After a year in abandonment in Boston, I finally decided to get Cholo shipped to California so work could resume after a year hiatus.
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| welcome to Cali Cholo! |
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| BEANTOWN BEANTOWN! |
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| in the shade for protection from Cali sun! |
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| EVT vinyl sticker still there! |
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| getting my tools ready! |
A bunch of friends from work have agreed to help me get Cholo on the road. I have also finally obtained some batteries for the Cholo. I got them from a salvaged i3 battery pack. The i3 pack is 8 modules with each being a 12s1p array of 60Ah cells. With 2 of these in series I'll have ~5.2kWh at 88V nominal. I'll be doing some discharge tests on these batteries soon. Ideally I'd like for them to pull 600A DC but it might prove difficult. The fuse in the i3 is 350A, and i know I can push that a little bit. Anyways it will just take some careful experimenting with a power supply and an IR camera and we'll see the results.
Mechanically the i3 modules are ideal for an open frame motorcycle like Cholocycle, the dimensions are roughly 12 inches, by 15 inch by 5.75 inch. So they should be able to stack nicely in between the wraparound arms that held the engine in place. They also have an aluminum housing which makes it easy to weld brackets to.
Additionally the battery pack comes in with direct cell connections and connections to thermistors on the cells. These wires are easily accessible via the module connector. This is great news because these can now feed directly into a BMS for balancing and temperature monitoring of the cells. Anyways I'm hoping to be working on this more and more and get it running by the summertime. The goal is to get it to be my daily commuter to work!
