News

After giving radio interviews this week on CBC's radio Canada and On the Coast, our Anne-Sophie is gearing up for a full slide-show presentation of her 4600km unicycle journey across south America this Saturday evening at the Rio Theater. It's part of the Vancouver Mountain Film Festival and seats are still available for this and many other tales of adventure if you're looking for something to do on this first-ever family day long weekend.

Some Web Maintenance

Several people have noticed that our website has been occasionally unavailable in the past 24-48 hours. We are making a number of changes to the back-end with some updates resulting in a bit of downtime. So rest assured that everything is OK here and we are looking forwards to having some nice improvements to show for all this work fairly soon.

For those who've been waiting, the remaining production batch of 72V capable 40A infineon controllers arrived last week and is in great supply. We hope everyone had a good holiday and have just a few small things to mention to start the year:

More PAS Sensor Mount Options

The split-disk PAS magnet rings have been a great convenience for those installing pedal assist systems on DIY ebikes without needing to take the crank off, but they only work with square taper bottom bracket spindles. For those with external bearing bottom brackets using ISIS or other splined standard, we now have a magnet ring option from King Meter that attaches directly to your small chainring instead. This works with 64mm 4-bolt and 74mm 5 bolt inner spiders, and comes with the universal CA3 compatible PAS pickup.

LED Rear Lights

We're now making the popular 8LED rear ebike lights available preterminated with a DC power jack, so that they are plug-and-play compatible with our Anderson Powerpole Tap. This makes wiring up your rear lights almost as easy as the front lights (which just plug into the Cycle Analyst). We will continue to offer the non-terminated version for those who want their lights hard-wired and/or who want to take advantage of the 3rd signal wire to control the flash mode.

Stokemonkey Install Tools

This isn't much, but we have both crank puller and chain breaker tools available for those installing a Stokemonkey drive on their cargo bike. We'll soon have large gear pullers for opening hub motors, and some other ebike specific repair and install hardware available.

Tidy Wiring Kit

There are a few tricks to making a DIY ebike looks as neat and professional as a turn-key ebike, and most of them center around wire and cable management. With proper use of spiral wrap (to bundle cables together), Velcro sleeves (to cover and protect connectors), and zip ties to secure it all to the frame, you can turn a rats nest frankenproject into a pretty clean machine. We've put together a 'WireRouteKit' to help people straighten their mess.

These items are listed on the Wiring Accessories section of our store site, and we will have them listed with the conversion kits shortly.

We're currently running the first small-scale production run of EdgeRunner cargo bikes featuring a freewheeling right side drive Stokemonkey setup (Renamed Cycle Stoker in 2014and are open to sales to early adopters. Priority will be to customers local in BC, although keen technically minded folks elsewhere are free to apply too.

This bike has all the benefits of the original Stokemonkey for cargo and passenger hauling, with the further bonuses of:

• 1) Integrated torque sensing proportional pedal assist, via strain sensors and a V3 Cycle Analyst
• 2) Single right side chain with freewheeling crankset, so the motor can run independent of the pedals.

Combined with the Nuvini CVT hub on the back, the result is a seamless mid-drive system that can change gears on the fly and under load. The introductory price of the complete bike without battery is $3295, with any of the 36V and 48V battery options being well suitable.

The Twist Battery Rail we made for the electric EdgeRunner bikes has been updated to work both with the original ER frames, the new 2014 frames, and the Big Dummy frames as well. With this rail you can fit the flat eZee battery on the seatstays and for a tidy look under the deck, and we're making them available as a stand alone item on our site.

We sold out of the original eZee hub motor EdgeRunner bikes some time ago with the exception of the Mocha colour of which there are 4 remaining. The geared hub motor option is simple with plenty of torque, but we need the floor space and are offering a special on these last Mocha coloured ebikes at 20% off.

Want to integrate all the advanced V3 Cycle Analyst features with an older controller that only has a V2 CA style plug? We're now making a simple CA V3 Adapter Module that splits out the 6-pin CA3 plug into separate throttle, ebrake and CA connectors. This not only enables the Cycle Analyst to run your throttle directly, it also allows the CA control regenerative braking whenever the CA's throttle output drops below 0.5V.

The 15% discount on GRIN products for people who didn't go out shopping on Black Friday is still going until the end of this weekend, right up until we get to the shop on Monday morning.

Those after torque proportional pedal assist systems now have a new plug-and-play option available. The bottom bracket sensor from TDCM uses novel geometry to measure the backwards chain force on the cranks rather than the spindle torque in order to sense your pedaling force.

This enables it to sense both the left and right pedal effort, giving a more immediately responsive PAS system at a much lower cost than magnetostrictive torque sensors. On the other hand, it is not as accurate at measuring human watts as the THUN sensor, and the installation is a bit more complicated as well.

We have the TDCM units custom made to run directly off the 5-pin V3 Cycle Analyst plug just like the THUN sensors, and have these new pedal sensor options available in the CA Parts page in 114, 120, and 128mm spindle lengths. The TDCM is a better option if the main goal is proportional pedalec assist, while the THUN unit is best if accurate human power output is needed, or if the chainline is not perpendicular to the legs (e.g. recumbent bikes)

We have been working for some time with AllCell to produce a custom frame-bag mounted battery pack using their unique PCM material both as a structural support for the cells, and as a means to keep the pack temperature under check. This is still progressing, surely, but in the meantime we're happy to offer their standard rectangular 36V 20Ah and 48V 20Ah batteries as an option for all of our kits. With a full 20Ah in the tank, these offer a nice high capacity choice for cases where the 10 and 14Ah eZee packs won't go the distance.

While these packs don't have a rigid enclosure or mounting hardware, they can fit inside regular trunk bags OK and offer a great long range battery choice with USA warranty and support.

And while we were skeptical of the claimed benefits of the PCM material, there is no doubt in our testing that it does effectively keep the pack temperature rise clamped at about 40 degrees Celcius. The graphs below show a direct comparison of the eZee flat pack and an Allcell pack we had assembled in the same geometry, under a steady high current (28A) discharge test.