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Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

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Re: Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

#591

Post by mbarlow12 »

jacquesm wrote: post #576
jakecodes wrote: post #573

Hi Jacques! A little late here. It's cool to see someone else spot welding! For the DC area, it's totally faster to commute and I took my daughter everywhere! Now we're in Philly and I use it for long ranges. I've built a bunch of these in various forms, my favorite is a big wheel scooter. It's my main commuter. Look up rivet nuts for securing to the frame! Was a big life saver. One thing: After years of riding vario…

Hi Jake, I love this kind of response, all the armchair lawyering and other bs is just a huge distraction, there are exactly four comments in this whole thread including yours that are constructive. You mean the metal part joining the two sides of the fork? That's a great warning, I never thought of monitoring that bit in particular but now that you mention it that makes perfect sense, there is quite a bit of force o…

While I've never seen/heard of this happening, I suppose it's possible. I'd chalk it up to 2 issues: 1) possibly not tightening the quick release skewers quite enough 2) cheaper aluminum dropouts on the suspension lowers. One solid option is to purchase a thru-axle fork and wheel. They're becoming pretty much the standard across the cycling/mtb industry and you can even find rigid steel options (https://surlybikes.com/parts/karate_monkey_fork). If you're replacing your fork, that'll also open up options to buy a larger rim & higher volume tire to absorb more impact. Generally speaking, thru axle forks are designed to take a lot of abuse, so you'd be hard pressed to overstress one in a commuting setting, even over a long period of time.

You can also try a bolt on hub/fork where you're actually tightening a hex nut to secure the dropouts on the axle—most older 10 speeds are in this vein. They're also typically steel which is always nice for reliability.

I electrified a Kona Unit last year as a car replacement and have put it through the ringer. If you like tinkering, I highly recommend poking around the forums on lunacycle.com.

Re: Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

#592

Post by AYBABTME »

jakecodes wrote: post #573

Hi Jacques! A little late here. It's cool to see someone else spot welding! For the DC area, it's totally faster to commute and I took my daughter everywhere! Now we're in Philly and I use it for long ranges. I've built a bunch of these in various forms, my favorite is a big wheel scooter. It's my main commuter. Look up rivet nuts for securing to the frame! Was a big life saver. One thing: After years of riding vario…

Look for thru-axle, they're standard on gravel-oriented bikes and mountain bikes, and are getting onto more and more of the road oriented bikes.

Re: Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

#593

Post by AYBABTME »

jacquesm wrote: post #538
AYBABTME wrote: post #506

FYI: spot welding is a lot easier and precise using this welder: https://www.keenlab.de/index.php/portfolio-item/kweld/ With the capacitor module, you can easily power it with a lab bench power supply.

Finally, a constructive comment instead of a bunch of legal stuff and fantasy performance figures. Thank you very much, I'll look into this. edit: Hm, the power supply looks to be a LiPo pack, the other two options are no longer available. But very nicely executed kit, now to find a way to power it from a wall socket.

If you pair it with this ultracapacitor bank, you can power it with a regular lab bench power supply.

https://www.keenlab.de/index.php/product/kweld-ultracapacito...

That's what I did for a custom ~600Wh pack I made. From memory (that was ~3y ago) I've set the voltage to ~12V and amperage to 30A. If you weld super fast, you'll start to be rate limited by the capacitor charge rate, but then you can just slow down a bit and all is well. It seems like the creator of the project has since released this custom voltage regulator that you can hook to a server power supply:

https://www.keenlab.de/index.php/product/ksupply/

This would be useful if you don't have a lab bench powersupply that can't provide 30A at 12V, and you're impatient. The website looks like their stuff is all in stock, so you shouldn't have a problem. Although you already built your pack so it might be too late. :)

Re: Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

#594

Post by wpietri »

dncornholio wrote: post #194
wpietri wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speed (or better, momentum) is important. But pedal assistance is definitely material to me. Switching from pedal-assist to throttle-controlled changes the proportionality between impulse and real-world results. As a kid my first response to pretty much anything with a dial was to turn it up all the way and see what happened. That's a behavior I saw quite a bit during the brief plague of VC-funded scooters: novices a…

E bikes also have a dial, all it does is it limits the speed when it stops accelerating. You can dial the bike all the way up, peddle but not apply any force and still accelerate to top speed.

Interesting. So you're saying that they have to keep pedaling, just not very hard? My only experience is with the Lyft e-bikes, where high speed required actual work for me.

Re: Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

#595

Post by GhettoComputers »

jacquesm wrote: post #547
GhettoComputers wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping them within a certain range is useful but not as much as preventing them from overheating, heat and fast charging is more dangerous, basically if you limit them to 80% it will prevent trickle charging, you can do this in hardware by monitoring the speed it charges at and shutting off when it lowers with wattage monitoring equipment. Apple has this as well, and every lithium charger has trickle charging at 80%…

It all helps, heat and fast charging are bad, charging to 100% and discharging to zero are also bad (100's of cycles vs thousands!). I salvaged a BMS from a borked battery to fool the Bosch system into thinking that it has a 'legit' battery, and yes, you need that chip, the CAN-BUS communications do all kinds of stuff such as report state-of-charge to the display, enable the high voltage bus and so on. Without that t…

Can you explain how much of a difference it is from non state of the art equipment? I don’t know much about electronic vehicles, I assumed that it was just power regulators, and it could be done on hardware like charging through an advanced IC charger. Basically if you replace the chip with another one, what is the greatest cost?

