2.5" tyre 14" electric unicycle 30 km/h high speed with Bluetooth App

[Lz Lee]

2 minutes ago, HunkaHunkaBurningLove said:

It wouldn't hurt to poll a few other members of the forum here regarding potential brand names.  I was just throwing a few random ideas out there.  It doesn't hurt to see what other ideas people have. 

Yes just a good idea.  we hope to keep opening mind in all time.   We will think of it carefully and don't hurt other exiseted brands. 

thank you very much

19 hours ago, RolluS said:

It is the exact same wheel hub motor than this product you sell: http://wholesaler.alibaba.com/product-detail/2016-new-skate-board-electric-skateboard_60438131347.html

yes, we have this skateboard programings.   Just write the programings into 30B4.  that would be ok.

 

[electric_vehicle_lover]

@Lz Lee, "geek" have a bad connotation in our culture, IMO, so I think should be avoided.

I would use the name of an animal that could represent speed and freedom (because I feel kind of free when I drive my EUC).

[Hunka Hunka Burning Love]

Okay I've started a thread in the general forum to see if we can help you with a few more name choices.

How far along in production are you with this new wheel offering if you don't mind me asking?  There are tons of riders on the forums so you have a good base of people to find out what features they want to have in a wheel and also see the problems people are encountering with even new products (eg. overheating mosfets, unsafe cutouts, overspeeding accidents).  A smart move would be to study the threads here and try to address these issues and enter the market with a strong, competitive product that stands out from the already established crowd rather than just blending in.  I'm no marketing MBA  , but I think that would be a smart move to take.

Look at what some of the products that Ninebot has to offer - Ninebot One E+, S2, A1 along with Inmotion V5F and IPS Zero... these futuristic wheels have style and popular designs that are very apealing.  I guess though it depends on how big of a market you want to capture and whether you want to compete against some of the bigger players out there.  Some might just want to offer a simple wheel to enter the market and be more like Raspberry Pi where it's pretty basic and aimed at a smaller niche market rather than compete with Apple for example.  I like to think big though - I have a good eye to see potential... but sometimes I can be a bit off base.  

[Lz Lee]

40 minutes ago, electric_vehicle_lover said:

@Lz Lee, "geek" have a bad connotation in our culture, IMO, so I think should be avoided.

I would use the name of an animal that could represent speed and freedom (because I feel kind of free when I drive my EUC).

ok, thank you... as you said, Geek is bad connotation.  We will discuss another name for our brand name.

animal name is a great proposal.    like Puma, firefox, redbull...etc

how about Alpaca ? 

[Lz Lee]

1 hour ago, HunkaHunkaBurningLove said:

Okay I've started a thread in the general forum to see if we can help you with a few more name choices.

How far along in production are you with this new wheel offering if you don't mind me asking?  There are tons of riders on the forums so you have a good base of people to find out what features they want to have in a wheel and also see the problems people are encountering with even new products (eg. overheating mosfets, unsafe cutouts, overspeeding accidents).  A smart move would be to study the threads here and try to address these issues and enter the market with a strong, competitive product that stands out from the already established crowd rather than just blending in.  I'm no marketing MBA  , but I think that would be a smart move to take.

Look at what some of the products that Ninebot has to offer - Ninebot One E+, S2, A1 along with Inmotion V5F and IPS Zero... these futuristic wheels have style and popular designs that are very apealing.  I guess though it depends on how big of a market you want to capture and whether you want to compete against some of the bigger players out there.  Some might just want to offer a simple wheel to enter the market and be more like Raspberry Pi where it's pretty basic and aimed at a smaller niche market rather than compete with Apple for example.  I like to think big though - I have a good eye to see potential... but sometimes I can be a bit off base.  

we can produce 14x2.5" tire EUC anytime . But it is made by hand ( saw the shell like a guitar shape).  very slowly

Yes more functions means more competitive and bigger market share.  We have 2 models new EUC in developing.  It will integrate many functions in the controller board. 

I think you have very good foresight. Your suggestion is strong worth of learning.

[HEC]

2 hours ago, Lz Lee said:

when we issue new controller, i will post here or free sample for testing and comments.

Thank you for an update @Lz Lee! There are some highly knowledgeable users and experienced riders here in the forums, many of them owning and riding multiply EUCs / Wheels of different makes and sizes. I myself own and ride 4 different ones (14", 16" and 18") regularly. I'm sure that many here myself including would be interested in testing your samples and providing valuable feedbacks and suggestions to improvements and additions. Also several users here are local resellers in various locations so you'd gain valuable business contacts and feedback as well. Please keep us updated in this thread with your progress and if you looking for test volunteers please let me know - I'd like to participate for sure. If you need some more EUC / electric wheel related background details let us know as well.

