Hyena's e-bike builds (now with HD video)

[Almasi]

So if I discharged them and charge them every month it will help them live longer, is that right?

No.

OK, now I get it....you said to use them for something else during winter...

I don't see what...unless I build myself a custom electric snowblower (I have a Original B&S Etek and a Alltrax 48 Volt 300 Amp controller...this could be a way to make so use of them again that white shit we get )

 

[Mark_A_W]

Snowblower?

What's that?

 

[Almasi]

Snowblower?

What's that?

Your kidding right?

If not here is a regular one:

We need one here!

 

[Hyena]

I wouldn't hook up these lipos to that motor with a 300 amp controller!
I dunno about snow blower, but I reckon you'd end up with a pretty spectacular snow melter!

 

[Almasi]

I wouldn't hook up these lipos to that motor with a 300 amp controller!
I dunno about snow blower, but I reckon you'd end up with a pretty spectacular snow melter!

I won't use Lipo for that...(I ws just kidding) for a snow blower Lead Acid battery would do it. (Marine Deep Cycle)

 

[Hyena]

Well, it looks like I'm adding another e-bike to my collection 8)
Trawling ebay for upgrades and bits and pieces for my current bike I came across a complete "proper" e-bike that's supposedly in good condition bar an interesting crank problem. The guy says he was pedalling one day and suddenly the pedals started spinning freely but not turning the chain. He said the motor still runs fine but it's as if you're pedalling backwards. It sounds to me like it has a cyclone style free wheel crank that's died, but why a commercially made hub driven ebike would have one is beyond me...
Or maybe its the bottom bracket ? I dunno, either way it doesn't sound like it'd be too hard to fix.

It's a little odd looking with the way the battery box is mounted with the slightly longer wheel base with the rear suspension, but meh I can easily transfer the bits and pieces to another bike if needs be. It has reasonable looking forks, front and rear disk brakes, lights, mud guards etc already in place to make it a good commuter. It looks legit in the eyes of the law too which is a bonus. It has pooey SLAs at the moment but they'll soon be replaced with nice light higher voltage lipos

I still really want to mod one of my old frames to completely hide the batteries in the frame. I've already cut part of the frame away playing with early prototypes, so its ripe for butchering I'd like to build something totally custom like Hal is but I havent got the skill or cash, but I reckon if I was to cut the full length of the bottom bar of the frame in half and weld on a piece of rectangular channel I could easily hide 44v 8ah worth lipos in there. OR, I could cut that bar away completely and replace it with a wider longer section and just weld to the other bits of the frame which would be neater, but then I'd be more fiddley around the bottom bracket etc and I'm sure I'd botch it up!

 

[Hyena]

I've been playing with me newly aquired bike. Turned out it was only 24v thus sloooooooow. Very slow when the crank is stuffed so I could only test it on battery power alone.
So I opened up the little controller in the bottom of the battery box, soldered in an extra resistor so it'd take higher voltage, but sadly that promptly killed it. :lol: Browsing ebay I thought I'd probably get an ecrazyman controller but found a local seller just up the road from me selling whole kits. I emailed and asked if they sold spare controllers seperately which they did and to my delight $50 later ($35 US) I had a big fat "36v 1000w" controller in my lap. I was also pleased to find it took my 50v hot off the charge lipo pack straight out of the box, so no need to mod it. $2 worth of duct tape later its on the bike and up the street for a test run, still with no crank. I dont know if its this controller or the throttle or what, but the acceleration is alot different to my GM one. It seems to accelerate fairly gently and smoothly to about 30km/hr and then levels out like thats all its got, but then open the throttle right up and it launches off. It has much more top end torque than my GM and clocked 44km/hr on the flat (GPS) vs about 39km/hr on the same pack for the GM. So very pleased with this I'm back to the workshop to get the watts up meter and see what sort current it's pulling. Cruising along its doing 10-15-20 amps, much the same as my GM, then I opened it up and looked down to see 42 amps! Damn, that's where the extra torque is coming from! Sadly my cheap 8ah lipos didnt like this and the voltage quickly sagged.

Looking inside the controller the shunts are quite accessable - I might try removing the one with the cuts in it and see how that affects the current draw. I'm thinking I could also wire up a "performace" switch of sorts - that I can flick if I want the extra current so I dont have to baby the throttle so much to get good milage out of it. I guess once I fix the crank I can give it a proper test and see how it performs.
Even with the noticably heavier steel frame its nicer to ride than my other bike so this may become my main commuter. I should be able to build both my lipo pack and the 8 amp switch mode PSU charger into the existing sla battery box - so I can just fit a mains socket to the box and charge it directly onboard where ever I go. All while looking neat and like a stock 200w off the shelf ebike

 

[dazzassj6]

thats a very good read. Hey do you know if your new bike's hub motor is geared or not? or is it direct drive?

