After a week of commuting (well 4 days of it) in a mixed bag of weather, the weekend was actually quite pleasant. On Saturday morning, Lynn was at work, and while I had a stack of stuff to do at home, I decided a trip into Porirua to do some shopping was much more interesting!…
Category: Electric Bikes
The trials and highlights of building and using E-Bikes
Electric bikes – a mixed mode holiday.
After nearly two years of using our electric bikes almost entirely for commuting, I decided it was time to use them for what I intended them for – riding for fun and pleasure. We normally take some sort of break around the Winter Solstice (June 21st) and this year we decided to close the shop…
Electric Bikes – 6000km in two years
On the 22nd Jun 2016, the odometer on the bike clicked over to 6000km. Just one day short of 2 years since the first commuter ride on the bikes. We weren’t commuting at the time, in fact we were on holiday in the Hawke’s Bay area, doing the third of 3 days cycling the cycle…
Arduino – multi cell battery voltmeter progress
As reported in the last post on this topic, I soldered headers onto the two 16 channel MUX and started testing. Since then I have spent a bit more time trying to get it all to work. The major change was simplifying the code not to use Port manipulation on the arduino. It all looked…
Electric Bikes – two years and still going
This morning I rode into my third year of using my electric bike. Just another commute to the shop, but still great fun. The first ride was on 6th June 2014, to the coffee cart and back, and the first commute was on 23rd June 2014. The odometer reads 5788km, so I am not likely…
Arduino – voltage drop
I started working again on the multicell voltmeter, I soldered some header pins onto the two 16 channel multiplexers, and plugged them into a breadboard with arduino. Some basic testing proved that my optimism was completely unfounded. So using best testing practices, I peeled off layers until I got to the bit that worked, and…
Electric Bikes – Cheetah not a cheater
I have noticed a few threads on forums and an article or two on Electric Bike Report about electric bikes and cheating. There has been many tedious pages of people justifying their use of electric bikes, all very true and sincere, but unnecessary. There have been one or two excellent one liners, such as “I…
Electric bikes – random odometer reading
Riding into work this morning, I randomly pressed the mode button on my cycle computer, from Trip to Odometer, and it read 5555.5 kilometres! Couldn’t photograph it, as I was doing 30kph at the time. The motor has settle down since its gear replacement, much quieter now, and very smooth. The batteries are also behaving…
Electric Bikes – blogging
I have had one or two people comment on this blog, possibly the total audience, who knows? Electric bike riders seem to enjoy blogging, some about the build, some about the riding. Obviously I like to do both, but my riding is fairly boring, mainly commuting to and from work, along the same routes each…
Electric Bikes – wear, tear and repair – Bafang CST Hub Motor strip down
Following on from the last post, the new gears arrived, and at the weekend I stripped down the Bafang CST Hub motor and replaced the planetary gears. There, that was easy wasn’t it? OK, for my own satisfaction and to document the process, here is a description and a few photos of the process. This…