[Tesseract]

Originally Posted by ewert

Oh noes, no regen braking for Jr.? =( Any chance at all? No? Regen capability has been a big thing for me in figuring out which parts are possible choices ...
...
Do you foresee any chance of having a regen capable version, I'd definitely pay a bit more if could get regen too.

Regen braking with a series motor requires, at a minimum, a set of reversing contactors, which (unless you go with the cheap Chinese knock-offs) would cost a substantial fraction of the Jr.'s price.

And regen still can't be used with an advanced motor without destroying it, pretty much instantly. We haven't yet figured out a way to dodge that liability bullet, and that is by far the biggest obstacle. Well, regen with a series DC motor is also technically challenging, but dealing with angry people that instantly destroyed their motor and then blame our controller for it is not a prospect we much relish... Any constructive suggestions on that front are welcome, but they have to be realistic. Saying "make the customers sign a waiver first" is not constructive, btw.

EDIT: you should realize that in the real world - with ac controllers - regen maybe adds 10% to the range. If you can't get the range you need with batteries alone, regen is unlikely to make up the difference. I certainly wouldn't want to rely on it. Also, strong regen braking in any vehicle is potentially very dangerous, especially if the road is slippery from snow, ice, rain, mud, etc.. It's especially dangerous on a motorcycle.

[Darxus]

Originally Posted by Qer

Feeping creaturism.

Neat, thanks.

I once wrote a program that was pure feature bloat. It made it into a print magazine, the February 2001 issue of Linux Journal (issue 82). http://www.chaosreigns.com/code/dlkern/
At the time it was kind of obnoxious to manually download new Linux kernel source, and there it began. 14 command line flags, three (automatically detected) download methods, one of which wasn't possible....

Originally Posted by Qer

And then there's, of course, the web server: 1400 lines of code...

I had suspected that one
Crazy... technological advancement. I'm still feeling like you should be programming in assembler or logic gates.

Originally Posted by ewert

Regen capability has been a big thing for me in figuring out which parts are possible choices ...

Why? I got the impression there was very little (electricity) to gain from regen.

Originally Posted by ewert

...I require quite a bit of range ...

How much, how often?

Originally Posted by Tesseract

First a general comment, Darxus... I don't mind these sorts of questions at all - in fact I rather enjoy them...

I'm very glad to hear it.

Originally Posted by Tesseract

I am an unapologetic capitalist. I believe that if you design and build a quality product, sell it at a fair price, and support your customers that you deserve to be well-rewarded

I do not disagree with you at all. Although I think the words "deserve" and "right" might be a bit strong. Quality and fair price don't obligate anyone to compensate you for all your expenses. Perspectives on entitlement vary interestingly.

Originally Posted by Tesseract

If you don't believe the Soliton1 is worth the price we ask then don't buy one or do your level best to prove your point with an actual product, and not just words on an internet forum.

I agree again. And I have no reason to believe that the Soliton1 isn't worth your price. For people who don't enjoy spending a great deal of time and money blowing up electronic bits.

Originally Posted by Tesseract

Not in my opinion. I simply don't agree with the all-too-common presumption ascribed to open source projects that a group of amateurs working together can somehow do a better job designing complex hardware or software than one or two professionals working alone.

I have had too much contact with reality to presume that. Possible, but not appropriate to assume.

Originally Posted by Tesseract

Interesting... so your asking to see the inside of the controller was, indeed, an attempt at getting what you perceived to be the most valuable bits of our intellectual property for free!?!

Hmm. Yes. But that was not a direct causal relationship.
I spend a lot of time drooling at pictures like these: http://www.diyelectriccar.com/forums...&postcount=265
So sexy.

Originally Posted by Tesseract

Oddly enough, while my parts selection is somewhat valuable, yes, it's not all that important compared to the pc board and power bus layout, and those are not even remotely as valuable as the actual code that runs the whole shebang.

Neat, thanks. It was crazy to see a picture of an oscilloscope showing so much improvement on a controller just from adding a wire to shorten a ground path.

Originally Posted by Tesseract

Regardless, we don't give away our core IP for free. If someone goes to the trouble to buy a Soliton1 just to reverse engineer it, well, at least we got a sale out of the deal!

I don't know if it can be done, but you might want to look into making it more difficult to download and decompile your software. That part would certainly be covered by copyright, but....

Originally Posted by Tesseract

One thing that is perhaps being overlooked here is that just reverse-engineering the code won't automatically put a competitor on par with us - we have the gestalt, after all, and they don't.

Mm. Nobody else is competent to implement my own dream.

Although given a finished product, the Chinese are scary like that.

[JRP3]

As has been explained regen on series DC through the motor simply isn't worth the hassle and potential damage. Adding an external alternator or generator is possible. As to the benefits, I feel regen simply makes for a better driving experience, beyond the actual range increases. Instead of trying to coast up to a stop, possibly delaying and annoying traffic around you, you can drive like a normal person and still recover some energy. In hilly areas where I live I probably get more than 10% return from regen. It's also very easy to modulate the amount of regen with the throttle, you can even coast with a neutral throttle position.

[toddshotrods]

Originally Posted by Darxus

...I do not disagree with you at all. Although I think the words "deserve" and "right" might be a bit strong. Quality and fair price don't obligate anyone to compensate you for all your expenses. Perspectives on entitlement vary interestingly...

This thread is beginning to remind me why I sold my shop...

They're not suggesting that a collection plate be passed around the world and people feel obligated to reward them for their accomplishment.

