This is the email sent later to the electronic supplier in Vancouver Canada. Their height help is likely needed in diagnosis and possibly in shipment of a replacement part
.Justin, guys, dead analyst?!?! RIP?
[ note. The cycle analyst is the electronic control system for the vehicle, in addition to managing operations like throttle it tracks speed, tracks human energy, energy into the motor, and very importantly provides most of the regenerative braking capability. virtually all of the breaking for this 900 pound payload is the regenerative braking and with the loss of that brain tonight it was a very treacherous 4 Mile, one thousand foot descent. Almost immediately it was discovered that the brake pads for one of the two brakes were totally gone. I was very careful but we had to get down trying to beat full-on hypothermia and hopefully the rotor was not destroyed. Tomorrow morning we'll dig into it. Justin is the world's go-to guy for this equipment which he designed. And it is his company. They are closed weekends so I might not hear anything until Tuesday but it is not rare that in a crisis he responds over the weekend.]
Temperature plunging, a thousand feet up, on my two thousand foot 1600 calorie climb, drenched in sweat, the battery I was running on quit, I plugged in another, the system came on, and nothing, not a hint of life in the motors but everything else seemed to work. Power was getting to both controllers, and the light on the face Runner was solid, but on the older controller it was erratic. Three or four of the normal pulses and then something irregular and then maybe a couple of normal pulses and something else irregular. No pattern that I could detect. The throttle registered on the cycle analyst but nothing to the motors. I was clueless. Don't laugh. This is been so stable it's been so long since I have had to troubleshoot anything. But somehow I had a hunch that the throttle was not being seen by the controllers. Thankfully the throttle cable was long enough and I ran it directly to the controller's bypassing the cycle analyst. Bingo. The motors worked. Then some things on the cycle analyst began to catch my attention. On the main screen, the bottom left should read watts. Instead the letter was not W, it was A. And then on the screen that reads out how many watts since the system was last reset, which for me was at the beginning of this trip 4 miles earlier, it said something like 7,000 watts, and 1700 watts per mile on the following screen. What?
It was risk of hypothermia I was covered in sweat. The temperature was plunging. So I'm back at the hostel where I stay sometimes.
I sure wouldn't mind some thoughts from you guys. In the morning when I have warmed up I anticipate getting my laptop and attempting to refresh the firmware to see if that's the problem.
Sure hope to hear from you guys.
Of course, it's the weekend.
Oh, and I trust I'm not getting anyone in trouble. Seriously. I called at 10 to 6, I didn't expect to have a signal but I did, got your switchboard, oh we're closed our hours are whatever until 6 p.m. . 10 of 6 I called ARG!!! LOL.
The only other system anomaly is for the last probably several days, the last several trips up the mountain which I do at about a mile and a half per hour so that I can do 25% of the work, every couple of minutes one of two things happens but not on any predictable schedule that I can find, either the motors drop out for a moment, a second, but very noticeable, the system lights and power do not flicker, but the motor dropped substantially, and on the cycle analyst it shows about a 50 watt drop, or, much less regularly, it pulses about 50 Watts. My first thought was that it was one of the batteries but it seemed to have done it on any and all battery combinations and each battery.
James
No comments:
Post a Comment