News

This has been an awesome time for alternative transportation in Vancouver. Not only did we learn that non-car trips (biking, walking, transit) outnumbered private vehicle trips for the first time ever; cycling use in the city jumped another 20% last year, the hopelessly archaic Business Improvement Association has finally acknowledged that bike lanes are good for business, and the weather and turn-out for Bike to Work Week has been amazing.  We’d love to know exactly how much of a role electric assist is playing in that, but it’s no doubt a very large factor for some. 

Let’s not forget to celebrate all this at the wrap-up BBQ on Friday at Creekside Park besides Science World. The full details of the Cargo Bike Championship have been posted to the participants. It includes a race where you pick up more cargo on each lap and a host of prize categories, and should be good fun with nearly two dozen cargo bikes of all types in the mix.

For the categories of “Best Custom Built Cargo Bike”, and “Fastest Time with Electric Assist” we’ll be awarding winners with their choice of:

• A) A Cycle Satiator universal battery charger.
• B) A Cycle Analyst and front/rear ebike lighting system
• C) A $300 Grin Credit towards the purchase of an eZee conversion kit, or
• D) A $200 gift certificate for anything at Grin

For all the other categories we’ll be giving away gourmet popsicles from our friend Johnny, who’s been making and selling unbelievably tasty cold treats from his mobile trike:
https://johnnys-pops.com/

Because of this event, we will be closing our shop early on Friday at 4pm so that all our staff can participate. To our local customers and friends, we hope to see you there too!

The classic V2 Cycle Analyst series hasn’t seen a firmware update in several years, and it’s time we fix that.  For anyone with a V2.3 Cycle Analyst, we’ve now got two more firmware options that you might like, both featuring the battery state-of-charge (SOC) icon previously only available with the V3 devices.

The first is a special Marine Firmware that we developed for a Dutch dealer. This trimmed down code is ideal for anyone using the V2 CA as a power monitoring device in applications where there is no need for speed and distance tracking, just watts, amp-hours, volts etc.  The Auxiliary Potentiometer Input has been re-purposed as a temperature input for thermal monitoring if desired too.

Main Screen showing Amp Hours and Battery SOC Icon	Amp-hours toggles to temperature readout if enabled	Display of recharge percentage and recharging Ah

The second firmware update is a general purpose V2.4 release for vehicle usage. To a first order, this is very much like the V2.3 CA code with the addition of a battery icon, but there are many changes in the back-end and setup menus too which should be appreciated, including better rejection of spurious speed readings if the spoke magnet and pickup sensor become misaligned.

You can update any of the V2.3 Cycle Analyst devices (But not V2.25 and earlier) using the same software tool and programming cable as a V3 CA, as explained here. This update will reset your total life cycle statistics, so before reflashing be sure to write down your total Amp-hours, Distance, Battery Cycles, and other custom settings so that you can re-enter those values later.

So if you have an inkling to try out the latest, please load the code above and send us your feedback.

There are few things we love more than riding around Vancouver hauling stuff on electric cargo bikes; turning heads and getting high fives and thumbs up while shuttling goods back to our shop at Grin. So we were smitten to see that Vancouver will be hosting it’s first every Cargo Bike Championship on May 29th, right at the end of Bike to Work Week, courtesy of Modacity and HUB. Read about it right here.

What’s a Cargo Bike Championship exactly? We don’t really know, but we figure it’s going to involve some kind of informal cargo hauling contest, some kind of vehicle rally, some kind of judging, and of course prizes! On that front we’re going to be sponsoring some very big awards, like Satiators and Lumenators and perhaps even a full conversion kit. We’ll update on the details as they materialize.

In the meantime though, if you ride a cargo bike of any kind here in Vancouver, whether for transporting kids or your full suite of work tools, then come help us to showcase this other side of utility cycling. Modacity is looking for participants to register their bikes by May 18th, so get your details in and lets make this a great little rally. It's timed to coincide with the wrap-up BBQ at creekside park from 4-7pm, where there will be tons of cyclists gathered and free foodstuff too. 

Last year around this time we got our Torque Arms listed and stocked at Amazon for faster and cheaper shipping to US customers. Well we can now add to the mix the Grin Lumenators Lights, USB Power Adapter, and Cycle Satiator Charger too. So if you're after just one of these items and are in the United States, then you should find Amazon can deliver it to you quicker than we can here in Canada. 

In our first community event of 2015, we’ll be participating in the BC Sustainable Energy Association’s (BCSEA) electric vehicle faire, taking place this Friday evening at Science World from 5:30-9:30pm.   This is being promoted as an opportunity to learn about EV’s, meet local EV businesses, and test ride any number of electric vehicles. Additional information is here:

BCSEA Page: https://www.bcsea.org/bcsea-vancouvers-electric-vehicle-fair-2015
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BCSEAVancouver

So come on out, it’s not free but it should be worth it. We’ll be there to balance out the heavy presence of commercial electric cars with a full suite of electric cargo bikes, trikes, folders, and longboards, all available to test riding.  

