Customer Profile, Part 2 of Mark Havran and his Solar Ebike

[Music] getting enough power to propel yourself yeah that's the idea i'm just starting a 7 000 kilometer trip let's hybrid pedal and solar power excellent [Music] a couple of years ago we had the fortune of interviewing mark halvor and back at the maker faire in san francisco he was a customer of ours building a phenomenally elaborate solar e-bike with sort of a long-term mission of doing something of a round-the-world solar bike trip mark's been documenting a great detail the build sequence the evolution of his pursuit one that he's been working on for well over a decade if i believe correctly and and with an enormous amount of diy ingenuity throughout this right to the point of actually having all of his solar panels custom-made as light as possible so unfortunately covid of course got in the way of many people's round-the-world traveling plans um but with that coming to something of an end in sight uh mark's doing a shakedown test and uh to our good fortune uh leaving from furry creek in bc uh with vancouver being his first stop and uh it's our first chance to invite mark into our helm um and also just do a follow-up to catch on what has changed on his bike since we last talked and uh what's in store for this and since we've taken such a strong interest in solar just in the last year with our sailboat projects and with a lot of the customer interest i'm sure there's a much broader audience out there interested to see what mark has done here this is the cockpit and everything i need is just right in front of me i've got some harley style motorcycle switches here for lights and a horn and turn signals uh here's a grin potentiometer that i've got wired for controlling the tilt on the panel in the front of this one i have remote switches for the cycle analyst because i can't reach the buttons on the front so i've got a couple in the back here so i can switch that and i have the solar firmware on there so i can keep track of my production it's a little overcast now we're getting 31 watts and on the right i've got my phone on a wireless charger so that was a that was a new addition that i'm really happy about so i don't have the cord when it gets wet and i can still keep charging it and uh the dji controller here with the drone that i can just hand launch and stop without having to get off the bike to get some good footage normally when i'm riding i just have it set to to tilt as far as it needs to to track the sun so there's a couple of sensors on them on the back of the panel and they just they just detect whether there's more sun on the left side or the right side of the panel and the motor moves it until until those two are equal and usually when it's overcast it'll be close to flat but because we're standing here next to this tree tilting away from the tree a little bit turns out uh gives it gives a little bit more power because it it opens it to the to the bright part of the sky and i've got a few different modes on here just from trial and error that i found that i need uh when riding so for example when riding through like a narrow opening like to a bike path i just flip the switch and it automatically tilts to the uh to the nearest side so that it's it's nice and narrow and i can get through which is nice if it's like a crowded bike path or something like that and when i get through i just put it back to automatic and it finds the sun again and it's tracking and the the other thing i sometimes need to do if it starts getting windy is i leave it in tracking mode but i can limit how far it tilts so if it's very windy i just turn this potentiometer here all the way and it just levels out the bike is tilted a little bit so it doesn't look quite straight but if it was if i was riding then this would be completely completely level and uh if it's if it's just a little bit windy and it's early in the day i don't want it going completely vertical i just adjust this a little bit and it'll only go to 10 degrees or 20 degrees or whatever is uh you know whatever feels safe for the conditions i just play it by ear like by how much the bike is moving and um yeah so through trial and error i found that i needed a few different ways of controlling it right from the handlebars without taking my eyes off the road so that's the nice thing i just moved my hand down this this part moves obviously the the suspension on the wheel needs to be attached to the static part there's a little bit of an overlap here and these are just off the shelf carbon fiber tubing from a supplier who who specifically makes them so they nest inside each other so it's you know so it's a 38 millimeter diameter motor about this long it ended up being too weak even it's adjustable but at the strongest settings i found that wind would like still push it over so i ended up coming up with a clever solution where i ended up putting a second gear box on the other side of the clutch and replaced the motor with one that's i think 9 rpm what is the weight of just panels with the laminate without any support just a laminated solar panel without solar structure i think it's 300 grams each for for 4x6 the support structure is is like a is a nomex honeycomb with top and bottom layers of of carbon fiber kevlar cloth uh it's a quarter inch and yeah i had i was using what one inch foam on the last version and i and it was way stiffer than it ever needed to be every time it gets touched it creates a divot oh that's that's me being a dummy i went through one of those traps to get on a bike trail i was maneuvering it was just a tall fence and i accidentally managed to sort of press it into part of the fence i didn't even realize it happened until like two hours later i looked but there doesn't seem to be any any permanent damage there's no appreciable decrease in output and uh and it didn't and it didn't and it didn't puncture the the the top layer which yeah so 3d printed enclosures this as well this and this is an evolution it's a bit of a i don't think i should even open it up the idea is to have all the switches and dc converters and even a motorcycle alarm system in there and you know and and like the the the headlights the german uh vascular they need like uh they're made from nickel metal hydride batteries it's like i think 6.5 to 7.2 volts or something so there's a converter for that i was going to show you where the batteries are so let me open here off uh four light goes here and two on the other side uh phase runner and backup this is actually the backup phase runner i have both of them mounted with all i need to do is switch the cables over and i've got the i've got the you know the uh i've copied the profile over and i have three um charge controllers separate for the roof because it doesn't tend to keep the same angle yeah and um i think i couldn't fit all three like voltage or and current wise two of them are either in series or parallel right ones by itself so back to or in parallel and the one that gets shaded in the front is on its own controller so so that mitigates uh partial shading concerns so i put resistive heating pads between the batteries and my thinking was that i'm going to encounter parts of the trip where it's going to get below zero degrees centigrade below freezing overnight and in the morning i want to be able to take full advantage of the rising sun even though the batteries are cold so i found a resistive heating pads that when six are wired in series they'll they'll just provide a gentle heat off the battery voltage of the ligos and connect it to a temperature controller and at about i right now i think i have it set for 10 degrees centigrade they turn off and once i start riding there's resistive heat with it within the battery so so it shouldn't be necessary when there's heavy traffic around i spend years looking at like the brightest leds on the road and which vehicles had them and certain vehicle manufacturers tesla and audi have nice bright taillights but like you can't get those as aftermarket and what i finally figured out is that what i really want is the stuff that's made for emergency response vehicles so like for volunteer firefighters or for a police car or or an ambulance or something like that that they can embed inside the headlights so i haven't worked out where i'm sleeping tonight ugly if it fell over so mark has one of our early release version one all axle motors on here and he's put on an impressive 30 000 kilometers in the three years since this bike was first built up i'm super impressed at how well it's held up you can see some sort of pitting and corrosion from the original uh rotor rings but our main concern here is that the version one all axle motor had a really thin section ball bearing and we had a few cases where those bearings became a weak point and ended up getting a bit loose on people so at this point we've got a substantially upgraded version two all axle motor with a much thicker better sealed ball bearing um and some other mechanical improvements so before mark sets out on his epic journey ahead i really want to take this chance to just upgrade his motor hardware accordingly and give us a chance to sort of do some uh analysis of the innards of this border to see if there's anything we can learn on that right so let's go get a wheel built up for you mark [Music] never hurts to add statorate inside these hubs especially since there's some mountain passes in mark's upcoming voyage [Music] 20 000 miles how do you feel about that [Music] you

Channel: Grin Technologies

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Id: a-4JPYHcfxQ

Length: 11min 17sec (677 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021