Lynn and Dave cycle the Otago bike trails Background Lynn and I have been wanting to do the Central Otago Rail Trail since we first heard about it many years ago. We finally have bikes that we feel we want to use on such adventures, but weren’t confident about our ability to get there and…
Category: Electric Bikes
The trials and highlights of building and using E-Bikes
Ebikes – DBMS issues with counterfeit parts
The DBMS worked fine for 50 or 60 km, but the behaviour of the various components – batteries, motor and controller and DBMS started to get erratic, and it started to get difficult to tell what was going wrong. I slowly removed items until I was back to a normal set up on both bikes,…
Ebikes – dual battery managment system more riding.
Two more days of testing, a week apart, building on the numbers from day one. Total kilometres over the three days 66.4 and total time on road 3h22m, giving an average of speed of 20kph or thereabouts. The bike was definitely starting to get sluggish towards the end, and the gauge on the bike was…
Ebikes – dual battery management system – first rides
I have waterproofed both the DBMS and the power meter, so am feeling a bit happier about going out for a ride or two. I did my first ride just after I finished the basic unit, but it was all a bit short and hilly to get a grip on what was happening. I had…
Ebikes – dual battery management system – build and install
Build After a few months of designing, prototyping and waiting for all the components to arrive, I finally had enough to build a working, install-able prototype of my Dual Battery Management system. It is still a prototype, and like all prototypes is too big, too heavy and too expensive. I am not an electronic designer,…
EBikes – Dual Battery Management System
The only commercial developer of dual battery electric bikes I have seen to date is Bosch, who do an optional Dual Battery kit, which one or two manufacturers have taken up. Being proprietary technology, there is not a lot out there about it. The only two things I can glean are: 1. The real technology…
Yuba – display woes
After just a couple of hundred kilometres, the main display unit described below stopped working correctly. It bega with it occasionally not switching on first time, needing a repeat try, and this gradually got worse until it was taking 6 or 7 tries to get it switched on. Eventually it reached the point where it…
Yuba dashboard upgrade part 2
The new display panel has arrived, and was promptly fitted. Immediate thoughts were that it switched on and worked out of the box! Second thoughts were that the settings were also pretty good out of the box, with the exception of the top speed, which was set to 25kph. This is fine in those countries…
Yuba dashboard upgrade
A few posts below I mentioned that the handlebar display panel was a fairly standard C963 display panel, branded as a Lekkie. It is based on the KM5S made by King-Meter. A quick review of its capabilities compared to what the KM5S manual contains shows that it is quite heavily customised. I am not sure…
Yuba – another ride in Kapiti with Lynn
Having spent a hard week in the workshop, and most of Friday and Saturday digging a patch of clay over in the back garden, Lynn and I decided to have a trip out on Sunday. I wanted to show off my new found knowledge of the Kapiti cycle ways, so we put two bikes on…