Modularity

One of the strongest concepts that are coming up from the discussion of the first phase of this project is modularity.

“In an electric vehicle, modularity can also help owners, to upgrade their vehicles once new technologies come to the market, Want a more powerful motor? Need new batteries? Just swap it. Want to hit the trails on the weekend? Exchange the wheels, take the second passenger seat out and go eat some mud.” quote from project status discussion

The Idea of a plug and play electric vehicle that can be highly customized by a community of designers and suppliers seems quite interesting to me. It will be good to find examples of hardware modularity that can help us in the development of a “hardware framework” to build our vehicle around.

Testing the velleman controller Part 2 - Video

I just finished correcting the configuration of the electronic components for our scale model.

I am very glad that it worked out! The motor accelerates when we turn the potentiometer and comes back to a stop when the “pot-meter” returns to “position zero”.

emoped-20090526-Electonics Test 01 from Henrique Monnerat on Vimeo.

Link to video

I am quite curious to what will happen when we start using big motors which we will actually be using in the future. Can we develop an open source controller for electric motors? Are there are people developing something like that??

It is probably wiser to use one of the existing controllers like the Alltrax Controllers but I would be quite curious to understand what makes up a robust motor controller.

Next Steps: Design the Laser Cut scale frame to contain all components (battery, pot-meter, motor and Board)

Testing the velleman controller

Quick update: Soldering was ok! Kees helped me with the wiring, we found out that the throttle Potentiometer (C) has to be placed between A and B. Back to soldering!

Soldering up the speed controller board

Last weekend I started building the Velleman K8004 DC to pulse Width Modulator which will act as the speed controller board for the throttle and the electric motor for the first test model. It’s my first soldered circuit board! I am very happy with =) It was easy an fun to do it, kind of “meditational” also. My soldering skills dated back to 1995 when I was building R/C Cars with my Grand father…so before starting the soldering I watched this really helpful film from the Make guys, a video tutorial on soldering, so good!

My goal is to use Arduino for controlling of the motor, to stay open source, but I still don’t know much about it so I decided to start with the Velleman board instead. I don’t know if it functions yet, but I just wanted to post the pictures of the process here, more updates soon.

New tools: Slowly but surely

Just got all I need to start building the DC to Pulse Board and to measure things for the Laser-cut part I will design to hold all the components together.

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