[HEC]

3 hours ago, Lz Lee said:

Your suggest is appreciated.  Falcon sounds good.  I will re-discuss brand name with my colleages later.

@Lz Lee  -  as the MicroWorks controller boards are already well known and established in EUC community I'd probably aim to include either MW or the whole MicroWorks in the part of the product / wheel. As the specific model (or series) of the wheel first idea which came to my mind was "Ranger" (let's say "MW Ranger 840" would be sounding name for wheel with 840 Wh battery). There is a double reasoning behind such name. First - it implies / evokes the (long driving) range. Secondly it can also (due to it's 2.5" tyre) highlight it's more off-road capability / suitability (despite it's being only 14"). The second name which came to my mind was "Scout" implying similar as above. For example "MW Scout 560" (suggesting more agile / lighter model).

[Lz Lee]

10 minutes ago, HEC said:

Thank you for an update @Lz Lee! There are some highly knowledgeable users and experienced riders here in the forums, many of them owning and riding multiply EUCs / Wheels of different makes and sizes. I myself own and ride 4 different one (14", 16" and 18") regularly. I'm sure that many here myself including would be interested in testing your samples and providing valuable feedbacks and suggestions to improvements and additions. Also several users here are local resellers in various locations so you'd gain valuable business contacts and feedback as well. Please keep use updated in this thread with your progress and if you looking for test volunteers please let me know - I'd like to participate for sure. If you need some more EUC / electric wheel related background details let us know as well.

HEC   yes, i read their comments and good suggestion.  Very professional.

we will post and find player to test board.    I don't know if i can leave a contact information here...

or add whatsapp or skype..or like that..

 

 

[Hunka Hunka Burning Love]

Thanks for the kind words.  It sounds like we're probably talking quite low productions numbers to start. Without a prefabricated custom shell that could be a bottleneck in terms of production numbers.   Hand trimming can be labour intensive, slow going and produce less accurate results.

Custom trimming a shell to make it different looking might not make it unique enough to stand out and make people take notice unless the performance specifications make up for that.   Function before form can lead to great things, but it can be a tougher sell.

Spending some dollars on having a custom shell made rather than modifying off the shelf components can be a worthwhile investment.  It sounds like your company is being cautious and wants to see how well a small production run works out before investing more money.

I hope everything goes well and that we'll see another player at the table with a good wheel to ride with many easily sourceable replacement parts.

 

[HEC]

1 minute ago, Lz Lee said:

I don't know if i can leave a contact information here...

or add whatsapp or skype..or like that..

@Lz Lee you can update you profile in forums to include more contact details. You can add links or contact / business details in your forum signature. If you want to contact me or other individual users directly please use the forum's PM (Private Message) option. Thank you.

[HEC]

45 minutes ago, Lz Lee said:

we can produce 14x2.5" tire EUC anytime . But it is made by hand ( saw the shell like a guitar shape).  very slowly

@Lz Lee If you already have all the parts needed as the major manufacturer / supplier you can try to sell the DYI kits just by boxing all the needed parts together. While this would be at start for sure a bit of niche market enthusiasts like us would purchase those from you and spread the good (or bad indeed) name of the brand. That would most likely lead to more people being interested in building their own EUC from kit as apart of the more affordable price it would also allow them to maintain the wheel more efficiently in case of repairs or part replacement needed as they've build the wheel originally from the parts. Other aspect is that if your manufacturing capacities are currently low you can ship unassembled wheels in bulk to local resellers at discount and they'll be more than happy to assemble them themselves for the very same reasons - easier customer support and repairs later on.

[esaj]

5 hours ago, HunkaHunkaBurningLove said:

Spending some dollars on having a custom shell made rather than modifying off the shelf components can be a worthwhile investment.  It sounds like your company is being cautious and wants to see how well a small production run works out before investing more money.

I've heard that injection moulds can cost a pretty penny (tooling costs can be >$50k?), so better have the design pretty well down before mass production  

I find the idea of DIY-kits interesting, but personally I'd prefer to be able to also tinker with the firmware-code, which probably isn't publicly available.

I still got this "project wheel", but the Firewheel mainboard doesn't seem to "like" being placed too far away from the axle (or maybe it's just an issue with the "top-heavy" -structure):

 

 

[MattJ]

Will the 14x2.5" tire be available separately and will it fit a regular 14" 500W Microworks motor?

