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Thursday 14 August 2014

Finishing off bike.2


Today I finished off. Installed the LCD meter/control panel, installed the controller and a throttle and tidied up the wires. Some comments.

First of all, let me say it's very nice, it's really all I hoped.

It is quiet, except at high speed there's a sort of buzz, nothing that sounds bad.

I'm running it from 12s Lipo. At low speed, I get 12mph, and it climbs the very gentle hill I tested it on like it wasn't there. At high speed, with a very slight downhill, it can get to 20 mph. I'm happy with that; this is a 250 watt motor. Most of my biking is done at less than 10mph.

The autochange doesn't work very well; I'm not bothered, I wasn't planning to use it anyway. It has trouble deciding to change gear, I think.

When you change gear, there's a delay of maybe a second before you get power again. Since the motor is reversing it's direction of motion, that's not too surprising.

The LCD thing is a bit complicated to learn how to use, but I guess you'd get used to it. It tells you that it's going to give you motor temperature, but it doesn't - as far as I can tell, all it gives you is the outside temperature. I don't really understand that; there's six control wires going into the motor, surely one of those is the temperature sensor? Maybe I haven't understood the LCD thing. It does give you battery voltage, and speed, which are the main two things I want. The voltage is in volts, hurrah, not some arbitrary number of blobs on a blobmeter. You also get an odometer. I plan to add a clock, because I like knowing the time.

Something to watch out for; there's a "walk the bike" mode, which is nice (2.5 mph in low speed, 4mph in high) but if you invoke it while you've got the bike in your garage, you'd better be ready for the bike to start going forward! But as soon as you take your finger off the LCD's control, the bike stops, which is very good.

The wheel does freewheel forward, but there's more resistance than in an unmotored wheel. Not so much that you couldn't pedal the bike, though. There's a lot more resistance if you try to go backwards, but I doubt if that would matter much to most people. You can wheel the bike backwards, it's just not as easy as forward.

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