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Tuesday 19 August 2014

Bike stuff

I bought ten reed switches on Ebay for 99p. They arrived yesterday, and I had a little play with one today. It's neat. It's a switch, which turns on when you put a magnet near it. I'm planning to use it to control the bike motor with the brake cable. The idea is that when I put the brake on, the cable moves, that moves a magnet stuck to it, and the magnet gets close to the reed switch, which closes. And that tells the bike controller to switch off current to the motor. So if I forget to cut the motor when I put the brakes on, this will do it for me. Not that I've ever done that.

I also tested a nice switch that I got (also Ebay, also about £1). It's actually three switches in one. It's sold as useful for horn/headlight/turn-switch, but that's not what I have in mind.

I have a three-way switch for the Infineon controller, that switches the amount of power between 30%, 60% and 100% (those percentages are programmable, and that's what I chose). 30% is really feeble, it's a "granny mode". 60% is what I usually use, and 100% is for when I'm going as fast as I can along a long straight length of tarmac, I hardly ever use it. I can use the turn-switch for that function, it has left-middle-right.

The Xiongda motor has two gears, and you access them by running the motor either forward or reverse. I can use the "headlight" switch to tell the controller to run in reverse. And the horn switch? I have a horn; not as loud as a car horn, but it makes a nice noise and I can use it to tell pheasants, cows or pedestrians that there's a bike comping towards them, so they don't get startled as I pass.

My tests with the motor so far, gives me 11 or 12 mph in low gear on the level, several mph more in high.

One problem I see; according to the documentation I've seen, the fastest you can go in reverse is 70% of full speed. That makes some sense because reverse is usually so that you can back the bike (for example, a heavy cargo trike). I'm not sure if that 70% limit really is true; experimentation will tell me. What I really want, is 100% in low gear, and 30/60/100 in high gear. When I run the xpd software (that's what you use to program the Infineon), that seems to allow up to 100% in reverse.

But first, I'm going to use the bike as it is, with just the options of low or high gear. Actually using it for caching is going to tell me what modifications I want.

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