[electric_vehicle_lover]

Now that I have a good design of EGG EUC, I will focus on firmware development. This weekend in the Makerfaire I were able to talk some about 2 hours with a university professor that gives classes about motor control and we talked a lot about this firmware - we also discussed the 30B4 board that I had with me.

I had also the pleasure to talk with a senior developer of the MultiWii firmware for the trip//hexacopters, which is very famous and OpenSource - what an inspiration!!/

[HEC]

26 minutes ago, esaj said:

I find the idea of DIY-kits interesting, but personally I'd prefer to be able to also tinker with the firmware-code, which probably isn't publicly available.

I still got this "project wheel", but the Firewheel mainboard doesn't seem to "like" being placed too far away from the axle (or maybe it's just an issue with the "top-heavy" -structure):

It could be solved by either having two options / kits - one with original MW firmware and one open for programing with our own "homebrew" version or simply by allowing to reprogram original one with ours (without providing the original code).

In regards of your "steel stallion" wheel - by far away from the axle do you mean front / rear, too far to side or too high? If front rear that would be logical (similar like FC being mounted to far from CoG on RC multirotors). Left / Right might have a minor influence on side tipping cut off algorithm but not so much IMO. Having the board way higher than usually might simply require re-calibration as indeed the distance the board and sensors travels in both front / rear and left / right direction are longer on partial circles than closer to axle however that shouldn't be that much of issue as angles will be still the same.

[Hunka Hunka Burning Love]

With all the knowledgeable people out there, I wonder whether it might be a smart move to open up the source code for others to tweak and perfect the wheel.  I guess the problem that develops is possibly losing contracts with other brands that depend on MW to customize firmware for them if they don't do it themselves.  More likely though is that MW supplies companies like GW with the source code to load firmware onto custom fabricated boards that MW supplies so why not do it for end users?  There's not a huge number of people capable of customizing firmware, and the hardware would still come from MW.  There likely aren't a huge number of control board suppliers so having the end-user community help develop software can only strengthen the popularity of a specific brand and have it done for free basically.  Take for example the Raspberry Pi.  It's in a bit of a niche market, but there are tons of users and interest due to the fact that there is a lot of open source programming for it.  People like tweaking things and customizing it for themselves.  They sell a bazillion of these units and profit from the hardware sales rather than gain from holding onto software secrets.

It could be a problem if end-users use the software to decompile GW firmware code for example and use it on their own wheel, but they wouldn't necessarily have the same motors and customized control boards so that firmware might not be that useful to them.  Competitors could take advantage of others work though, but usually motor differences and other features require customization anyways, and they likely have their own capable programmers so it's not like Microsoft giving up the source code for Windows 10 or something to Apple Computer.  For something basic like EUC control, I don't see a big deal in allowing users to have more access to adjusting horizontal vs vertical orientation settings for example or being allowed to tweak maximum safety tiltback settings and beep programming.  Is it a big enough trade secret to keep that private?  Judging by @electric_vehicle_lover's progress, he'll have his own controller software developed sooner than later.  I suppose if the firmware programming gets out, other clone companies might produce copy cat controllers, but is the market hot enough that clone companies want a share?  I guess one has to weight the pro's and con's.  Sooner or later someone is going to dump and decompile the firmware anyways if interest is high enough so why not open the gates and gain popularity I figure?

EDIT:  Regarding Custom molding, yeeks - I plugged some random numbers into this calculator:

http://www.custompartnet.com/estimate/injection-molding/

And got a total of $78 000 in cost for 1000 pieces, but that works out to be $78 per piece which isn't too bad. I used random guesses for some values though so it's probably way off.  MW probably has some contacts in the EUC shell making community to get some shells made for less I'm guessing.  I wonder when commercial sized 3D mass printing will be commonplace.   It sounds though that although they are focused on producing the individual components, producing a whole combined product is quite new to them I'm guessing, and they likely want to keep investment costs low as it seems the shell is the only one thing that they don't commonly supply so they are making due with an off the shelf hand trimmed case.  Yeah it's a tough call.  I guess it depends on how much they want to start competing against other companies like Gotway who they have some invested interests in.  Everyone wants a piece of the pie, but you don't want to upset customers who buy the pie ingredients from you.  MW might be better off targeting the enthusiast community first then maybe delving more into the mainstream market.

 

[electric_vehicle_lover]

I am really happy that I had yesterday a compliment from the Portuguese representation on NineBot - the guy did ride a few times the EGG EUC and was very happy for the compactness and speed, when compared to the "big" NineBot 16'' wheel he were riding. This means that an OpenSource design and shared knowledge from the community users can produce EUCs with good characteristics.