Do you have that replacement might be mitigated through other means?

Do firmware updates matter? I know that there were projects to make a Bluetooth finder with non replaceable batteries not functional when the batteries were replaced, it was tile, it depended on waste, a replaceable battery that was locked, and became non functional to sell more product.

Do you see it being bricked in a forced update like the tiles? Are you sure it’s able to be tuned for the newer battery capacity, or do you see workarounds? I can see a switch that can change it to stock mAh cells to ensure the best compatible with the software, but you also lose efficiency through voltage lowering buck conversion.

Re: Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

#597

Post by fragmede »

fragmede wrote: post #179
TacticalCoder wrote: post #27

We really need a terminology to differentiate better between pedal-assist only e-bikes ("pedelec") and electric motorbikes. A "bicycle" that can accelerate without the need to pedal at all is an electric motorcycle, no matter if you put pedal on it or not. I see the two as totally different things: I've tried pedal-assist e-bike and they're great. But... Although I have nothing against motorbikes I'm not cool at all…

And scooters, electric-scooters, and sit-down electric scooters. And electric wheelchairs, and non-electric wheelchairs and mobility assist carts with handlebars. We also have to delineate between a daydreaming cyclist who's top speed is slow, and a hard-core cyclist with a $3000+ bike that can hit 40 mph in the right conditions. Those cyclists should be banned from using the same paths as the first kind of bicyclist…

I'm totally ashamed that I forgot to mention electric skateboards with 4 wheels and electric skateboards with 1 wheel and electric unicycles (larger single wheel vs a 'one wheel' electric skateboard) and it's too late to edit them in.

Re: Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

#598

Post by JCharante »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #366
rjbwork wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an e-bike and I disagree with your assertions. I'm a fat asthmatic and I have absolutely no problem maintaining 40kph for long stretches of time on my bike. The fastest I've done on it (on a large hill but still) is 42.7MPH (~68Kph). Average cruising speed on flat land can easily be 30-33mph(48-53kph). Not all e-bikes are capable of this, but they are certainly not some kind of rare expensive impossibility - m…

If something has that average speed capability, why is not licensed, registered, insured and held accountable as any vehicle would be? My 50cc scooter appears to have comparable speeds (maybe 10kph higher), and I wear proper armour & helmet, took the classes passed the test, am registered, licenses & insured. That's my massive pet peeve & safety concern: I WANT to love e-Bikes, and all those sorts of things; and like…

Should regular bicycles have to be licensed? When I studied in Vietnam I'd ride my bike amongst traffic in bursts of 55 KPH and cruise around 40kph (I had a Garmin mounted). Generally I can only do 30 kph in the countryside, but in the city & amongst traffic there is much less air resistance.

Additionally a bicycle can do Lane splitting much better than a motorcycle can.

I however don't ride my bike in the US because it's not safe to. There's not the proper infrastructure which just annoys drivers, but if there was I wouldn't have a problem sticking to riding 20kph in the city until I get to rural parts for training. Riding fast in bicycle lanes seems irresponsible if you're amongst commuters.

I suppose I just kinda answered this. There should be speed limits for bike lanes inside cities.

Re: Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

#599

Post by markvdb »

jacquesm wrote: post #534
ornornor wrote: post #511

There are alternatives that don’t involve DRM or Bosch at all. I built our ebikes around regular bikes using a TSDZ2 torque sensing motor and an em3ev 52V battery. Total cost around 600$ + bike + tools. The battery is already assembled so no risk of setting your house on fire. The torque sensing makes it really natural (like having bionic legs), the whole thing has an open source firmware if you want to replace the C…

Where I live you can't legally cobble together your own s-pedelec, you need type approval.

The EU is large. Did you or anyone else by any chance do any research on EU countries with a fairly flexible certificate of conformity approval procedure for L1e-B/speed pedelecs?

I'm starting to research my options for a twice weekly 2*65km commute. Most of it is ideally suited for speed pedelecs, along a canal and an old railway converted to cycle highway. The commercial offerings don't suit my needs. I wouldn't really want to pay a lot of money for a DRM offering either. That would be different for a DRM free version with serviceable battery packs.

A lot of the problem would go away if the Bosch DRM could be broken in some way, or at least convinced to accept non-Bosch batteries...

Re: Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

#600

Post by llampx »

kennywinker wrote: post #508
Johnny555 wrote: post #443

This is an interesting project, but if I needed long range transportation and didn't want a car, I'd get an electric scooter (the Vespa kind, not the Razor kind), or an electric motorcycle. It's built to handle higher speeds and can coexist with cars more safely.

For highways of larger roads perhaps. If you’re somewhere with good bike infrastructure you won’t be able to take advantage of those nice separated lanes.

I bought a Vespa instead of an e-bike a few years ago because I thought e-bikes would get cheaper with time and I figured I already have a bike, why get a more expensive one? Also because my SO could ride with me instead of having to have two bikes.

However I noticed that bikes can still be faster than sitting in traffic and trying to filter through to the front at traffic lights. Now I have an e-bike but have kept my Vespa for the wind-in-the-hair feeling of a scooter on nice summer days.

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