Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Kevin's Scooter(my first EV's competition or driving force)





As my artifact about my main topic, I'm writing about Kevin's Scooter. When I got my scooter, he also got one, and as we started to modify our scooters, we really began to push each other to go faster. While I chose to use a brushed motor, Kevin chose to go with a brushless motor.
Though our scooters shared the same base scooter, and batteries, that is where the similarities end.
Kevin had decided on the motor pretty early. The Turnigy 80-100 HXT is a 1/4 scale model plane motor, meaning that this motor is designed to make a model airplane that is 1/4 scale of the real plane fly. Two small controller attempts ended in flames, but showed the potential of this motor, with the scooter reaching massive speeds before bursting into flames.
This brought Kevin to his next and final controller, a Kelly KBL-48201, a much beefier, but much more expensive controller. This controller has specs in line with my controller(48v at 200amps), but is a brushless controller, instead of brushed. In order to use this controller, he had to modify the motor and place 3 hall effects sensors around it to convert this motor into a 'sensored motor' and make it compatible with this controller.
A couple days and a few machined parts later, and Kevin's scooter is operational. Both of our scooters are very compatable in power, though his would typically be downtuned further than mine was(while my scooter was running at 68%, he was running at 40% to have similar speeds). The brushless motor proved to have much more torque than my scooter, and made a very different noise. His motor and controller also has regenerative braking, meaning that he can slightly charge his batteries by slowing down, or using the motor to brake down hills.

Many people had questions, including "what is the top speed?," "what kind of range do you get?," and asking him about the motor hitting the ground(see video to see how close it comes). Some people gave suggestions to problems he was having with heat, and eventually the thread went into his next scooter project(which has since been discarded to build an E-Bike)

The information in this post came from Kevins original post on Endless-Sphere, with his permission.
Though I've already posted it, here is the video I referenced in this post.


No comments:

Post a Comment