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.