Letsevo

Hello people of E-moped,

I was searching for the term "throttle control arduino and came to your page of the E-moped. The reason that I was looking for this throttle control was that I am making my own E-scooter from a "HCF pacelite 707" that had no batteries and no controller. The throttle control was defective and so I had to reconstruct it. I used an arduino duemilanove, 2 7.3 amps 12 volts lead-acid batteries, a syren 25 speedcontroller and a potentiometer inside the handle-bar to control the speed.

The potentiometer proved not resistant to rain, (should have known that) so now I am looking for another solution. Maybe just a push-button and then letting the arduino smooth the ESC-output.

I am wondering how far you guys have come with the actual hardware and I have lots of experience in the RC cars/planes/boats to advice where possible.

Hi Hacky, great to get know about your efforts and experience. We haven't come far with the electronics, I have made some experiments with a Velleman board (www.lets-evo.net/emoped/2009/05/26/testi...roller-part-2-video/) but I haven't look deeper into it.

I think a person with knowledge in Arduino could really help, funny you mentioned about RC cars, I used to race RC cars in Brazil, it was my first experience of the feel experiences with electronics.

In the this project I will be focusing my efforts on the frame geometry, but if you want, you can participate, there are many things open still. for example:

Do you think we make a controller based in Arduino, that can be configurable (through modules?software code?) to different motor/battery combinations?

Let me know if I can help you with your scooter frame. ahh did you see the e.Moped group? you can join it if you want..

Hello henrique. I would really recommend the arduino board for the controls. It's easy to use, easy to program, fast and robust. The syren25 is a battlebot motor-controller. Syren also has more powerful controllers. I use a simple 1-wire serial connection to the syren to ensure that the bike doesn't fly off when it receives a simple resistance input. I'm willing to share arduino code. It's even suitable for simple touchbutton-throttle operation by using a smoothing algorhytm.

by using an arduino you can compile the code with different variables as motor-power, battery-power, battery-life. That will be no problem at all. I am only not sure if it will be possible to make the motor modular. The controller should change together with the motor to account for the power-throughput.

I think that a very modular design is a battery that shows his own power through one or more leds (like compaq notebooks) and you can just slide in one or more batteries according to the distance or speed you want to drive.

My daily job is 3D-visualization, so I can also visualize some sketches in 3D if that might come in handy.

The scooter-frame of the HCF pacelite is perfect for me. It's made of aircraft-aluminium, adjustable, foldable, small, ergonomic and light. Only drawback is that it looks ugly. Sitting on it makes you look stupid. really! it's uglyness. I really like your modular ideas of the bike. Whe this one breaks down, I will weld my own one and maybe lend some ideas of your designs.

Don't forget to make place for the batteries. They will take the most place and weight. Do you already know if you want to use lead-acid or li-po batteries?

Hi Hacky, very interesting that you mixed both of them.

hacky wrote:
I use a simple 1-wire serial connection to the syren to ensure that the bike doesn't fly off when it receives a simple resistance input.

I suspected you did that because the arduino itselft cannot handle all the resistance coming from the batteries...


hacky wrote:
I'm willing to share arduino code. It's even suitable for simple touchbutton-throttle operation by using a smoothing algorhytm.

That sounds awesome!

hacky wrote:
I am only not sure if it will be possible to make the motor modular. The controller should change together with the motor to account for the power-throughput.

I don't think we need to make the motor modular, but our open source motorcycle frame should be able to accomodate different motors and different batteries, a controller based on arduino that can control any kind of motor recieving energy from any kind of battery would be awesome. I made a little illustration on that where X the Arduino and Y is Something =) that makes it accept different motors. You used for Y the syren25, could we place something else? something easy and cheap to assemble ourselves?



There are some people already working on an open source controller (OPEN BLDChttp://open-bldc.org/wiki/Open-BLDC), I was planning to contact them, but did not find the time yet because of the frame development.

hacky wrote:
I think that a very modular design is a battery that shows his own power through one or more leds (like compaq notebooks) and you can just slide in one or more batteries according to the distance or speed you want to drive.

