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My quest for a perfect hybrid vehicle
Hm, upgrades.
One of the problems we’ve been having from the start is that the motors I used were recycled from a couple of electric scooters and not only they are kind of weak, they are also unequal: one is 200W nominal and the other 240W. This wasn’t too apparent until recently when we implemented regenerative braking, […]
DiffTrike mechanical drawing
October 13, 2014
With some people wanting to build their own crazy trike / kart and due to popular demand, I’m posting here the current design and measures of our proof-of-concept vehicle. Obviously, this is not an engineering blueprint, and anything you build based on this information is your responsibility alone – don’t blame me/us if you break […]
Posted in: DiffTrike, Fabrication
We made the news!
September 23, 2014
We made the news!!! Here’s Portuguese television channel 3 (“SIC”)’s coverage of the event, with a 3 second apparition of the DiffTrike at timestamp 1:39. Plus, the national radio “Rádio Renascença” also promoted the event and interviewed me in studio about the project. My 20-second promotion spot can be heard on that page; an 8-minute […]
Posted in: DiffTrike
Off to the Faire!
September 22, 2014
NOTE: THE Lisbon Mini Maker Faire 2014 IS NOW OVER. THIS IS A POST-POST. 🙂 The Trike is finally ready for show time. Please have a seat and take a smooth ride… So I packed it up on my car and went off to the Maker Faire. Once we got there, a lot of people […]
Posted in: DiffTrike, Motivation
Integration Jam Session
September 21, 2014
Njay got the burned bridge rebuilt, tested, and “burned-in” for an hour at 10Amps, so we got together again to finish integrating the system. This time with the 500 kbps I²C bus between the RasPi and the Power Bridges, so that the link is loud and clear. Njay was afraid that such high speeds would […]
Tuning out the glitches
September 20, 2014
WE ARE AT THE FAIRE RIGHT NOW! 🙂 JOIN US! Meanwhile we’ll keep posting the story behind the project… Me and NJay finally got together for a hacking jam session to find out what the heck is going wrong with the I²C comms bus between the RasPi and the Power Bridges. This is where his […]
Vroom vroom
September 19, 2014
ATTENTION: THE Lisbon Mini Maker Faire 2014 OPENS TO THE PUBLIC TOMORROW, SATURDAY. GET YOURSELF REGISTERED ONLINE AS A VISITOR SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO WAIT IN LINE AT THE VENUE. IT’S FREE OF CHARGE, BUT YOU HAVE TO REGISTER FIRST. And now, back to our soap opera. 🙂 The time has come to finally […]
Communications test, system bring-up
September 18, 2014
So, the hardware was finished and basically tested. Time to go for the software and get all this stuff to actually do something together. 🙂 I had to spend some time updating my motor “device driver” module to be compatible with Njay’s new power bridges. I took my “latest and greatest” version (which had been […]
New wiring, power test
September 17, 2014
Vnevoa: Due to the new I²C communications bus scheme, I had to make new cables to connect the Raspberry Pi controller to Njay’s power bridge controllers. This cable is a simple “Y” shaped common bus made from CAT-5 network cable. The network cable is cool for the job because it’s already got 4 twisted pairs […]
I know why the drivers heat up
September 16, 2014
Njay: I think I know what warms up more in the drivers. It must be the transistors that pull the N-FET up (to turn on), Q3 and Q8 in the schematics. When it’s ON, pumping current into the capacitor that is the MOSFET gate, is dissipates a lot of heat because it is being fed […]
October 22, 2014
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