Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “eBike Battery Watchdog”.
Yes, my name is charles schweiger, i’m from west virginia, and i brought my electric bicycle battery modern, green watchdog project to the maker faire. Every day i follow the make magazine blog and i saw this uh cool little project come up. This is a peacock maker from cypress semiconductor and they were giving away a kits for filling out an essay. So i entered that and won the free kit, and i saw they were having a challenge to come up with a design and just thought: it’d be a wild and crazy thing to do to enter their contest.
But i never really expected to win. But here we are we’re out to maker faire we’re having a great time and it was a fun project, as i learned quite a bit in a little time. The technologies involved for entering the contest i had previously three or four years ago created an electric bicycle and it has a commercial monitor on it for keeping track of the batteries.
How much capacity is left in the batteries, and i thought it would be a natural product to create a monitor that would take the signal, the serial signal of the data from that commercial product and send it over bluetooth to my cell phone. That way, i’ll be able to record the data into a database and keep track of it and make little charts and plot it and eventually publish it in the cloud it took about two and a half three weeks to come up with a development of the project. From just getting an led to flash to an actual working, uh, psoc device and a cell phone application – and i had absolutely zero experience with the psoc before, in fact, i got the kit and it was just a lot of fun. I could say learning to flash an led and then playing around with all the components that are available. The biggest challenge was actually some of the software. The bluetooth software stack has some rather obscure variables in it and actually had to post some questions on the forum to see how to solve those, but it’s actually very well packaged and made available to use, and here at maker faire, i’ve had a lot of interest From people who are interested in electric vehicles and how they can build their own and it’s a good, inexpensive starting point there with electric bicycle in here for young makers getting started, there’s just a lot of information out there to help. You get started most of it’s on, the internet, inexpensive kits are available and just get your hands dirty and let your imagination go crazy and you come up with something great .