October 2007 Archives

My vision for the future of personal transportation involves an at-home solar-charging electric vehicle.  The vehicle would be fully electric, running off of affordable lithium-based light-weight high-capacity high-discharge batteries.  The vehicle charges overnight in a garage or near a parking facility.  The charging facility (garage or otherwise) has a bank of much cheaper flooded lead-acid batteries in which it charges by means of a building exterior (roof and sides) made of high efficiency silicon solar and polymer solar skin.  This allows for as free of energy as possible, only costing the driver vehicle maintenance.

    Well I talked to the guys at Oatley Electronics today about some of the more technical decisions i needed to make and have worked out a stylised diagram for the electrical side of the scooter:

The big question I have been asking myself since getting this car is how am i going to get power from the motor(s) to the wheels. It sounds simple in theory, but is not as simple in practice.  Below is a view of the car from underneath. There is a reasonable amount of room around the back wheels to fit motors but not really a simply way to get power to the wheels. Note: You can also probably see the mechanism that allows the car to be steered from behind (the long diagonal rod). I will be removing that as one of the first jobs as it is just getting in the way

So how does someone with little knowledge of mechanics or electronics learn how to make an electric car? I've been getting more and more excited about doing an electric car conversion the more I learn about them. However i won't be in the position to do one for the next couple of years when i finish my degree and can get a decent job. So, inspired by http://bjblaster.homedns.org/projects/electric_drive/bigredcar_mk2/, I decided that a good place for me to start was on a smaller scale. My first conversion will not be an ICE car it is a kids push car. I bought this little veedub styled push car off ebay for $80 and will be installing electric scooter parts to make the electric drive train