Project Aims

  • <$10,000 conversion
  • Top speed of +100kph
  • Range of +100km
  • Make a bike that is able to be registered
  • Make the bike look like the standard petrol version

Design Specification

  • Regenerative braking
  • 1990 Suzuki Across
  • 216VDC @ 15A (~3.2kw) VRLA battery pack (~90kg) for proof of concept
  • 3.3kw 3 phase induction motor

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Progress update

We have now moved up to our property and have sorta settled in. We have setup a small 1kW off grid solar power system with a 1380Ah 12V battery bank. We are heading into summer so at the moment we are generating lots of surplus power. We have usually recharged the battery bank to 100% full before lunch time at the moment.



This is good because the surplus can be used to recharge the bike. Speaking of the bike I have not done too much work on it since the move, however I have been thinking and planning on it. I have got some work with a local induction motor manufacturing firm which is giving me a better insight into the working's of the induction motor. I have seen the regenerative braking effect and am pretty confident that this will be quite easy to add (the motor when driven slower that the motor rotational speed will cause it to turn into a generator that backfeeds DC voltage, perfect)

I was planning on using the Atmel AT90PWM3B processor for the inverter, however now Atmel have released there XMega series of processor, they look very cool. I don't need much incentive to play around with new stuff but these processors are jammed packed full of very nice features like 2million ADC samples per second (12 bit), advanced waveform generator (perfect for motor control), new event bus and DMA to namea few. Farnell have listed the 44pin ATxmega64A4 which I think would be perfect. It is a 3V part so I may have to tweek my current inverter design. They have the 100pin A1 part already in stock at the moment, but the pin spacing is a little too fine for a handmade board and I don't need all the IO. The current design uses the 28pin AT90PWM3B which only just had enough IO with no room for expansion.

Will hopefully now update the blog more often as I expect to be spending a bit of time each week on the bike.

6 comments:

Steve said...

Hello Bradley,

Were still stopping by every so often to check on progress of your E-bike project. We haven't forgot about it:)

Bradley Jarvis said...

Hi Steve,
Thanks for the message. I still haven't been able to spend any time on the bike recently, too much to do around here. I hope over the next few months to get back onto it. I have been thinking about the bike though, today whilst I was driving around I was thinking how cool it would be to be using the bike(I also miss going for a ride on my old bike). I saw some nice conversions on the Instructables website recently which may be worthwhile checking out.

amin said...

can I also ask your email address please?

amin said...

Hello bradely,

I am working on a simple inverter with at90pwm3b and trying to design a pcb for it in protel. but there is no library for this microcontroller to make the pcb and its schematic. i will be so gratfull if you help me and tell me how to do it.
Thanks

Steve said...

More then a year on, I'm back again checking on progress. :-)

Bradley Jarvis said...

hehe, progress is actually very slow. It is a project that I still want to complete but at the moment other things keep coming up. I have been working for 2 electric motor manufacturers with built-in inverter controlled motors, one deals with induction motors which is what I am using on the bike) and the other deals in permanent magnet motors. I am gaining very good insight into the workings of electric motors.

Thanks Brad