For the boards and firmware, I can give some examples of OpenSource success that includes companies selling (not mention to the well known Arduino, RPI) and that are an inspiration for me :

- RepRap 3D printers (yes!!)
- MultiWii firmware and board for tri/quad/hexacopters
- VESC board and firmware for the electric long boards (yes, this is very near the EUCs)

[esaj]

50 minutes ago, HEC said:

In regards of your "steel stallion" wheel - by far away from the axle do you mean front / rear, too far to side or too high? If front rear that would be logical (similar like FC being mounted to far from CoG on RC multirotors). Left / Right might have a minor influence on side tipping cut off algorithm but not so much IMO. Having the board way higher than usually might simply require re-calibration as indeed the distance the board and sensors travels in both front / rear and left / right direction are longer on partial circles than closer to axle however that shouldn't be that much of issue as angles will be still the same.

My guess is that it's the distance of the gyro from the axle. The further away it is from the origin around which it revolves, the further travel it will have for the same tilt and the higher the angular acceleration is. I did some fiddling around with the MPU-6050 for my self-balancing robot, and the typical way seems to be to use sensor fusion (using both orientation and acceleration data), and the Firewheel firmware is probably programmed based on the acceleration values it gets when it's about 3 times closer to the axle in the Firewheel shell (so much lower acceleration values), but that's just a guess really.

Hitting a pothole or a stone on a forest path, the wheel does this really strong acceleration, not exactly (but almost) tilting back, nothing like the original Firewheel. It could be due to the much higher up centre of gravity too, but I suspect that the higher angular acceleration also plays a role there. Haven't found anything suitable to encase the mainboard further down the frame to see if it affects things.

[Lz Lee]

7 hours ago, HunkaHunkaBurningLove said:

Thanks for the kind words.  It sounds like we're probably talking quite low productions numbers to start. Without a prefabricated custom shell that could be a bottleneck in terms of production numbers.   Hand trimming can be labour intensive, slow going and produce less accurate results.

Custom trimming a shell to make it different looking might not make it unique enough to stand out and make people take notice unless the performance specifications make up for that.   Function before form can lead to great things, but it can be a tougher sell.

Spending some dollars on having a custom shell made rather than modifying off the shelf components can be a worthwhile investment.  It sounds like your company is being cautious and wants to see how well a small production run works out before investing more money.

I hope everything goes well and that we'll see another player at the table with a good wheel to ride with many easily sourceable replacement parts.

 

if production, i estimate quantity 500-600 pcs /month for this 14*2.5" tire.

we will add headlight and traillight later... That product only as a advanced period DIY products.  Maybe it doesn't have amazing appearance. Only performance and muscle.

[HEC]

33 minutes ago, Lz Lee said:

if production, i estimate quantity 500-600 pcs /month for this 14*2.5" tire.

we will add headlight and traillight later... That product only as a advanced period DIY products.  Maybe it doesn't have amazing appearance. Only performance and muscle.

That is sizeable amount. Lights addition even if as only DIY option woul be nice. And it's less about amazing look but more about standing out in the crowd so your (by specs) advanced or excellent product could be easilly identified by quick glance at its unique shape / design.

[Rui Zhang]

14" 500W Microworks motor

[electric_vehicle_lover]

6 minutes ago, Rui Zhang said:

14" 500W Microworks motor

????

[Lz Lee]

20 hours ago, esaj said:

I've heard that injection moulds can cost a pretty penny (tooling costs can be >$50k?), so better have the design pretty well down before mass production  

I find the idea of DIY-kits interesting, but personally I'd prefer to be able to also tinker with the firmware-code, which probably isn't publicly available.

I still got this "project wheel", but the Firewheel mainboard doesn't seem to "like" being placed too far away from the axle (or maybe it's just an issue with the "top-heavy" -structure):

 

 

 

very strong wheel  !  the battery pack put in the top housing ?  what a deep impression !

 

[esaj]

2 minutes ago, Lz Lee said:

very strong wheel  !  the battery pack put in the top housing ?  what a deep impression !

Yes, the battery packs (4 x 192Wh) and the mainboard is in the top housing:

There are more images of building it here:  http://imgur.com/a/orjAz

 

[Lz Lee]

On 2016/6/27 at 10:21 PM, MattJ said:

Will the 14x2.5" tire be available separately and will it fit a regular 14" 500W Microworks motor?

yes,  same motor . it can match well.