 

[Hyena]

It's a direct drive.

I tried my 500w GM hub with the new controller and throttle today and it behaved the same way as it does with the GM controller, so I guess the extra torque and rush of top end speed on this new hub is a result of the way the motor is wound?
Interestingly, when connected to the 1000w controller the GM doesn't want to pull any more than the 30a upper limit of the 500w controller (except for near stalling it on a really steep hill) The GM uses draws around 10a cruising at top speed on the flat, the new hub pulls 15-20a so i guess that extra top speed comes at a high price when it comes to battery milage.

 

[Hyena]

I thought I'd post a pic of my home made lipo charger because someone was asking me in PM about it the other day.
Props to methods for his help in chosing components

As I posted above, I'm running an 8ah lipo pack made from 4x 4ah 6S 22.2v RC packs - so running 2S2P. They're soldered together into 2 lots of 2P, so and to charge I run them as 4p.

So first thing, I bought a 7 amp switch mode power supply - it real life it actually puts out 9 amps. It's 24v +/- 10% so I have it set to 25.2v. I charged the packs directly from this for a few weeks while I waited for the rest of my parts to arrive which was fine, but in the interest of cell longevity I now have it running through a balancer. I chose a hyperion LBA10 because you can charge through the balancer at up to 10 amps, perfect for my application. I also added a 10a amp meter to keep an eye on the charge status. I found that the power supply was getting reeeeeally hot at the start when it was pumping out high current so I added a small fan from an old computer power supply. I got the 12v supply for it by poking around the board of the power supply until I found 14v coming off the back of one of the diodes. It only draws 100ma, so homefully it will be ok! As an added bonus, and completely by coincidence, when I powered it up and the charge current was high the voltage to that diode went went and so the fan speed got faster. Free current dependant fan speed controller that increases the speed as the heat rises. Cool!

It's all held together and encased with a piece of perspex I heated and bent to suit.
Here's the finished product in action, I'm quite pleased with how it turned out

Trap for young players - don't leave your parallel balance taps harness connected when you switch the batteries back to series. It'll result in an immediate vaporisation of your connectors. Opps...

 

[bzhwindtalker]

hello
i orded 2 of these 6s 4000 lipo pack to play with, 6s2p on a 24v kollmorgan
what kind delay can I hope for delivery? cause I'm getting tired of sla's :lol:
for charge i will re-wire balancing plugs to get a 4s3p setup, i will be able to charge in 6hrs with my cheap hxt charger, but your setup look nice for a onboard fast charger. did you found this power supply cheap?
and last question, how many charges did the pack take so far? my experiance with small and cheap rc lipos runing a 15+c is around 50-100 cycles or 1-2year max. I just hope bigger lipos runing a 2-3c can last longer :wink:
thank

 

[Hyena]

Delivery time will depend on where you live I guess - I got them delivered to Australia in under a week. (something like ordering on Thursday and they arrived on Tuesday)

Why are you charging in 4S3P ? Is your charger only 4S ?
The power supply cost me around $55 AUD delivered, balancer was around the same from a local hobby shop.
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/24V-DC-6A-145W-Regulated-Switching-Power-Supply_W0QQitemZ230330507987QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item230330507987&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=66%3A2%7C65%3A1%7C39%3A1%7C240%3A1318

The balance plugs also came from ebay - they only came in packs of 10 which I didnt quite need, but cheaper than sourcing a few locally.
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&item=270340320490

You won't get anywhere near 15C from these lipos despite their rating. Up to 3C and they're happy, any more than 6C and they sag too much to use. Still for the price you can't really complain. It wasnt until after I bought these that I found out the zippys have much less sag and thus will enable you to maintain a higher speed for longer. They're less than half the price though, so if you can put up with the sag you'll get very close to their rated ah. With yours as 6S2P you'll probably be running around 23v pulling 20 amps.
I've put around 30 cycles on mine so far and apart from the one cell that randomly died out of the blue they're going well.
I use about 4ah riding to work, charge it there and then about 5 riding home.
I hope I get much more than 50 cycles because at this rate charging twice a day (albeit only half discharging) they won't last long!

