Blog

Being well lit and seeing the road is especially important with the higher speeds on an ebike. Every now and then we get customers sending us pictures of crazy lit up contraptions, that not only keep them safe on the road, they also make us and I'm sure everyone on the streets smile a little too. We've decided to have a small promotional contest, with the best looking nighttime bicycle shot winning the first production unit of our next series of super bright ebike lights.

What's that super bright ebike light? It's been some time that we've been working on a new lighting series using the very best CREE XP-G high power LEDs. Our current prototypes have cracked over 1000 lumens of output, consume just 9.5 Watts of power and run off any input from 18V up to 100V, AC or DC. We are just gearing up for production and have the target release date for May 15th, and would like to give away the first one off the production line, to you perhaps. So send us your creatively lit-up bike pictures to info@ebikes.ca and you may end up with one very bright beacon to add to your lighting mix.

The submissions for our Cycle Analyst giveaway contest keep getting more and more interesting. For our April 30th winner, we decided to give the prize to Pascal Chollet for his BikeProof.ch solar bike adventure project, which he plans to ride from Switzerland all the way to Tibet. This is a fully engineered tricycle that uses 3 of our eZee hub motor kits and has a roof canopy containing a 220 watt solar panel. It can climb mountains and run off its own steam, and goes a long way to showing just what is possible in the realm of sustainable transportation. Pascal has a well documented website for his project, with many images and videosof the build. Bravo Pascal!









The next CA giveaway Prize will be decided on May 15th. Previous submissions will continue to carry forward, and any one with an ebike project that they'd like to enter the contest with, please send your conversion details and a bit of background to: ca.giveaway@ebikes.ca

There is tons and tons of stuff that goes on behind the scenes here which is pretty slow to percolate onto the webpage, but every now and then we get to something. We have just added our own battery discharge test data for all of the 36V packs that we offer on our site, from data collected over the past year with our own in-house computer controlled automated testing apparatus. This should help people better understand the differences in discharge profile and behaviour from the various chemistry and 'C' rate options. The specs for the individual packs can be seen below:


8AH NiCad


eZee LiFe


9Ah LiMn


10Ah LiPoly


14Ah LiPoly


Triang. LiFe


10A Curves Compared

We have also combined all of the 10A curves from each of the different chemistries and super imposed them on a single plot in the graph on the left. In this way, you can see side by side how they all stack up at different points in the discharge.

Our next Cycle Analyst prize goes out to Peter Wagner in Switzerland for his cruiser bike that demonstrates a remarkable level of craftsmanship. Fitting a battery nicely in the triangular frame area of a regular diamond frame bike is challenging enough, so it takes a special kind of dedication to fit this around the curved tubes of a classic beach cruiser, with a shaped sheet metal enclosure and quick release mounting mechanism. In addition to the superbly clean build, he also modified weak elements of a cruiser bike to better suit a fast electric assist, including thru-axle front suspension forks with disk brakes. You can read a full documentation of his project construction here.

At the end of last week we received and unpacked our spring 2010 sea shipment from Nine Continent. We decided in this order to try out their larger 273mm diameter motor series, hoping to find something comparable to the beefy and robust Crystalyte 5300 hubs for those needing maximum torque. What we received is a motor that has almost exactly the same performance specs as the Crystalyte 5304, but with 1/3rd less weight. This motor series uses narrower 16mm magnets, but this is offset by a much larger internal rotor diameter, producing a hub that's about 10% heavier and 10% more powerful than our Nine Continent 2800 series. We have named this the 1606 hub (16mm magnets, 6 turn winding) and have both a front and a single speed rear option available on our motors store page. We have modeled it for the simulator too.

It is well suited for scooter and cruiser bike projects, but is not as good a compatibility fit for mountain bikes as the Crystalyte 530X hubs which have an integrated disk rotor attachment and can accommodate a 7 speed freewheel.



As well, we have stocked up substantially in the faster wind 2806 and 2805 hub motors, and have now listed these as _FAST options for our Nine Continent kits. With the 2806 in a 26" rim, or the 2805 in a 20" rim, it is possible to reach 40 kph (25 mph) cruising speeds when using the standard and readily available 36V battery packs. There is no need to run at 48V just to achieve this performance.

It's not a fun job, but at least we now have solution to the regen overvoltage issue with our Infineon motor controllers. We have several hundred replacement Infineon chips that are programmed correctly, and now have to open up each controller and them remove and resolder a new Infineon chip to the PCB. We have now resumed sales of the controllers and Nine Continent kits as we carry on with this process, but it will probably be another 2 weeks until we have sufficient stockpile of fixed controllers to send out replacements for all those in the field.

Bruce Lau has brought out the first revision of the ebike audio amplifier (VeloAMP) originally released last fall. It has now been slimmed down to half the original enclosure thickness, while still maintaining the full 100 watts of stereo output power, 24-72V input voltage, a volume knob, speaker terminals, and an indicator LED. It looks slick, and delivers volumes. These units are in stock again for those wanting to play with loud and high quality sound systems on their ebikes.

We've just become aware of a firmware problem that exists in all of our current stock of Infineon motor controllers which can present a safety risk. Normally there is a high voltage regen cutout that prevents any regenerative current from flowing as soon as the pack reaches 58V. This is incredibly important, not so much to prevent overcharging of batteries, but to protect the controller and electronics against voltage spikes that can occur when the battery pack is disconnected. With no battery attached, the regen current has no place to flow and rapidly charges up the controller capacitors until something gives. Unfortunately, somewhere in the communication efforts to try and make a more easily 72V compliant controller, this protection was eliminated from our recent batch with 100V components. As a result, if you ride the bike without the battery, or your pack becomes disconnected while riding, then there is a risk of frying the controller mosfets.



At the moment, we have suspended sales of the controllers and the Nine Continent kits until we get this sorted and have the controller boards reprogrammed. For those that already have our Infineon in the field, this issue only applies if you received it in the last 2 months, and the Low Voltage Cutoff on your controller label shows 27V. If it shows 20V, then you are OK. We will be contacting those who have the newer controllers in order to work out getting replacements delivered. In the meantime, keep your battery attached!

We have numerous Phylion lithium manganese batteries from 2009 that are delivering on our test station more like 8-8.5 Ah instead of the 9-9.5 Ah that we normally expect. In some cases it is just a small cell balancing issue, while in other instances it is more of an intrinsic cell capacity problem. However, with so much we want to do this year, we don't have the time to go through and try and tweak all of these batteries. So instead we are offering these packs in pairs at a great combo price of $795 CAD or $750 USD for those who want an extra range kit at a good deal. You'll get two lithium battery packs and bags that can hang on either side of your rear rack, a 2A battery charger, and a 'Y' splitter cable that will let you combine the two batteries into a single controller. The combined capacity is about 17 Ah, good for a solid 60+km range, and with the current shared between the pair of packs, it is OK to run this battery combo with high current 35A or 40A controllers.

We had lots of interesting submissions for the Cycle Analyst giveaway prize, so thanks to all those who gave it a shot. Picking a winner was not easy, but in the end we chose an electric tadpole trike project by Andrew Thomas in Toronto. He built this almost entirely from scratch using industrial aluminum railing parts and spare bicycle components. The setup is fully suspended, and features a pedal trailer that hitches on the back for his son ride as a converted tandem. It's powered from a DC hub motor on the rear and has a full fairing for winter riding.







Next prize will be decided on April 15th, so please keep the submissions coming to ca.giveaway@ebikes.ca . We will carry forwards previous entries that didn't win.