Robot land has an annual car-and-other-vehicles show. Last year I brought the hybrid car powertrain go kart, but this year the kart's geting some upgrades (stay tuned), so I brought the electric tricycle instead.
The trike has been hanging from a miters wall unused since 2019. The last time it was ridden, someone crashed it into a curb and bent the head tube inwards, so it needed some work to get back into a rideable state.
Somehow it's been ~11 years since I built the tricycle - looking back at the blog to jog my memory, this was one of my first big projects at miters, one of my first projects using a mill and lathe, and the first thing I ever designed in Solidworks. It's a miracle it worked.
Here's the trike pulled down from the wall. The battery cover broke ages ago so the battery is strapped in with tape. Most of the wires are held together by duct tape. The brake and shifter cable housings are frayed, and 5th gear sounds super crunchy. And that head tube angle...
First order of business was to take it apart and do a little inspection and de-grunging. I'd forgotten how much mileage the trike got - there was period of time in undergrad where it got ridden once or twice a week, and it shows in the amount of chail lube and dirt caked onto everything:
The shifting wasn't working well, so I pulled the chains and Shimano gearbox:
The spur gear differential was one of the more complicated things I'd machined at the time, and it was... a learning experience. At the time I didn't know that I should never trust communal mills to be trammed (or how to tram a mill, for that matter), so the bores for the six shafts that span across the differential aren't very perpendicular to the end plates. As a results, the differential was super finicky to assemble and would bind up if the fasteners were tightened in the wrong order. Also apparently I hand't learned about chamfers either - those corners sure are sharp.
The turnigy 80-100 motor Shane donate to the cause was still working fine, but the position sensing and motor control setup was never great - I used a Kelly KBS brushless controller plus one of Charles's external hall effect sensor boards that measures flux leaking through the OD of the rotor. The Kelly controllers aren't great at driving low inductance hobby motors, and would periodically fault when pushing the trike hard. The external hall sensors weren't great either, between the wires falling off, the hall sensors mysteriously dying, the sensors rubbing the outside of the motor, and the timing vibrating out of alignment:
The original seat was a fiberglass monstrosity made of an old bicycle saddle, and years of newbie riders doing wheelies by accident had scraped the back edge off.
I found a perfect replacement for the seat in a bin at miters: an old Brooks B-67(?) double-rail saddle:
The curb incident bent the curved frame tube rather than breaking the weld with the head tube - I found this tube pre-curved on the miters floor, so it's made of some mystery-alloy low strength steel. I put a steel bar in the vice and did some gentle persuasion to get the steering back in alignment. I think the trike would handle better with a slacker head tube angle , but to change the angle that much I should really chop and re-weld the head tube.
I brought the pile of parts home from miters and did the rest of the repairs in the home shop. I got this cheap e-bike controller shaped VESC as a replacement for the Kelly - it's not higher power, but supposedly supported external SPI encoders, and a real encoder + FOC should be big improvement over the old hall sensor and trapezoidal drive setuop. It claims to be a 120A max controller, but I've only gone up to 75A so far - internally it's just got 6 TO-220 package FETs, so I'm probably not going to push it much further:
Turns out the controller didn't really support external SPI encoders. I wired up the encoder to the hall sensor cable according to a guide I found online, but it didn't work. Probing around with a scope, the signals looked nothing at all like SPI.
I cracked the controller open and immediately found the problem - there were RC filters and pull-ups/downs on the pins, for hall effect sensors. More probing around and I was able to figure out what modifications to make - the picture below shows the full set of changes I made to the drive. Initially I had solder bridges instead of the 100 ohm resistors, but I found that the SPI only worked when I was scoping the clock pin - I gues the tiny bit of capacitance from the scope probe was damping out some ringing edges. The 100 ohm resistors in series fixed everything.
I machined a holder for a diametric encoder magnet:
And 3d-printed a holder for an encoder breakout board:
The original plastic battery cover got destroyed ages ago, so I did some CAD - the other CAD - and whipped up a new one out of some thin aluminum sheet.
Yes, that's a frozen pizza box, thanks Jared.
I don't have any sort of bending brake, so the sheet was bent with a combinations of quick-grip clamps and aluminum billets.
I made a cover for the other side of the battery (which it never had before):
I replaced the brake and shifter cables as well - the originals never had ferrules on either the cable housing ends or cable ends, so they were fraying and in terrible shape. I did a test ride the evening before the show with a 50A current limit and didn't run into any issues. I turnued it up to 75A the morning before the show and didn't test, fortunately it didn't blow up despite some coworkers' thrashing it.
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I didn't take many pictures or videos at the show itself, but parking it next to a Ferrari wagon (I can't beleive that's even a thing) was entertaining. Lots of test rides with no issues other than a set screw coming loose once. It could definitely use a bit more motor controller - it's noticeably less peppy than before (with a 120A limit on the Kelly controller).
