Justin Lemire-Elmore

It was sad news that we heard Sheldon Brown had passed away on Feb 3rd of this year. For anyone who has even casually searched the internet for technical information on bicycle systems, from seemingly obvious compatibility questions that no one seems to answer (like "can you use an 8 speed shifter with a 7 speed freewheel") to obscure details on internally geared hubs, Sheldon Brown's website would turn up like a resource beacon in a World Wide Web that is increasingly dominated by marketing and commercialism.

When we finally found a manufacturer of Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries that met our requirements for an ebike-ready battery pack last fall, we fairly promptly placed a large order. The original expected arrival was at the beginning of January, but that has faced several holdups, and due to paperwork delays overseas it missed the last boat before the Chinese New Years holidays. We will post details only after they arrive, and from now on we will be following our earlier practice of not mentioning pending orders of new products until they have arrived and been tested to meet our specs. Sorry to all those who had their hopes up for these batteries to be in by now.

You would think looking at the projects page that we haven't built an ebike in 3 years, or from the troubleshooting page that the only thing to check is the throttle and hall effect signals on a motor controller. Fortunately, the winter season tends to encourage staying indoors, so the ball has started rolling on web updates again. The Events page has seen some new additions and be prepared to see projects like the following featured soon enough:

We've conned two more idealistic youths to join our little operation in Vancouver. Alison Corrall (UBC Eng Phys, 2005) is on board to initially design and produce custom bags, enclosures, and mounting hardware for ebike battery packs, while Mark Stephens (UBC Electrical, 2007) is designing a series of DC-DC based ebike lighting systems and keeping the Cycle Analyst production line flowing.

We have a number of spare hub motors that we have decided not to stock for various reasons and have them available for clearance. These include small geared hub motors from Tongxin, the slightly more powerful geared hubs from elebike, and finally the latest 500W direct drive hubs that are sold by Golden Island Machinery.
January Update - The front Tongxin motors have sold out. All that we have remaining are two rear units, they have 135mm axles but the motor is centered, so at most you can fit a 3 to 5 speed freewheel.

Throughout the year we have been sampling hub motors from a variety of different manufacturers aside from Crystalyte in an effort to continue offering the latest and best electric bicycle conversion parts. One of motors that stood well apart from the pack is a new 400 watt geared hub motor from the eZee bike company. Our first large shipment arrived last week and the system is available now as part of a complete kit package with a 37V 10Ah lithium battery pack.

Let mosfet failures in 72V Crystalyte controllers be a thing of the past! We sent Crystalyte a batch of IRFB4110 mosfets to incorporate into a custom run of 72V motor controllers capable of 40A and even 50A current levels. These mosfet transistors have 1/3rd the ON resistance of the original 4710's used in previous 72V controllers and so are far more tolerant of the large motor currents in high voltage setups. As well, the stock 72V controllers now use IRFB4310 mosfets, which have over 40% less internal resistance than the original transistors.

January Update - The modified 72V controllers sold out in no time. Our next batch isn't due to arrive until March as well. However, the stock 72V 40A controllers with the IRFB4310 mosfets have been holding up just fine with most 72V arrangements, so unless you really need 50 amps, then the standard 72V controller should be fine. We have modified the Low Voltage Cutout on these to 27V, and have also added a waterproof conformal coating to the circuit boards as well. 

One source of frustration with the hub motor disk brake setups has been that the threaded disk adapters have a bolt hole pattern that doesn't match the standard for disk rotors here in North America. If you wanted a larger size rotor or a specific disc you were flat out of luck. Well, we have now had a local CNC machinist produce a custom batch of threaded adapter plates with an industry standard 44mm Bolt Center Diameter (BCD). These can be screwed onto any threaded side cover, or even bolted directly to non-threaded side covers, to bring disk brake compatibility to your vehicle.

The feedback from customers using our higher rate NiCad batteries from Elegance has been quite positive, and we are now offering these as loose tabbed cells for people wishing to build their own custom battery packs. This way it is possible to arrange the cells in any desired layout to fit the geometry of your particular vehicle. We stock Thermistors, wide heatshrink tubing, and appropriate charge and discharge connectors for those doing a custom battery build.

As well, we are also offering some high capacity R/C grade Lithium Polymer cells, battery management system (BMS) circuits, and lithium chargers, for those who want to build the lightest pack possible. These cells are less than half the weight of an equivalent energy A123 battery, and are also capable of impressive charge and discharge currents. The 6Ah cell is rated for 36 amps, and the 4Ah cell can handle up to 60A.

The Hub Motor Dynamometer was upgraded over the summer to produce load torques of up to 40 Nm and has been busy characterizing a variety of different hubs. At the moment we have added the 500 Watt motors from Golden Island Machinery, as well as the very similar looking motor being touted by FalconEV. Expect to see additional geared motors put up on our motor simulator in the near future once the model is refined to include mechanical gearing losses.