Blog

Happy New Year everyone! We will be back to business as usual on Jan 3rd with some substantial product updates to launch in the coming weeks.  Hope you all continue having a great holiday break and we leave you with a little video treat from our staff Christmas party. 

At Grin we are wishing everyone a great remainder to the Christmas season, especially those who've been caught up in the wild weather and travel chaos! Our shop will be:

• CLOSED: Dec 23rd - Dec 28th, Jan 2nd
• REDUCED CAPACITY: Dec 29th - 30th 

Orders placed online will continue to get shipped out but expect some delays in email correspondence.

Simulator Vids

And on a totally unrelated note, we recently published the first 3 parts of what will become a lengthy tutorial series on how to make the most of our online ebike motor simulator tool. Not your typical holiday binge watching content, but surely riveting for a few people none the less!

It's a big day for pedal sensor options here at Grin.

ERider T17's

We've just received our first large shipment of the T17 model ERider torque sensors. These have the same convenient side cable exit as the T9 model (no need to drill your bottom bracket), but with two big advantages:

• They have 2 wire quadrature PAS sensing enabling the back-pedal regen features of the V3.2 CA firmware.
• In addition to the common 68 and 73mm bottom bracket sizes, they are also available in both 83mm and 100mm BB's to use with fatbike frames. So now no MATTER your frame type, we've got an ERider for you.

These sensors are in stock and available by themselves or with any of our conversion kits.

Budget Sensors:

For those who want torque sensing capabilities on a tight buget, we've aquired a large surplus stock of sensors made by the german company Fischer AG at a great bargain price. These are similar in electrical operating mode as the the THUN/NCTE sensors but with a more generous signal range.

• Single Side torque sensing (Measures right pedal torsion)
• 18 PAS pole pairs
• Center hole cable exit

We've had to snip and solder on a suitable connector and adapter cable to make them compatible with our kits. There is only a single size (68mm BB shell and 127mm spindle length) and installation requires drilling a hole in your bottom bracket for the cable exit. But if you are cool with that, the $60 price gives full torque control from a quality manufacturer at not much more than a basic PAS sensor.

Basic PAS with HiGo: 

And lastly we now have inventory of our two basic PAS sensors available with a 6-pin HiGo plug for direct hookup to the V5 Baserunner controllers. In our initial deployment they'll be used for activating back-pedal regen on the newly released TSM-A5 motor kits. 

The company TDCM has made some innovative motors over the years. For a while we carried their IGH motor that featured a 5 speed Sturmey Archer internally geared hub inside a direct drive motor. More recently they've introduced an even more powerful motor using a quick-release axle and featuring a torque sensing freehub body

It took us a while to develop a full kit package around this motor as it needed a custom controller, a custom torque-arm, and a customized CA3 firmware. But we've pulled it all together and are now releasing the TSM-A5 kit. Watch Robbie's summary in this video.

More detailed information including specs, user manual, CAD drawings etc. are on our Kit Info Page,and they can be purchased as part of a full conversion kit from our Ready-To-Roll Store page

This summer we actually had THREE people make prolonged stopovers at Grin while embarking on epic solar bike trips. We covered Mark Havran earlier this year with a Part3 Video. He's since continued all the way up to Alaska to catch the Northern Lights and and is now in Australia chasing summer sunshine while the days get shorter here. 

We then had one of our long term customers James visit, who's been criss-crossing america on a solar powered Elf ebike for almost as many years as we've been in business! 

And finally, a legend in the European Suntrip races, Stéphane Bertrand, has decided to do his own solo trip across both North and South America. He left from Montreal on a solar recumbent bike in August and was here in Vancouver 4 weeks later, ready to honor a debt to Justin from the 2018 Suntrip ride!

Stéphane has since progressed right down the coast and into Mexico, and you can catch more pictures of these travels on this Facebook page.

We just want to give a big shout-out to you three and everyone else out there using DIY ebike tech to explore all corners of the world, push both personal and technological limits. It is so very cool to see.  

Hey everyone we hope that you are all having a fantastic summer in between the various sweltering heat waves. We had some controller QC and supply hiccups starting this season that kept our noses to the grindstone. But things are mostly sorted out, with lots of good news to share:

G62 Hubs

Inventory keeps on trickling in, and an order from Bafang that we placed last October finally arrived this week. This includes their most powerful Fatbike motor, the G62, which will brought in to replace the G60 fatbike hubs.

The larger G62 motor has an wider motor stator and thick gear assembly to handle significant torque levels, and uses the higher amperage L1019 connector with a side-axle cable exit. This hub can seriously haul, especially with our Frankenrunner controllers at 90 phase amps, operating in a power domain we don't usually expect from Bafang. Torque arms are a must.

For fatbike projects needing a rear hub motor, this is the model to beat. We've got them available as ready-to-roll kits with downtube batteries, DIY kits with 3rd party batteries, and as bare hubs too, for both 170-175mm dropouts and 190-195mm dropouts. We also have spare gear assemblies for those who want to try welding the clutch and using them in regen capacity.

Here are the engineering drawings and 3D models.

MG62_170 Dimensional Drawing (101.74 kB)

MG62_170 3D Part File (8.34 MB)

MG62_190 Dimensional Diagram (100.61 kB)

MG62_190 3D Part File (8.26 MB)

They will be up on our motor simulator in the coming week.

We've had to fully discontinue production of our original LiGo battery modules after an impressive 8 year run. Key semiconducter chips used on our BMS circuit were simply no longer available for doing another batch. The last of our LiGo+ batteries are being potted in the coming weeks and all have been presold.

But despair not, we have a next generation LiGo module up our sleeves that we've been working on for many months. We're calling this the LiGo 10X, and are moving rapidly through the design and testing phase with a goal to be release ready by the end of the year.

We've published quite a few videos lately. This includes a new series on retrofitting parts onto factory ebikes. It's a line of questioning that we get asked about with increasing frequency but we struggle finding the time to explain things to people. So we hope that a a growing video series can help with that. So far we've got parts 1 and 2 released as we do some 3rd party hacks on a Radrunner fatbike.

We've also got an update on the 32 foot electric sailboat conversion Belle Ami, with Part 3 being filmed this weekend:

We were recently blessed with another visit from Mark Havran on his (for real now) round the world ebike trip:

And earlier had a bit of fun bringing a vintage dirtsurfer back to life in electric mode:

The ebike season is starting to get in full swing and we're glad to announce a roster of new staff here at Grin to help us cope with the anticipated summer demands!

We've got Miguel now assisting with front-end sales to help customers navigate their kit purchases. Elvis is bringing to the table years of CNC experience to ramp up the productivity of our machine shop. Constantin has several years of experience as a technician the ebike industry and is helping in our support and repair department. Sean has worked in electronics manufacturing and the creative arts and had taken the lead in our LiGo battery assembly. And we have two coop students too, Ryan in software engineering making improvements to our website and Sam is doing his first mechanical engineering coop on our shop floor.

So help us in welcoming this crew of new faces to our team!

And that's not the end. We're still looking for someone exceptionally qualified at doing email based tech support. If you've got a wealth of hands-on experience assembling and troubleshooting ebikes, familiarity with the Grin systems, are looking for a change of work, well we could have an option for you so drop us a line.