Writing here after a long time!
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I’ve been cruising around on my trusty Ampere Reo electric scooter from 2017, and it’s just hit the 50,000 km mark. But, as expected, I’ve noticed a significant drop in its range (surprisingly 50k kms, right?). Instead of saying goodbye to my ride, I’m thinking about giving it a bit of a facelift by upgrading the batteries and throwing in some cool extras like a better screen, GPS, and snazzier LEDs.
Quick rundown of my ride:
Model: Ampere Reo 2017
Manufacturer: Ampere
Battery Type: SLA (Sealed Lead-Acid) 12vx4
Here’s the plan so far:
I’m looking into using an ESP32 for local Wi-Fi communication for basic parameters
Fancier LEDs.
Considering adding a SIM28 module for GPS, especially if I decide to throw in a GSM (already have sim900) module for tracking. Considering STM32 too - getting my hands dirty.
Speed-wise, it’s all good – the top speed of 35 km/h suits my local needs just fine.
Now, I could use some advice on how to kickstart this project and where to dive in. By the way, I’ve got a background in electronics a master’s in computer science, and an okayish amount of knowledge in electronics - ready to explore as always xD
So basically, new batteries and some cool upgrades. Any tips or anything related to this?
there is an LCD-based ESP board. supports Bluetooth and wifi. you can connect an analog signal to a digital signal converter for battery charge percentage/ speedometer, if you are more into programming, then maybe a Raspberry Pi setup for a more miniature Android OS.
I mean changing the motor to an pm axial flux one rather than the bulkier radial bldc present on board.
About the inline partly due to not finding the proper word and partly I was trying to convey something regarding the poynting vectors which I hastily forgot to add atm.(I’ll get back to you once I do remember).
ahh!! not really - keeping the motor components the same. but maybe I can consider if the cost factors are not so much comparatively. Scooter is only for local use, so i think replacing batteries would do too.
The thing is getting the battery seems a challenge for me.
Hence the question regarding motor change as it might give you better efficiencies even with similar batteries as getting a battery pack might be a bit challenging if you’re thinking of changing to batteries with a different composition.
wow, thanks for sharing - yes I can code into it. The reason for not using RPI was power input and thought it would be heavy in consumption. I will give it a thought
Against this tbh, even though touchscreens and tech fascinates me.
Unless he can leave the Raspberry on and powered 24/7 (which is unlikely), turning the scooter on everytime would mean 1-2 mins waiting time for Android to boot up.
There is also the issue of safely shutting down the RPi before turning off the scooter. Abruptly cutting off power can lead to corrupt SD Cards
There’s a simple solution for the second problem, I guess it will require an extra microcontroller to cut off power to the RPi when shutdown is sensed and restart the RPi when key is turned on.
that would have been agreed, but with yesterday’s new launch of the Pi 5 board, things have changed, now it supports much better hardware. if not Android he can switch to Linux. but will be hard to setup GPS, and networking.
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