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Custom Electric Unicycles


XenonJohn

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Hi everyone,

Have just stumbled on this thread. For what it is worth I am not a trained engineer but I have been building one wheeled electric motorbike style machines for a few years now and have recently taken a big step in terms of the design challenge, going up from a 500W brushed DC motor and chain drive to a 3000W alloy hubmotor wheel originally designed for an electric motorbike. This was wound at the factory in China for low(er) top speed and maximum torque. Firstly, the wheel is a pretty heavy piece of kit, or at least its non-alloy internals are. This is actually helpful for control to some extent. The fuselage is filled almost entirely with 20 Headway LiFePO4 cells (approx 65V) and all the balance electronics are in the headlamp pod. On level ground it barely gets to more than 10% of maximum output. Testing on a beach coming soon when it stops raining. The front safety wheel / skid is there to prevent faceplants at speed. I know as I have done it, it hurts even with a motorbike helmet on. There are crazy videos on YT of people doing 20 - 30 mph on one wheelers with no head protection wearing just T shirts. Very brave or very crazy!

https://sites.google.com/view/mega-hub-motor-e-unicycle/home

 

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Very cool :thumbup: I'm impressed when people such as yourself undertake projects like this, which has to be a lot of work. Presumably you enjoy the process though :D

When I've seen similar wheels such as yours (and I believe I've seen at least on video of yours before), what strikes me is their slow speed relative to EUCs. Can you comment on why you think this is? I'm not necessarily talking about going 30-mph, but 20-mph is a decently fast EUC and my sense is that yours is slower. Do you purposefully limit the speed and if so why?

Are the self-balancing electronics and software yours, or are you tailoring off-the-self components?

 

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2 hours ago, XenonJohn said:

Hi everyone,

Have just stumbled on this thread. For what it is worth I am not a trained engineer but I have been building one wheeled electric motorbike style machines for a few years now and have recently taken a big step in terms of the design challenge, going up from a 500W brushed DC motor and chain drive to a 3000W alloy hubmotor wheel originally designed for an electric motorbike. This was wound at the factory in China for low(er) top speed and maximum torque. Firstly, the wheel is a pretty heavy piece of kit, or at least its non-alloy internals are. This is actually helpful for control to some extent. The fuselage is filled almost entirely with 20 Headway LiFePO4 cells (approx 65V) and all the balance electronics are in the headlamp pod. On level ground it barely gets to more than 10% of maximum output. Testing on a beach coming soon when it stops raining. The front safety wheel / skid is there to prevent faceplants at speed. I know as I have done it, it hurts even with a motorbike helmet on. There are crazy videos on YT of people doing 20 - 30 mph on one wheelers with no head protection wearing just T shirts. Very brave or very crazy!

https://sites.google.com/view/mega-hub-motor-e-unicycle/home

 

Looking forward to a big hill test too, keep up the great work

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Man this is way too cool! Looks fantastic, great work!

Question about the safety wheel in the front - did you ever field test it? Did it help avoid a face plant? It seems to me that once the front wheel touches the ground, with all that inertia, there is nothing stopping the rider from continuing to fall forward off the euc and face planting . The front wheel seems to only be preventing the euc from spinning forward?

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How cool is that...brilliant !!

Hope  you get it perfected.

i was at car fest a few years ago and saw some guy riding a one wheel motorbike but the wheel was huge and the seat was inside it. The motor drove around the inside of the rim. Looked bloody leathal, I’ll see if I can find any YouTube clips of it tomorrow.

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