Hacking an Ebike with a phone: Reprogamming Bafang Mid Drives!

so in a previous video i showed you how you can reconfigure a buffung e-bike with your own settings for the motor and the controller and stuff like that and can and change how the pedal assist works and the throttle works and all of that now the thing about that is you you did need a a windows laptop in order to plug into the bike and run the software well recently someone um a viewer told me that there's now an android app that lets you reconfigure your buffung mountain bike and all the settings using nothing but an app um now the thing is the the buffy mountain bikes uh they do not have bluetooth so you still need to physically plug into the bike with your phone you do that you still use you still use the usb programming cable that you would with the laptop you still use the same usb programming cable but then you use an otg cable an otg cable is a cable that plugs into your cell phone and converts uh you know your cell phone connection into a regular usb connection and if you have most modern android phones can plug into regular usb devices so this cable allows you to plug into an android phone and then the app will will be able to talk to the bike um so the procedure is still the same this is the controller for the the e-bike it plugs in here into this green connection you unplug the controller and then you take your your programming cable and you plug it in to the green connection here once it's plugged in you'll see the the light has come in come on on the um the programming cable that's because the battery is connected and now it's getting powered by the e-bikes battery that's important the light must be on before you begin the process now i am going to plug this into my cell phone and then i'm going to show you around the software and the app so let me do that and i'm going to probably screen capture the cell phone so you can see what's going on the bottom here called speed i'm about to plug the let me actually let me turn on let me fire up the app this is at its speed with three e's um now there is nothing connected and i have not yet plugged in the usb cable i am plugging in the usb cable now and so now the usb cable is plugged in and now i'm going to press connect and we should be able to connect the bike now allow it to connect yes connecting to motor great now we are connected and you can see here that it it knows the motor i have the firmware version the max voltage max current everything about my bike which is perfect now there is a display screen which you can see here um in fact let me lift up the back of the bike and um anyways this is a yeah this is a display screen so you could have your phone on a like mount on your bike and see things like your speed and and um yeah you can even program your uh your gear setting [Music] i just picked up the back of the bike and used the throttle to power up the bike and you can see it works so these are your um these are your pedal assist numbers here in the middle that you can change and then this is your speedometer so this is a cool display that you can get for your e-bike but i'm not here for the display i have a nice controller on my bike i'm here for reprogramming the bike so i move over to the settings tab here and along the top here there are different things that you can reprogram now the way you do it is you need to hit the green read first because you need to read what settings are on your bike you need the the phone to see what settings your bike has and then you can edit whatever setting you want and then you press right to upload the setting back to your bike so i'm going to press read and it's reading you can see i have low voltage at 41 volts because it's a 48 volt battery my current is at 18 amps um but let's say i want th this bike is capable of up to 25 amps so let's say i set it to 20 amps to give it a little more boost um my wheel diameter is 27 and a half inches so that's correct so now i'm going to press right processing and it says right parameters successful so now we're at 20 amps in current i'm going to leave the screen come back here read it again and you can see it says it's now it is 20 amps inside the system which is what i want now we can go to levels these are um i'm going to press read so it can read all my settings these are the pedal assist settings that um you get when you put it in mode 1 mode 2 mode 3 all the way to mode 9. these are settings i discussed in my other video i like this is how the first column here this column in the middle here this is your current i like to i like to have lower amounts of current in the lower numbers because i want to be able to go slow um when i'm driving between pedestrians and that on the bike path i only want 5 10 15 20 assistance at the lower levels but and then when i get on this on the road and i want to go fast i can put it up to six seven eight nine and just ramp up the current to the high numbers so that's how i programmed it more fine control at the lower numbers and then i just ramp it up once i start to get into the higher numbers speed is an artificial speed limiter that the bike has built into it what this means is when you're pedaling um once you hit a certain speed limit the pa the pedal assist just turns off um so i do have speed limits set at 20 