News

Last month we received what was one of our largest sea shipments of Crystalyte motors to date, large because there were so many new motor models and enhancements to get us excited. Here is the short summary:

Crown motors with Normal Spoke Flange

Previously, the large Crown motors had a pseudo straight-pull spoke design which meant custom wheel builds or even run of the mill spoke replacement was a great inconvenience. Well no more, they’ve now been retooled with a regular flange taking standard spokes, giving freedom to custom lace at will.

Narrower Crown motors

As well, we’ve received a narrower version of the Crown motor with a 30mm wide stator, which allows it to fit in a 135mm bike dropout with a 7-8 speed freewheel (Normal Crown motors are really for 1 or 3 speed freewheels). Although that also means less power and torque than the 40mm Crown hubs, it makes for a much more rideable bike conversion.

NSM and narrow SAW motors for folding bikes

We’re also introducing two new motor series designed for the special requirements of folding bikes with 75mm fork dropouts and small diameter wheels.  The Crystalyte NSM motor is the smallest direct drive hub we have seen, and is ideal for Brompton and Tikit conversions with 200-300 watt assist levels. The 20mm SAW motor is larger in diameter for better torque, power, and efficiency, at the expense of a bit more weight. Both come with 75mm axles that are machined with 8mm axle flats for a drop-in fit on Brompton forks.  

The SAW motor we also have stocked in a larger 20” wheel suitable for the range of Dahon folders. We will be building more dedicated kit packages around these smaller wheels for easy installation with Brompton, Bike Friday Tikit, and Dahon bikes, but for now have the motors themselves available for those doing a DIY build.

Unlaced with Options

Finally we’ve increased the availability of motors stocked unlaced, including front and rear H series motors and the Crown hubs as well. This simplifies those doing custom wheel builds for fat tire bikes or rim matching, and reduces shipping cost significantly for overseas orders.  

For all of these new hubs, we’ve created full 3-D CAD models and also characterized their performance behavior and put them on the motor simulator page accordingly.

NSM CAD	SAW20 CAD	TC30 CAD	TC40 CAD

Battery Bags

We’ve also got a good stock of the Crystalyte rear trunk bag as a battery enclosure option for the Naked Allcell battery packs. This as a built-in wiring harness with an on/off switch, so that you don’t need to rely on unplugging and plugging connectors, and has sufficient ground and side padding to keep the heat-shrunk packs protected.  

At the start of August, Justin and Anne-Sophie packed up a pair of electric Brompton bikes, some competition unicycles, and a small stash of clothes for what was nearly a 7 week world tour. This included joining the 17^th international unicycle convention in Montreal, touring through France, Germany, and Switzerland to meet many of our European dealers face to face, attending the Eurobike show in Friedrichshaven, the Interbike show in Vegas, and finally spending a good week in the UK with some of our English comrades in crime. 

So we’d like to publicly thank all those who made this such a great adventure. From Martin and Bobby for taming the beast at Unicon, to Philippe, Jean-Pascal, Andreas, Florian, and Reinhard for the accommodation through Europe. To Guillaume, Jules, and Tristan for such good company at Eurobike, and Stefan + the Radkutsche crew for the t-shirts and making our day. Miles you were a kind host with mind-blowing knowledge, and Steve it’s great to meet early pioneers. And finally to Ron, Tora, Paul, Ching, Wake, and everyone else at Interbike. We’ll hopefully see you next year.

A lot of other progress has been taking place at Grin in the past 2 months too, and if you’ve browsed around our store site lately you may have some clues to what is coming. So stay tuned as we’ll be filling this blog site with a number of announcements in the coming weeks.. 

Our Ebike Trip Analysis Software is now posted live on our main website in the online tools section. We've included a number of new features since the last announcement, including the ability to label different segments of your trip then upload the results so you can share a link to the graphs and energy usage data.  Take part in the full discussion here.

We're really happy to see where this is going. If you’ve been logging Cycle Analyst data from your ebike/EV trips and have interesting observations to share, then please let us know and send a link of the results. 

A number of people with modern bikes have been hesitant to add a torque sensing bottom bracket to their ebikes because it meant changing over their cranksets to a square taper model as well.