I'll report back when they start to deteriorate.

 

[AussieJester]

Great to see you got the charging organized mate

For those looking for Meanwell power supplies (if your in OZ anywayz) Computronics are the agents for them...

KiM

 

[Hyena]

Ah I didnt know about that company - $38 AUD for the power supply I got, not bad. I did a quick google before I got the one from ebay and came up with some other mob but they want $80 odd!

I just checked and they have a S-100 model that outputs 48v @ 2a (more like 3a based on how underrated my current one is) for only $28.
If I'm going to keep riding to work I might grab one of those to leave here for a quick ghetto straight plug in 50.4v 12S charger and I'll balance it every second charge when I get home.

 

[AussieJester]

Yeah JayCar also sell them for HUGELY inflated price, I have bought a couple from Computronics in the past to run
peltiers on my PC watercooling setups few years ago now, they are about 10 minutes drive from my place now

KiM

 

[bzhwindtalker]

that's the charger i have from my indoor RC projects,
http://www.hobbycity.com/hobbycity/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idProduct=2055&Product_Name=hexTronik_Balancer/Charger_Dual_Charge_Capable

it's a really nice and cheap lipo charger, I know a gui who passed his car on this charger and it's still working it's well performing on 2-3s small packs, it's basically 4 1s 2ah max chargers so balancing is easy.

It's nice to have a high value currency, 55 aus is about 25-30 eur I will look foreword to use a powerful power supply as charger, but maybe not now , I will wait until I upgrade to more wh's :?

I'm french, and I took free shipping auction, 2-3 weeks ago.... I still wait and hope free shipping don't mean ground shipping

 

[Hyena]

It says 14 days to major european cities, 3-4 weeks to italy and that they often get held up by customs - so I guess they should be there any day now. I've bought from the seller 3 times now and the've been excellent each time so I'd say it's just a postage delay further down the line.

And yes our dollar is crap at the moment! When I was first looking into buying all my ebike stuff our dollar was buying US 95c. Now we're only getting around 65c - which means somthing that's $200 USD costs us around $300 AUD :x

 

[bzhwindtalker]

got my batts
they look ok and size & weight can' be compared to sla's
I hope getting 75 cycles from these, 1year leisure usage
the wires are nice 12awg, i will re-think balancing plugs to get 4s3p setup.
need to find a fireproof charge solution

 

[bzhwindtalker]

Hey!
got the batts tested, work well, more power than sla, mutch less sag, 2-3v instead of 7-8v for sla's.
the bike is geared a bit high, I will fix that on next one. easily 25-30 km/h on flat with absolutely no pedaling (as my bike don't have any foncionnal pedals) the batts get fairly hot after a ride, less than sla's, but what about your's?

 

[Hyena]

Mine can get hot depending on how much current you draw and for how long.

I just wrote a full review of my finds so far here:

http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=9426

 

[Hyena]

Here's a quick video I shot yesterday in the national park near my house.
It's a bit shakey because I accidently left the camera zoomed in a little and its duct taped directly to my handle bars. At 2 mins I was throwing the bike around alot and going fairly quick on that concrete path.

[youtube]2-I2B8xFTME[/youtube]

 

[Hyena]

2 pics from today. Behold the glory of lipo
This is the final configuration for this bike.
I have 60v10ah of new lipos that I was going to use for this bike but I might leave it complete as is and start on a new project
It'll be a RWD this time so I can use some better forks and brakes up front. It'll also facilitate better wheelies

http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/1152/hyebike1.jpg

http://img56.imageshack.us/img56/7503/hyebike2.jpg

 

[icecube57]

Time for you to join me in the 40mph club only 25 more volts.

 

[Hyena]

It's tempting, but I reckon 60v will do me for now. For my new bike I'm configuring my cells so they can either be run as a 60v10ah speed pack or a 42v15ah range pack. I could always add the 120v 5ah option for short range insanity, but I'm sure that'd end in any combination of smoke, tears and broken bones :lol:

Next time I have cause to take the wheel off I'm very tempted to give star-delta wiring a go.

 

[mwkeefer]

Hyena,

Nice video... good too see someone else moving their camera around and even leaving it lay out so you can shoot oncoming and leaving shots = )_

Ive gone over the thread and ... for the life of me I cant see how that pack under your seat is 15S2P... it's too small.

Also where is your controller mounted?

The build is clean, I really love the last 2 pics... still wondering about that seat battery = )

-Mike