Capitalism = If I accomplishment something of value to someone else, I deserve (United States foundation stone) and have the right (according to the law of the land, supported by the judicial system) to be compensated fairly for that person taking advantage of my hard work! Geez!

It's why people move to democratic, capitalistic, societies. They obtain, by citizenship, the right to prosper from their contributions when others take advantage of them. If no one does you have the right to be poor, whether you deserved it or not. The system works.

[JRP3]

Originally Posted by toddshotrods

The system works.

The concept is sound, how well the system is actually working is still open to debate

[markcycle]

Originally Posted by Tesseract

Regen braking with a series motor requires, at a minimum, a set of reversing contactors, which (unless you go with the cheap Chinese knock-offs) would cost a substantial fraction of the Jr.'s price.

And regen still can't be used with an advanced motor without destroying it, pretty much instantly. We haven't yet figured out a way to dodge that liability bullet, and that is by far the biggest obstacle. Well, regen with a series DC motor is also technically challenging, but dealing with angry people that instantly destroyed their motor and then blame our controller for it is not a prospect we much relish... Any constructive suggestions on that front are welcome, but they have to be realistic. Saying "make the customers sign a waiver first" is not constructive, btw.

EDIT: you should realize that in the real world - with ac controllers - regen maybe adds 10% to the range. If you can't get the range you need with batteries alone, regen is unlikely to make up the difference. I certainly wouldn't want to rely on it. Also, strong regen braking in any vehicle is potentially very dangerous, especially if the road is slippery from snow, ice, rain, mud, etc.. It's especially dangerous on a motorcycle.

I have to disagree, smooth variable regen on a motorcycle is not especially dangerous and in fact is less dangerous than using only the rear brake. I have been using variable regen with my BLDC motorcycle products for almost 2 years. The thing I like about regen is if the wheel stops spinning due to some slippery surface then the regen stops, hence no braking force. This at some level is anti lock in principle. I agree regen is worthless at extending range and have never seen more than 5% return but my customers love the feel of regen and makes the bike have a down shift feel that keeps the connection between ICE bikes and E-bikes. Also Regen extends the life of the brakes.

So in conclusion
Regen on a motorcycle is not dangerous if properly implemented
Regen does not extend range
Regen does improve the riding experience for my customers
Every customer asks for it and the customer is always right (as long as its safe)

Mark

[Qer]

Originally Posted by Darxus

Crazy... technological advancement. I'm still feeling like you should be programming in assembler or logic gates.

Well, even though it's good to have absolute control over the microcontroller in a real time environment, the readability of assembler is pretty non-existing. I mean, this is how you multiply two 16-bit unsigned integer numbers in C:

  uint16_t a = 10;
  uint16_t b = 20;
  uint32_t c = a * b;

I'll spare you the corresponding assembler dump, but just the code for the actual multiplication is 30 lines of assembler. And then you have to do it with registers which you have to manually assign, keep track of and make room for by pushing and poping registers you're currently not using. And so on, and so on...

That said, I sure wouldn't write the controller software in Python or Java. But then, I don't write ANYTHING in Python or Java since I think they're horrible languages. I did try with C++ (just classes, no STL or so) in the beginning, but when I did a performance test and realised that converting it to C almost doubled the performance, I skipped that. So C it is. By some strange reason I almost always end up going back to C no matter what I start with...

Originally Posted by Darxus

I have had too much contact with reality to presume that. Possible, but not appropriate to assume.

Linux, which I work with on my day job (don't worry, we contribute back), BSD, Sendmail, Apache, gcc etc are good representants for open source that works. Gnome, PulseAudio and some other projects with wildly escalating elephantiasis or projects that pops up, makes a cool SourceForge-page and then more or less grind to a halt, not so much.

Being able to live on open source typically means that you either need a very big customer basis (hello Red Hat) or that you use the open source project more or less as a empirical CV that proves that you know your shit. I could use the Soliton code to show off my skills, but EVnetics has spent pretty much money on developing the hardware so if I would give away the code it'd kill EVnetics and without EVnetics I wouldn't have a hardware to code for.

So yes, greedy capitalism's in da house, but it's greedy capitalism with bills to pay and I don't think a "Donate" PayPal button would cover it...

Originally Posted by JRP3

As has been explained regen on series DC through the motor simply isn't worth the hassle and potential damage.

I think what's convinced me that regen on series wound motors just isn't worth it is that the contactors you need cost a lot. Sure, if you're doing direct drive and need the contactors to reverse the motor anyway it could be worth it, but how many Soliton owners have chosen direct drive AND have a motor that's not advanced?

There's a few that are doing direct drive that I know of, but I think all of them have WarP's and since WarP's are advanced none of them would be able to do regen anyway. So the real question is if it's worth the time and effort for such a complicated feature that so few would use anyway? I'm leaning towards "Probably not".

[JRP3]

Originally Posted by markcycle

Regen does not extend range

I think that needs qualifying. On flat roads with relatively constant speed, true. When I'm going down a 2 mile long hill that would normally require me to put on the brakes, and instead I'm getting 50-100 amps back into the pack, false.

[Darxus]

Regenerative Braking is probably also useful coming down from one of those mountains where disc / drum brakes will fade to the point of uselessness and you fall off.

[markcycle]

Originally Posted by JRP3

I think that needs qualifying. On flat roads with relatively constant speed, true. When I'm going down a 2 mile long hill that would normally require me to put on the brakes, and instead I'm getting 50-100 amps back into the pack, false.

So on a 30 mile trip, what percentage Regen do you see, not peak amps back but total percent returned to the pack. My experience using the Cycle analyst is that I never see more than 5% regen on a motorcycle. Certainly a car will be better.