POC

This afternoon I got bored and rigged up 1/4 of my batteries to an old scooter one of my room mates had in the garage. The motor controller on the scooter was dead, but the motor still worked, so I rigged up a sketch "tap-to-go" rig, which is exactly what is sounds like: I simply connected the motor straight up to the batteries... sparks flew everywhere, but I was under way! I quickly melted the entirety of my leads and walked the scooter back home. I then remembered the brushed motor controllers I'm going to build my charger out of... 15 minutes later I was back on the road, this time with a toggle switch connected to the "enable" line of the controller. all or nothing was the name of the game... I rode about 5 miles and hadn't depreciably lowered the battery voltage, but I had sufficiently overheated the motor controller (I didn't install a heatsink or a current limiter or really anything else for that matter), so once again I limped back home. Every couple of minutes the motor controller's built-in overtemp would kick in and disengage the motor; eventually I got back home with the batteries still at about 80% of full charge... so it's looking like 5 miles being 20% of 25% of the batteries is going to give me about 100 miles range. Of course my bike will weigh more, but the motor and controller will be more efficient... but apples to oranges I might be able to get the 100 mile range I BHAGed from the get go.

My stallion: