Uh… YEAH bitches!  Come to the Northeast Motorcycle Expo and see the R5e!  (Along with a few other swell bikes.  OK, a crap TON of other swell bikes…  ) It’ll be there both days…  Saturday and Sunday.  Along with SONS OF ANARCHY STARS TIG AND BOBBY!!!OMGOMG

THANKS to Kevin and the rest of the crew who made this possible!

Motor prOn.

(all photographs ©Ted Dillard 2012, all rights reserved)

There is a model, the EV 200, uses a feature called the “economizer”.  This allows the contactor to stay closed by using PWM (pulse-width modulation) rather than a continuous current, which saves energy.  Most of the muscle needed to close the contactor happens when you initiate the switch, and holding it closed is just a matter of maintaining the, well,  “pressure”.  This causes some trouble with some controllers that do, in fact, control the contactor themselves (Curtis, I believe) where you have to bypass the economizer (or presumably turn that feature off in the controller?), but since I’m running a controller that doesn’t have that feature I’m safe. However, it’s a little more money, and although it’s an elegant idea, it’s not really a big priority for me.  (Yeah, I’m cheap.  I’m also easy, but that’s a different story.)

Here is the product page.  It also comes in a side-mount configuration, perfect for my bike.  It’s also available from DigiKey and Mouser… but the folks at EV Source have it for under $100 (along with some good information on the line of products).  Order up!

Yep, you read that right.  As part of the Brookline CCAB (Climate Change Action Brookline) and the unveiling of several electric charge stations in the town, I’ve been asked to bring the R5e to show on the floor of the museum.  The Larz Anderson Auto Museum.  The oldest and coolest auto museum in the US of A.

You can bet there’ll be photos to follow, but I hope you can make it out to stop by.  Here are the deets:

The schedule for the week is here.

Here’s information on the museum.

As promised…  the photo gallery:

Thanks to Clark Sopper and William Gilmore of Gotham Machine, I am now the proud owner of the coolest and baddest ass motor mount made.

Check back to see the fit, and what the ETEK looks like hangin’ off this jewel…

THANKS GUYS!!

Here’s their blog with some more shots of the mount being made, and here’s a tease from that:

…yep, it’s an Electric Chronicles exclusive!  Well.  Actually, no, they’re all from Alex’s page…   (And all photos are © Alex Tang, 2011)

So, FINALLY Predator has a site of sorts where you can see all sorts of awesome photos and videos, courtesy of the TRUE FANS of Predator.  This ain’t some stupid Fan Page set up by the people who want to have fans, this is the real, hardcore, groupie FAN PAGE yo.

See it (and “like” it) here!

I just happened to be in the neighborhood and stopped in to see Jeff Disinger, AKA dice23, AKA the man behind the Predator drag bike.  Yeah.  THAT bike.

He’s working on bumping the Predator up a notch, and also his “Street Bike”.  No, I can’t tell you any specs.  The man plied me with beer, what can I say?  He’s also got a rack of the baddest ass Razor pit bikes you’ve ever seen.

Enjoy!

So back to my story.  I got a Vicor DC-DC converter that a buddy found on eBay.  It came in a box.  It looks like this.  (The smaller one.)  That was it…  god forbid it should be labeled with where the wires go, or come with a little sheet.  What fun would that be?  So, a little trick I learned from somebody in the club, Mr Wizard himself, actually, is to look for markings that are model numbers and see what I can find.  This is marked with ” VI-J41-CY-B1″.  I figure the VI is Vicor, so I search for various combinations of those numbers and get nothing.

Long story short, I go to the Vicor site and find the page for the VI-200 and VI-J00 series products, (There are no products actually named VI-J00, that’s the class of product, and the specs are built into the name, see?  What fun would it be if they actually told you the product name?) …and find this sheet.  It’s the mechanical drawing for the unit, and shows this diagram with the explanation of where you hook up the wires.

Just click on this one, it will get bigger so you can see.

This is called the “pinout”, or, “where you connect the wires to make it work diagram”.  See what you’ve learned?  You can now be at a party talking to an Electrical Engineer and take a deep sigh, and say, “Damn, man, I was hooking up the Vicor VI-J41-CY-B1 yo (that J31 is such a piece of crap ain’t it? Nothing like the J41 with the BusMod and the heat sink option, unless of course you’re talking the HAM version…*) and damn near let the Magic Smoke out when my dog ate the pinout… ” then dash to the bar to refresh your drink.  Except if he’s an EE, he’s probably at the bar.  And won’t leave. (If you happen to notice a hot woman you know, are friends with, can talk to or even have “relations” with, do not, under any circumstances go talk to her if you want to remain “in the club”.)

Here’s the cool part of the treasure hunt, though.  This is what they show on the site for a product shot of what I have. 

Doesn’t look anything like what I have.  I’m a photographer, I know these things.  It’s actually a clever disguise to make the treasure hunt more fun.  It turns out, the unit I got has the BusMod unit attached, basically so you don’t need to solder connections to it and can just screw mount them.  Here’s what the site says, it’s awesomely Wizardly.

* “Rugged chassis-mount housing for VI-J00 module (add-B1 suffix to module number for preinstalled)”  Not for use with HAM module.

Now wait.  I would ONLY use the HAM module, since everything I run and I myself am totally HAM.  Oh.  OK.  Whatever.

If you’re standing in a bar with no chance of being with a woman, and need some awesome geeky reading material, check out the complete technical resources for the Vicor VI-J41_CY-B1 here.

If you just want to slap it on your bike and get 12V from your 72V pack then connect the high voltage ground to pin 4 and positive to pin 1, and 12V output positive goes to pin 5 and 12V ground to pin 9.

Like this.

PS

.

OK, if you want to actually look like you know what you’re doing, there are a couple of other things that this Vicor will do.  I have to tell you, but I’m going to make it sound like I figured it out myself.  What can I say, I have a supremely hot wife and can talk to women, I have to do everything I can to maintain my cover and stay in the club.

You can turn this thing on and off.  Let’s say you want to leave it tied to the high voltage pack, always on, and want to turn the 12V on and off, like, say, parking lights or a radio or something.  That’s what the “gate” pins are for.  If you connect pin 2 to ground (pin 4) it will turn the unit off.  If you use this, you need to put a 1 uF capacitor from 2 to 4 (gate in to -In). Otherwise the unit will shut down and won’t turn back on without being completely disconnected.

I have no idea why.

You can also “trim” the voltage.  That means adjust the output voltage a little bit.  +/- about 10%.  Why you would do that, I wouldn’t know.  (One of the dirty little secrets of electronic component design is that they can all operate within a voltage range.  For example, anything rated 12V can probably do just fine between 9V and maybe as high as 18V.  So if you need to adjust the trim, I suspect you already know how.)

Thanks to you-know-who-you-are. I won’t tell the rest of the club that you have a hot wife.  I promise.