Skip to main content

Flat tires, battery frustration, and new DIY headlight

My e-bike has been working pretty well, barring some occasional frustrations.  These are chiefly centered around flat tires.  I've had the back tire (the powered wheel) get punctured 3 times now.  The first 2 times I found small pieces of 22 gauge wire, which I'm willing to concede might have come from my garage floor.  The last time, I picked up a carpet nail!  It was right around the construction area on Shelburne road, where they tore up the pavement.  There were lots of little pock marks in the pavement for something like a nail to hang out in, at odd positions.  I learned that getting a flat is worse than having a controller blow up or a dead battery, because you can't even ride it home.  On the bright side, I found out it's an hour walk to my house from Burger King (2.79 miles).  Pushing 70 lbs. of dead weight on a floppy rim, that is.

Could have been a lot worse, I've gone as far as 25 miles from my house before.  I put a spare tube and patch kit in my panniers, in case it ever happens when I am far enough away to justify the effort of a field change.

Besides that, I'm really getting tired of having so much weight on the back rack.  I am constantly sweating hitting even a moderately-sized bump at high speed, and breaking the rack or damaging the battery.  I wish I had a smaller battery for shorter range travel, or perhaps a 15-20AH LiPo pack, which would probably weigh about half as much as my LiFePO4 20AH.  The trouble is that the cost would be around $300-$500, and I just can't justify it right now.  I've been studying tons about LiPo batteries - buying options, how to build a battery pack (series/parallel combinations), charge them, balance them, etc.  Once I know enough, I will probably get into building my own battery packs out of used cells or pouch cells.  If I get good enough at it, maybe I'll sell them.

Some good news: I finished my headlight.  It's built out of a 3up Cree XPE, a 700mA BuckPuck, and a snazzy aluminum housing.  I mounted it on a swivel and hooked it up to a small 12 volt LiPo battery pack.  Easily removed for anti-theft.  It puts out 750 lumens, plenty bright enough for night riding at 30 mph!  I plan to sell these for $160 USD.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reaper, Linux, and the Behringer X-Air - Complete Studio Solution, Part 1

Introduction and Rationale This is part one of a major effort to document my experiences with recreating my home studio, entirely using Linux.  Without getting into too many of the specifics, a few months ago I decided that I was unhappy with Windows' shenanigans - to the point that I was ready to make a serious attempt to leave it behind.  For most in this situation, the obvious choice is to switch to Mac OS.  With its proven track record, support, and options for multimedia production, it is naturally the first alternative to consider if your goal is to simply use something other than Windows. For me the choice was not so simple. I despise Mac OS and, in general, the goals and philosophies put forth by Apple in an effort to ostensibly provide users with an "easy" working environment.  It does not help that I have also failed to find any aspect of the Mac OS UI intuitive, but I realize that this is a subjective matter. With my IT background and user-control* f...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Alternative Take on AI Doom and Gloom

 I've purposely held my tongue until now on commenting about "AI" (or, more specifically as has come to be known, GAN or Generative Adversarial Networks).  It seems like it is very in-style to complain about how it has made a real mess of things, it is displacing jobs, the product it creates lacks soul, it's going to get smart and kill us all, etc. etc.  But I'm not here to do any of that. Rather I am going to remind everyone of how amazing a phenomenon it is to watch a disruptive technology becoming democratized From the time of its (seeming) introduction to the public at large, around November of 2022, to late 2023, the growth and adoption rate has been nothing short of explosive. It features the fastest adoption rate of any new technology ever, by a broad margin.  To give a reference, the adoption rate for AI image and text generation, real-world uses, in just 12 months is comparable to all of that of the another disruptive technology, the World Wide Web, takin...
Post a Comment
Read more

RANT TIME: Why do replies to a message I sent go to my spam folder?

Despite what one would think/hope, sending a message to a given address does not inherently give Google a high confidence that a reply from this address is expected (and, for example, that it should bypass spam checks). I have confirmed with Google's tech support that there is no way to automatically have this happen. The user can do the following: 1. Add the address to your contacts list in Gmail. 2. Check spam folder for replies, and mark it as "not spam" if something ends up there, which should influence the fate of future replies received. I can also approve an address at the domain level, i.e. if it is a big vendor or similar. I've had to do this with several of our Chinese vendors. I regularly ask engineering and purchasing to give me a list of the supplies we deal with, so I can approve them as a preventative measure. For what it's worth, all of the false positive instances of reply -> spam we have experienced have involved the sender's email server ...
Post a Comment
Read more