I love it! Absolutely clutter free bike...no ugly wires
Very nice
Thanks all! I missed riding the ole girl.
I took her to the local ice cream join last night. Couple of dirty looking, over weight, black t-shirt HD riders gave me the usual... "why did you remove all the plastic" routine. I told them i having the inside of the plastic washed.
First let me say your work is phenomenal as
someone who started designing PCBs to replace ferrite bead core memory I really like what you have done
Rock on! Thx.
That is some cool ole skool sh*t there. Awesome
.
If you don't mind, I'll send you the preliminary design for ver2 of this project. I could use the input from another EE who also have a passion for motorcycles?
Dammit, why couldn't you have made an extra prototype, then I wouldn't have had to use a motogadget
Haha. Actually i did buy parts for 3 kits as promised, one was(is) allocated to you and other for Mark at MotoCreations for his "Orange" project. However, i just couldn't meet your target date. If i had finished this project sooner, i would have loved to forward you a sample. Time was a limiting factor and the fact that I kept putting it off. I had other Ducs to ride. So it was not a line down situation. Besides it's a v1.0. Like ANYTHING "v1.0" there are slight hick-ups??? I believe version2 is in order. The main reason is the CINCH ABS plastic housing i chose. It is made my same folks who makes the stock Ducati connectors on the ECU. They make good auto connectors, but their PCB housing is a piece of SH*T to say the least. And not to mention some errors in their documentation. Had major issues crimping/installing the wires into the box. I designed the PCB around their housing. I wanted a fast solution. My mistake. Should expect this much from a French company - Ha!
Version2 i'll make my own housing and thus will allow a ~30% reduction in size. And I'll also be adding a GPS radio into the design. I want to extract ground speed and heading information. I believe with a good active antenna this is possible even in the most difficult of location for GPS signals. This will allow the elimination of the wheel sensor. Thus one less wire showing. Another cool factor.
So see... wouldn't you rather have v2 instead?
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One of the downsides to low current operation is that even the tiniest bit of oxidation can cause contact closure detection failure. On my S4RS the starter button does not connect to a relay but to the ECU. I was having intermittent failure to start, push the button and nothing. When I looked at the schematic I realized that the started button was not connected to a relay. Pulled the handle bar switch apart, used a pink pearl on the contacts. After "careful" reassembly (what a PITA) and water proofing it has been working fine ever since. The oxidation was so slight I was only able to notice it because I had seen it before on numerous back-plane connectors.
Very true. Especially with different contact materials or contacts that are open to ambient environment.
I'll be using something similar to these. (See pic below). Ingress Protection = IP65. Tangshan contacts. More resistive to oxidation. Picture shown is Blue. They come in Red and Green and even Tri-colours. Was thinking about also using them as idiot lights? The buttons will double as idiot lights. Again less clutter up front.
CAN bus sounds like a great idea, won't you need a small microprocessor up at the handlebar to encode all the switches up there?
Definitely! I was thinking sending 2each ~16AWG(mostly for headlight load) and a ~24AWG twisted pair for data comm. It will basically be a half-duplex I/O expander. Probably find an off the self unit if anything. I've seen some on eBay. What would be really really cool is just send the 2 power wires. Then put in a small RF transceiver locally to eliminate the twisted pair.... haha. But that maybe over kill!
