Something's not quite right with my e in ebike (part 2)

Huge push last weekend ... was it time to open up the motor unit ... not yet, but was getting close..

Lots more forum reading ... lots more ... lunacycles have a great knowledge base and forum over at electricbike.com (direct to bbs02 knowledge base).

Spent a couple hrs riding up and down street :) Clearly I'm a bike novice, not used to hearing and correlating issue sound.

Plenty of trial runs with changing gears, changing PAS levels... Managed to get into a consistent mode where I could always make the 'jumping' happen. The gear selection needed to be in the highest gear (8) and a reasonably high PAS level 8/9.

Leaving in gear 7 resulted in plenty of clean runs, but moving into 8 the problem came back.

Tried to make some video's, but I couldn't hold it still enough to see what was happening, just hear..

So what was the issue...

Main fix was aligning derailer gears! Clearly with motor it's more important for them to be perfect. With all the quick release of rear wheel it gear alignment moved enough to cause problem. So gears we're still changing after the auto gear selector had dropped the power and reengage, thus causing chain skip, which I'd not experienced before, this thinking motor skip.

This time, I spent a fair amount of time aligning the gears and also aligning the deraileur hanger - quick view it didn't look out, but it was slightly, so bend it back to true manually. These tutorials from Park Tool and RJ the Bike Guy are very helpful, and with my hanger only slightly out - manual bending with some grips, although tough, worked out enough for me.

Then spending the time aligning all the gears - more helpful park tool videos -  

 

Definitely recommend, going back and forth on the setting multiple time to turn them as best as possible since clearly with the motor it's even more sensitive.

With that complete, definitely the shifting was amazingly cleaner, could feel the gear selector working well and it was back to be a dream ride ... although 8th gear still caused a couple of chain slips during the couple miles of testing.

Lubed all the chain and gear set up, and yippee - all smooth now.

Amazing for me - was a great learning experience - gear alignment is important and recognition of audio chain jumping :) soooo pleased not to have to crack open the motor casing.

Funny thing also happened with support... I'd finally got desperate enough late Friday to raised a support ticket request with lunacycle.com. Support excellent as usual, Scott from Lunacycle got back to me on Saturday with a request to check my derailleur alignment lol - what a star - typical.

All is still not perfect with the throttle as it cuts periodically, usually at speed, so am thinking maybe it's just tripping a limit as once I disengage the throttle and re-engage, all works again ...

I don't throttle much, so will loot at that one another day.

Refactor - bike style

Workstand 

with all the work on the bike, I decided time to invest in a bike stand, starting to like the idea of being able to stand up, not having to worry about balancing the bike or rocking back and forth on the kick stand in order to spin front or read wheels.
That and now realising that I'm gonna have to pull the motor apart - the continual skipping when under torque has got me a little worried that I have some wear on the gears already (even though I think I'm just around the 400mile mark on the odometer).

looked for about 20mins and decied to give the buzzrack eco workstand (http://a.co/i7t1AGb) a try. Was one of the cheapest at $39.90, but I also liked the fact that it didn't have a clamp, just clever hook arrangement with the seat and seat post.

works great, needed to raise the seat in order to give it the leverage space and it doesn't have height adjust or tray for bits, but working great for me so far...

<< need to add piccy>>

Refactored handlebar today...

Another great find - sticky tape :) Silicon self fusing tape (http://a.co/buowzTg). With constant pain of peripherals moving on the handle bars as the rotate / slide round, even fully tight. or in the case of the red extension, even the central grip worked it's way loose and out. So what I needed was some decent tape that would bond and have some decent grip. This stuff is great, different to get used to as it stretches, doesn't stick to much, but boy when it gets with it'self - yep it sticks, holds together and provides a nice slight grip surface to stop those rolling brackets.  It's not cheap @ $10 for 10ft - so gonna look for larger cheaper roll now, but it's certainly worth it so far - will keep eye on it over next couple of months while in use

Moving the brackets to the centre allowed them to be more perpendicular to the handlebar to help static grip. Added some silicon tape on the light also to stop them rolling around hopefully. With the vibrations, last week or two I managed to loose the plastic infil for the left bracket, so took some cut up garden hose, wrapped it and am trying that for the grip/padding.

Something's not quite right with my e in ebike

Technically is it the motor? not actually sure and I suppose, possibility is low, more likely some of the support around it as motors are pretty simple at the end of the day :)

So over the last few days, I've been using the throttle and higher level PAS - instead of the usual 3-5, more like 6-9, which I figure has pushed the power up on the drive. Which correlates with the display showing me close / at 750 at times.

Problem is I'm feeling the pedals jump, initially I thought it was delay gear shifting as the feeling through the pedals is similar, but then it was clear that it was happening even when I'd been static gear selection for a while.

It definitely occurs when the demand/assist is higher, and will occur few times a minute if I just use the throttle.

Thinking a little :) this may well have evolved from creaky cranky

As I have the news in my eyes on my commute, I don't hear any noises, so it may have been there for a while I suppose.

Looks like it's time to have to pull the motor housing apart...

youtube media hunting time and lunacycles forum too....

Dietpi opens back up a simple approach to creating a security camera

Thanks to Don over at NovaSpritTech for another great video, I became aware of the DietPi distribution.
Intrigued me again as something for Ethan to practice on, so we setoff on that direction, but then as I looked through all the goodies that DietPi has to offer, noticed there was a couple of options for camera monitoring.

Played with the dietpi native camera package, but it wasn't that stable. Moving onto the motioneye version, things changed...
It worked out of the box, I didn't see the need to put a password on as it's all internal local lan anyway. It handled both a standard pi-camera module and a Logitech C300 simultaneously without issues.

It even has built in options to upload to dropbox, google or others. Googled-rive using a hash api token to use google drive, so no password username worries.

With the capture running it was then time to look for case / mount .. so off to tinkercad.

There are so many bits on thingiverse, but relatively quickly found this and this which was awesome and eay so the camera can be mounted using the ethernet socket as a project bracket hole :)

Those with a keen eye, will notice its in the usb socket not ethernet, well that's becuase finding another model doing some model merging in tinkercad and the usb mount was born 

Did make a tweak to the socket size to shrink it slightly since the original module yieled parts with knuckle joints were too small, so needed to work out alternative.

Resultant fix was simply by growing the ball (by 1m diameter) and for each joint link. and expanding the socket up (by xxmm)

Now to take a crack at using DietPi to get an openvpd server up and running....


Update: 12th Feb:

When pushing the changes back into thingyverse, noticed the author has placed his files on tinkercad - awesome - so ...

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2789946