This all started with a chinese hub motor board. It did the job, but it left me wanting more. More power, more speed, more fun. So I began my descent into madness(the forum)…
I had a few requirements in mind:
- Hub motors: I love the stealthy feel of having the motors built into the wheels. I do understand the downsides of this approach, and honestly if @Hummie didn’t make these I would’ve went with conventional satellite motors.
- Kicktail: On a college campus, would be nice if I could kick up the nose for the some quick direction changes.
- Relatively Short: The vanguard clone my meepo board came with is all the downsides of the vanguard design without any of the upsides. Even so, I mostly felt it was a bit too long.
This all started with the purchase of dual Escapes by @stewii. I initially bought 2 pcbs and had attempted to solder my own together to save a quick buck, but the process was neither quick nor cheap. After spending far too many hours getting the first once soldered and cleaned up and programmed and tested, I found out the second one was completely borked. Something was shorting the 5v to ground, and even after removing all the components between 5v and gnd, it was still shorted. I gave up and ordered a dual.
With the purchasing process started, I took the opportunity to hop on @Hummie’s hub train and ordered a set. With that in mind, I chose a 12s battery to maximize that speed, since I wouldn’t be able to change gearing ratios like on a satellite drive train. There’s a long story where I tried to separate some multistar lipos to make a flat pack, but somehow the solder didn’t melt??? So I ended up buying 30q’s from imr and spot welding a 12s4p pack. (If anyone wants 4s 16Ah multistar batteries for like, $50, hmu)
Got the hookup with the Sunko cuz a friend of mine is in a club that regularly makes 15kwh batteries. The Sunko was meh, but it seems to have done the job, will update in the event of problems I guess…
Now that @psychotiller enclosure there is the lorimer burst, and it’s supposed to be 23.5 inches long and it is definitely not 23.5 inches long. I cut off the cable routing piece at the end in order to bring it down to size a bit. Also in order to make the enclosure fit better, I hit it with a heat gun and hand formed it to match the wheel wells better. The result is pretty ok, hopefully it doesn’t result in any stress fracturing.
There also wasn’t enough depth in the enclosure thanks to the wonderful concave, so I double layered the foam to increase the available space inside. But even with that, the wiring of the bms to vescs was so tight, I didn’t even remember to get a photo of it before roughly trying to squeeze everything inside. I’d rather not open up the enclosure just to take a photo of it.
Also thanks to @Winfly for “shipping” the hubs to me, got them way sooner than I expected.
Build is “done” in the sense I’ll be riding it with Baesk8 tomorrow (first group ride such excite), but there is still plenty to change and fix.
- Hook up the switch to 5v from a vesc to make it light up when the board is on
- Finish cutting up that foam, looks kind of ridiculous with it extending so much past the end of the enclosure
- Get more screws to mount the Escape enclosure completely
- Figure out how to cable manage the phase wires, there’s no space inside the enclosure, trust me.
- Install countersunk washers (ordered, just haven’t arrived yet)
- more to come(?)…