Post-Maker Faire Update

This past weekend, I went to the World Maker Faire in NYC, along with a group from MITERS, and I brought my scooter.  I arrived at MITERS the night before we left, and spent the time making some last minute modifications to the scooter.  I found that even with the addition of a rear fender, I could not ride comfortably through wet conditions, since the front wheel would sling water into the  only partially enclosed battery box.  To make the battery housing more waterproof and also a bit more structurally sound, I plated most of the outside in 1/16" aluminum plate fastened with 4-40 screws tapped into the frame.

Many sleepless hours later, lots of vehicles and things appeared at the MITERS booth.  Some tesla coils and other projects showed up later:

A track was set up for a modified power wheels race, but Tinykart and the Chibikarts got to do some laps as well, and competed as experimental entries in the races.

I took the scooter around the track as well, and, unsurprisingly, found that it is terrible at going around sharp turns at high speed, to to its high center of gravity and large turning radius.

When it was time to pack up the booth, we decided to stack Hexarideable pod on top of Tinykart, so we could roll the pair of them to the van.  This assembly was then stacked on top of a push cart with casters, and tethered to the back of my scooter.  I then used the scooter to tow the vehicles through the crowds to the van.  As it turns out, trying to sustain very low speeds seems to be hard on the motors, and I managed to burn out another CIM, despite my conservative use of the throttle.  Strangely, earlier I used the scooter to pull around 200 lbs of load, made up of a large person on a longboard and a load of groceries, and the scooter handled it okay.  The only difference was that I did not have to accelerate the person from a standstill.  It might be time to enable the current limiting on the Kelly.