

But not for a while yet. Still doing cleanup. Final extension; end of this month is it.


Today, someone turned on the turn signal and left it running while I was inside work; I'd forgotten to disconnect the 12V lighting pack before going inside, so when I came out seven hours later it was blinking away, slower than usual, but I don't knwo for how long.

I had finally rememberd to recharge the 12V pack last night, after several days, and it took about 13Ah, so it was pretty close to dead by that point. At least I had just done it, or I probably woudlnt' have had anything but the CFL headlight and taillight for lighting (since they run off the main pack).

I really need to add either a contactor or a switch for the 12V pack that turns it off when I turn off the main breaker switch for everything that runs off the main pack. Ideally a contactor that is engaged by the keyswitch. Currently the keyswitch only switches the ignition wire to the controller, not power, and I use the main breaker for that.

Gonna have to wait on that, too, though, as the cleanup project is taking all my physical energy, and time out of bed. (ES browsing is done while in bed, so I can doze off whenever my body says so, whcih is often).

I've now got all the carpet and stuff out of the front room, except a couple small squares that are under stuff I can't move by myself, and over half of it in the big back room that will be floor-to-cieling storage for all the stuff that's outside that has to get "out of sight". It *was* going to be the bike workshop, but until there is further time and energy to take everything back out of the other storage rooms, move some of this in there, then shuffle stuff around so it all fits, plus get or build a third shed outside for most of the stuff that's in that room, it's just gonna have to wait. That could be a really long time, maybe years at the rate things are going.

If people werent' so nosy about stuff that isnt' their business, I could just leave the stuff outside in the sorted sections I had it in, and use it as I need it, and keep the house for living in plus working in. But they can't leave well enough alone, so here I am, filling up the house like a warehouse. Dogs don't like it any more than I do, and are pretty stressed out about all the constant changing of things, especially the spots they'd all picked out for hanging out in and whatnot now having all gone away.

I wish I could afford:
--a block wall. If I had a full-height (6 feet?) block wall around the whole yard, nobody could see anything to gripe about.
--materials to enclose the carport into a garage. That would give me a huge area I could use as either storage or workshop, at least twice as big as the back room is (or any shed I'd be able to put up in the backyard).
But both are too expensive, at minimum several hundred dollars, and probably a few thousand. (even though I wouldn't need a car-sized door for the garage, I'd have to put one in since I'm renting, probably a double-door since it's a double-carport).


Anyhow, a couple of weeks will see the cleanup overwith one way or another, and I can get back to this bike project and especially the new one, which will mostly replace this one for everyday use (though CB2 will likely still get experimental stuff done to it).

 

[Solcar]

Did your modem used to cut out when thunderstorms were in the area? That sometimes gets me a little backlogged on Internet tasks.

The town probably gets a cut of county property taxes.

Do Japanese Yew bushes survive there, I wonder. They grow very slow, though they are evergreen. Are there reuse building material places down there? I'm not sure if they could supply bricks or fence slats.

Simpler has its benefits, especially later on when memories get foggier. It makes it easier to use deadbug and point to point construction as well. I have been contemplating a BLDC controller based on a 74C14 hex Schmitt trigger CMOS gate IC. It seems it would be simpler than microprocessor-based control, yet I don't feel like messing with high side gate drive and Hall sensors.

Two of the switches that matter on mine are not obvious. I have one so obscure that so long as no one sees what I did when sliding it that they would need to stand around for a long time looking for it and still probably not find. If I'm going to a less secure location, I slide it before I get there and ride in unaided. Mine doesn't have a key switch. It has an obvious one, a standard 120vac light switch that someone might flip and that controls + battery, which could be basically considered a distraction. Nonetheless, if conditions permit, and they do permit too grievously often, we can never defend ourselves enough for every situation. Alas, I want to simplify my next controller/charger, which is bad from a clarity standpoint. The right answer to the problem is for everyone to have a good attitude and only compete against harmful non-people things like disease and a lack of knowledge. Then life would have a chance of being harmonious and efficient.

That black and yellow fl definitely appears to have deeper reflectors. The best focus would be when the lines extending perpendicular from the parabola minimums are all parallel. :wink: