Show HN: I Designed and Built an eBike

Re:Show HN: I Designed and Built an eBike by ehnto on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @07:43PM (#30448861)

There's a lot of regulations around e-bikes already, that enforce speed limits to the assist, after which it's all human power, zero assist. It is of course about safety, but it's also about dividing up the regulations between e-bikes and e-mopeds, the latter coming in so many shapes and sizes. That is also why the regulations usually specific that it must be pedal assist, not throttle controlled.

If it walks and talks like a bike, and only goes as fast as the average cyclist, it is probably a bike. But if it has a throttle and goes faster than your average cyclist, it's probably closer to a moped at which point you need a license, different kind of helmet, turn signals, registration, so on and so forth.

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Re:Show HN: I Designed and Built an eBike by ehnto on Thursday February 24, 2022 @01:47AM (#30451415)

To clarify why I posted that, I was referring to the mention of the power cutting out suddenly on commercial e-bikes. They only do that because of the regs, and commercial mountain E-bikes do the same thing, because of the same regs. They are not limited by their technical capabilities, just the regs.

Older bikes used the circumference of the wheel and a count of rotations to calculate the speed, so people could de-limit them by changing the stored circumference constant in the eeprom. Modern e-bikes use a combination of sensors at various locations to detect motion, acceleration, pedal force and tilt angles to decide how to apply the power but I think even with those added sensors, the speed is still detected via the wheel rotation sensor.

Seems some people don't like the regulations as the parent comment got downvoted, rest assured I did not single handedly write the global regulations, and I don't like the speed limiter either.

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