And if you do have a nice homemade electric bike or other PEV that you’d like to show off, it’s not too late to sign up as an exhibitor. Please either contact us or BCSEA directly to be a part. You can help bring awareness to the massive impact that ebikes can have as a viable transportation option.  After all, you don’t need 4 wheels, a roof, a trunk, and 2000lb of steel and batteries to get around town and have fun doing so.

We’ve recently changed how ebike conversion kits are presented on our website in a way that hopefully makes it easier to find the best option for your bike. At the center of this is a new conversion kit summary page that highlights the key features of every Grin kit and the applications and bicycle types where they shine.

Our mission is always to create conversion kits that use universal standards and interchangeable components, and address interesting niche applications that aren’t well serviced by other “one size fits all” systems.

On the new kit front, you’ll now see two dedicated Brompton specific packages based around the Crystalyte NSM and SAW20 hub motors. We’ve customized the cable lengths and controller / Cycle Analyst mounting brackets to fit neatly on these unusual bike frames, had the motor axles machined with a 8mm axle flats and a 75mm length to be a drop in fit with the Brompton forks, and even made custom 8mm mini torque arms too. No fork spreading or dropout filing required, these kits are ready for primetime, and feature the same upgrade options of PAS and Torque sensing pedalec control as our other systems.

Have a look at the Brompton Kit info page where we’ve explained the options and compiled a detailed installation guide with plenty of photographs and pointers on how to put things together right. This is our first time preparing a kit install guide in many years, and we’d welcome any feedback as this will become a template for other conversion kit installation pages soon to come. 

We’ve got a nice update for those like doing things a little bit custom. The high performance V2 eZee hub motors have only traditionally been available as part of a complete built up wheel, laced with a rim, tire and tube, which added a lot of wasted expense for those wanting a different diameter or rim type.  Well we had a recent shipment arrive of pure unlaced eZee motors both front and rear, permitting eZee motor systems in a custom wheel build.

Included in these unlaced motors is a new fast 350 rpm winding, which will help 16” and 20” wheels get up to a decent road speed without the need for a high voltage battery. They’re a bit quicker than the normal 300 rpm motors that are in the 20” eZee kits, and have been added to our simulator page too.    

Custom Builds

To facilitate the purchase of custom built wheels, we’ve also created a new part on our store site that lets you select any available hub, spokes, and rim option from a dropdown menu. That enables you to specify the best hand-laced motor wheel for your project rather than relying on stock kits.

A Suitable Fat Rim

One of the rim options you’ll see listed is a 65mm wide Weinmann rim for fat tire bikes. With the recent updates to our spoke calculator it’s much easier to figure out the optimum lacing and dishing strategy for a fat tire build and these particular rims have a close enough left and right hole offset that they can work well with most motors.  

If you are doing a custom fatbike conversion, the best approach is to select a rear hub motor and use this on the front fork of your bike for a front wheel drive. Most fat bike forks have a 135mm dropout width, the same as a standard rear mountain bike hub. 

Well who would have guessed that the improved spoke calculator we put online last summer has been used to make over 75,000 spoke length calculations! We imagine only a small fraction of those turned into laced up hub motors, but it feels good to see our tools get put to such good use.

We've now wrapped up the the second phase of this project to include a dimensionally correct cutaway edge view of the laced motor so that you can see the effects of dishing, spoke hole offsets, and even of lacing the spokes with the spoke elbows inside or outside of the motor flange. We're trying to turn this into the ultimate wheel lacing resource for ebike enthusiasts and welcome any additional feedback. Have a look and play around!

Under the calculator results are full descriptions and explanations for the various fields, and we've updated all the hub motors in our database to include the offset from the flanges to the axle center for dishing considerations.

One of the key issues we wanted to illustrate was the importance of having the spoke elbows on either the inside or outside of the hub flange in different scenarios. This can be a significant consideration when lacing hub motors which often have spoke flanges spaced much closer together than a normal bike hub. We also wanted to make it easier to let people do hub lacing into Fat Bike rims which tend to have large offsets between the left and right holes, and included a simple "swap spokes" button to gain better triangulation.

Hey guys and gals, check it out:

We've completed what is surely the first online lithium battery charging simulator, with accurate renditions of the constant power, constant current, and constant voltage charge regimes. With this tool, not only can you see just how long it will take to charge a given battery type using the Cycle Satiator, you can also figure out the exact voltage profile for partial charge levels, and then download the resulting profiles right to your Satiator Charger.

We're hoping that this takes some of the mystery out of designing custom charge profiles for your battery and encourages you to produce partial charge routines to enhance your pack's longevity. With good management you can often make your expensive lithium battery pack give 2-3 times as many discharge cycles as it would with the stock generic chargers, and have the satiator handily pay for itself just on reduced battery replacement costs alone.