Well, at least there is one choice for a splined interface. The company NCTE has produced a torque sensor that has the same electrical specifications as the THUN devices, but which uses an ISIS spindle. We've got a 128mm spindle length model in stock for those with ISIS cranks keen to try it out. 

Needless to say we had a pretty fun booth display and demo ebike fleet at the Vancouver Maker Faire last month. Thanks to all who came out to pay a visit and support the creative DIY and maker scene in town.

This coming weekend is the annual VEVA Electrafest Show, featuring nothing but local electric vehicles, from little DIY e-scooters up to full sized commercial electric cars. We're not going to have a full booth presence, but Justin will certainly be there with the latest version of our weight sensing inline-motor electric longboard, and perhaps some other projects up his sleeve.

If you are in the Vancouverarea and have an ebike or EV project you want to show off, it's free and not too late to register for the show and include your vehicle in the mix! The event is at the Concord Pacific, just by science world, and conveniently not too far from our shop either. 

We’ve finished a significant round of enhancements to our online ebike spoke calculator application to better serve the needs of people lacing hub motor wheels.

• Dimensionally accurate real time drawing of the motor, rim, and selected lacing pattern, so you have confidence to see that the hub/rim choices are correct
• Measurement of the spoke angle at the rim to indicate possible stresses at the nipple and threads.
• Allowance of paired spoke holes. Many large diameter hub motors have spoke holes grouped in two rather than uniformly distributed, but there are few tools out there to help calculate the appropriate length.

Check it out. We've added a number of new motor sizes (like the Magic Pie3, Crysatlyte Crown, Heinzmann PRA etc.), and are open to add additional suggestions via the related endless-sphere thread. 

Also on the web software front, we’re making progress on a web application to take information saved from the Cycle Analogger device and view both your route and energy usage statistics through interactive graphs and maps, all within your browser window.

There is still a long way to go to hit all our desired features, but it’s worth having a look now if you’ve got logs of CA and GPS data and have been stumped on how best make use of it. Additional discussion is here. 

Shipping small parts from our shop in Canada to American destinations has always been a tad expensive, so we’re experimenting with using Amazon as a fulfillment warehouse better serve US customers. Currently all three of our torque arms are available now, with free shipping for amazon prime subscribers:

And if it works out well we’re start hosting other small Grin Tech items like our ebike lights and DC-DC converters too. 

The last few weeks we’ve been in the midst of a full inventory transition with some of our product lines, and we apologize to those who’ve had difficulty getting all their kit parts together. This is all wrapping up and there is good news to speak of for those who have been patient.

Grinfineon Controller: Proportional Regenerative Braking.

All of our motor controllers are now running a newer control chip with a customized firmware for proportional regen. We’ve done this in a way that requires no extra hardware. If you have a V3 Cycle Analyst, the regen control is mapped to the otherwise unused 0.0 to 0.8V throttle signal range, giving you full control of the braking force and regen current through the Cycle Analyst. Without a V3 CA, you can use a regular ebrake lever to activate regen, and then use the throttle to modulate the intensity.

We’ve also improved the LED behavior so that you can tell if the controller is operating in sensored or sensorless modes while running, and tidied up the total connector bundle. At the moment, the 20A and 25A controllers are all available with this firmware. The larger 35A and 40A controllers are still in the midst of firmware testing and revisions, but should be available shortly.

eZee 5 LED Console

The latest shipment of eZee kits also includes a simpler 5-LED console for those who don’t require the full details of a Cycle Analyst. This device has been customized for full compatibility with any controller that has a CA plug, whether from an eZee kit or not, and it includes a DC power plug for running front headlights too.

The top row of LEDs show the approximate battery voltage, while the bottom row of LEDs is controlled via the up/down buttons to set the ebike power level via current limiting, much like with a V2 Cycle Analyst.  With the 25A eZee controllers, 1 LED = 5 amps, 2 LEDs = 10 amps, etc.

Batteries

All our recent stock of higher capacity eZee batteries are using Japanese Sony V3 cells as standard. While the Samsungs have worked reliably, their cycle life at higher discharge currents left a little to be desired and we’re hoping the highly regarded Sony cells yield better longevity. 

For those who found 10Ah wasn't quite enough, but 20Ah excessive, we've also got the Allcell batteries stocked in a 48V 13Ah pack with power cells, and in 35V 15Ah with regular energy cells.