Tuesday, May 27, 2014

I'm Riding Cholo!

Hey folks, its been long since the last update. This was a busy semester (but my last, yay!). I spent the last couple of weeks debugging the sevcon controllers to work with my AC-20.

I rigged up my testbed in the EVT room.

EVT test room

making sure to keep tires off the ground

Sevcon espAC with the bike

in the process of testing cholo ride, I had to revive two dead cells in this pack

putting the controller into the bike!


bike with zip tied batteries (better batteries and battery mounting coming soon!)
blown fuse!!!! during some auto-tune testing

power supply+espAC for autotuning

After struggling with the sevcon for a couple of hours Dgonz and I finally got this to happen!



Finally we waited for sunny sunday to do this:



I rode it around campus for a bit (i didn't want to ride too much given the bike is totally not street legal right now). Lots of fun! I Still need to mess around with the settings and fine tuning of the motor to get 100% of the motor potential. Currently I have a 72V 15Ah LiFePO4 pack (1kWh), I am hoping to upgrade this to 5kWh soon. I am also waiting for a sevcon gen4 size 6 to arrive to finish the bike.

[a more comprehensive update for the sevcon troubleshooting will be coming soon! in the meantime follow this as it is the best online tutorial that I found, credit to dgonz for all the sevcon help]