EBike

c. 2014

While working at Meka I had developed some pretty high-powered motor controllers and had a pile of motors around that we evaluated for development of some of the larger robots. One day while looking at some of the larger motors we had sitting around the office I thought it would be pretty simple to make a bracket to clamp the motor onto a bike frame to shove the rotor into the bike wheel. I was getting pretty good at TIG welding so I figured this would be a good chance to put these skills to use and weld up the bracket parts. I machined the clamp and a housing for the motor then welded things together. A little bit of wiring and firmware and we were off to the races!

It worked great - it could pretty easily propel me anywhere in SF . Unless it was wet. Turns out that rubber is pretty slick against metal in when wet. But in San Francisco that isn’t much of a problem.

One day it dawned on me that I rode my bike to work for the exercise and I had a perfectly good scooter if I wanted to get somewhere without any effort. Ultimately I ended up take it all apart and stopped using it.