30 40 at the lower numbers again so that i just don't go too fast but once i start hitting level 5 and then 6 seven eight i just turn off the speed limit and the bike can go as fast as it wants with either sixty percent seventy percent eighty percent or a hundred percent current so um these are all this is one of the most important screens just to get your bike to behave the way you want it and i like to set lower percentages and lower you know i want the bike to be slow in these lower numbers so that i can ride between pedestrians and not run anybody over or do 20 miles an hour on a bike trail amongst pedestrians with strollers so i do set speed limits at the lower numbers and i do limit the current at the lower numbers once i start getting sort of above level 5 and above i just ramp it up and so that bike can go as fast as it wants anyways again set whatever percentages you want and then you press right to write those percentages to the bike your bike pedal um again press read first so that you see your settings and then edit what you want and then press right to upload those settings back to the bike um there's not too many things i mess with on the um on the setting tab here uh on the pedal tab there's really not that much that i messed with i think i kept most of my settings the same and um you know i don't think there's anything too much too important on this that'll affect the the bike throttle tab again press read first um this the the important number the important thing that i did change here is this right here this designated assist level what by default it's this which says by displays come on what that means is your throttle will be linked to what pedal assist mode you are in if you're in pedal assist one then you're only going to get pedal assist one on the throttle if you're in paralysis 6 you'll get pedal assist 6 on the throttle i don't like that and so i do not use this option by displays command i do not use that that is the default setting i do not use that i want my throttle to be more like a motorcycle i want to hit the throttle and get a lot of speed so that i can use my throttle when i need to cross a street or i need to get around an object or something like that i want my throttle to just provide instant power regardless of what pedal assist i'm in so i force my pedal assist mode into yeah mode 8 so by forcing it into mode 8 like i just did i will always have pedal assist level mode you know level eight on my throttle at all times so when you again when you make the change on something you want you press right and it now uploads back to the bike so this app it allows you to do everything that the windows software did um it's pretty cool and as far as i can tell it's completely free and there's no ads so big shout out to the developer here um just remember when you're on when you're on the settings tab here and when you go to these different tabs first press read then change what you want then press right that's how you get everything back onto the bike your change settings if you if you don't read first and then right second you're not gonna your settings are not gonna make their way back onto the bike so um um anyways i mean that's you know what i have to say on this app it's really pretty simple and pretty cool and it just works honestly i didn't have to do any messing with my android settings or anything like that i just plugged in the otg cable fired up the app and it just connected now i'm using a oneplus 7 pro phone but most high-end phone android phones support otg out the box so just plug in an otg cable and and um download this app um again the app is called uh it's called speed uh let's see if it's yeah it's speed with three e's speed with three e's um but yeah i mean you you know you you get a nice little display if you have a permanent mount on your bike um you can have a nice display and use your phone as your controller which is kind of cool um now i won't do that again i i don't want to have the otg cable hanging out of my phone while i'm riding my bike and an actual control you know an actual controller is more hardy and and uh you know less prone to getting broken if i crash or something like that i would hate to damage my phone um when i'm using it as my display so i'm not going to use it as my display but as a programming tool it literally does everything that the windows software does so this thing's cool um you know props to the developer and and um i think uh yeah i think i'm definitely gonna use this is definitely what i'm gonna use in the future to make changes it's not worth breaking out the windows laptop um to you know tweak a voltage limit or a current limit or something like that i just use my phone and you know the nice thing about this is even when you're riding if you don't like a setting you've just put into the bike you can just literally pull out the phones plug in your otg cable tweak a setting again press right and uh continue your ride and see if you like the new setting better so this thing's cool so uh highly recommended um anyways i hope this helps and uh you know i'll talk to you soon

Channel: Stevenc22

Views: 155,763

Keywords: ebike, bafang, middrive, 18650, reprogramming, e-bike

Id: S6IHB2avi5w

Length: 13min 18sec (798 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 11 2021