That would be cool...then you could switch a button connected to the arduino, that loads a smoothing algorythim preset for that amount of batteries.

I am a product designer, I use a lot of 3D, what programs you use for that?

Henrique wrote:
Hi Hacky, very interesting that you mixed both of them.

hacky wrote:
I use a simple 1-wire serial connection to the syren to ensure that the bike doesn't fly off when it receives a simple resistance input.

I suspected you did that because the arduino itselft cannot handle all the resistance coming from the batteries...

No, I'll explain: The syren is a stand-alone motor-controller. It will control the power to the motor and has the batteries connected. The arduino is just a controller to control all other things. It sends serial numbers to the syren. 255 is full forward, 127 is stop and 0 is backward. The syren can also be controlled using a variable input voltage, but that can fluctuate. Imagine what would happen on a bike if the voltage suddenly raises a little. it would suddenly drive away!

hacky wrote:
I'm willing to share arduino code. It's even suitable for simple touchbutton-throttle operation by using a smoothing algorhytm.

That sounds awesome!

hacky wrote:
I am only not sure if it will be possible to make the motor modular. The controller should change together with the motor to account for the power-throughput.

I don't think we need to make the motor modular, but our open source motorcycle frame should be able to accomodate different motors and different batteries, a controller based on arduino that can control any kind of motor recieving energy from any kind of battery would be awesome. I made a little illustration on that where X the Arduino and Y is Something =) that makes it accept different motors. You used for Y the syren25, could we place something else? something easy and cheap to assemble ourselves?



Okay, you can make the controller like that, but the controller needs to have the power-throughput of the largest motor that can be attached. That mens it will be more expensive. Attaching a simple motor-controller to every motor would make the whole system cheaper, but exchanging a motor (with controller) will be more expensive.

There are some people already working on an open source controller (OPEN BLDChttp://open-bldc.org/wiki/Open-BLDC), I was planning to contact them, but did not find the time yet because of the frame development.

That is cool! I have no idea how to make my own motor-controller.

hacky wrote:
I think that a very modular design is a battery that shows his own power through one or more leds (like compaq notebooks) and you can just slide in one or more batteries according to the distance or speed you want to drive.

That would be cool...then you could switch a button connected to the arduino, that loads a smoothing algorythim preset for that amount of batteries.

I am a product designer, I use a lot of 3D, what programs you use for that?

In my job of visualization we usually get drawings (3D or 2D) from designers (buildings or products). We use only Autocad or 3Dsmax and photoshop to make the visualization. I like to use my wacom cintiq to draw stuff at home, but I can't really call it designing. For online realtime 3D (walkthroughs) I use quest3d or unity. They are both like game-engines, but able to export web-players.

I see it what you used the arduino for...cool that you have built it yourself. I found yesterday another open source motor controller project: The open Revolt project (ecomodder.com/wiki/index.php/ReVolt)

I think arduino is definitely a solid option, and appreciate your offer for sharing your code with us.

Our project is just in the start. So we need lots of steps to be accomplished before we can "turn the motor on".

Have you seen the Status page of the project? Do you feel like helping me release Version 0.1?

The idea is that if we have an open source frame, anyone can download it and modify it as they please...You good definitely use it for your personal moped, that's my wish too =).

hacky wrote:
hacky wrote:


In my job of visualization we usually get drawings (3D or 2D) from designers (buildings or products). We use only Autocad or 3Dsmax and photoshop to make the visualization. I like to use my wacom cintiq to draw stuff at home, but I can't really call it designing. For online realtime 3D (walkthroughs) I use quest3d or unity. They are both like game-engines, but able to export web-players.

the wacom cintiq is the dream of every designer, it is on my wish list! Cool that you work with game engines, sounds solid!