I dropped by Halted and GreenEmotor. Allen Chen had a lithium battery pack ready for me, so I went home and tried to charge it. Unfortunately the charger blew up the moment I attached it to the battery pack. Not quite sure what happened there, so instead I took the pack of 8x 3.2v 12ah cells and charged them with the old UPS by charging 4 at a time. The lithium ion cells are rated at 3.2v, but they actually top off at about 3.9 or 4.0 volts, and some had dropped to 2.8 or so. I left these charging for several hours
March 2nd
I made some rough tests of the generator motor. They reveal a bit of a problem.
| Pedaling Cadence (rpm) | Current (A) |
| 50 | 0 |
| 60 | 0 |
| 90 | 1 |
| 150 | 5 |
| burst | 10+ |
FYI, 60rpm is a nice leisurely pace. 90 is fast paced, while 150 is frantic. These results are not surprising. The battery voltage is 24v, so below that, there is no current flow. In some earlier testing, I was able to generate 36v by pedaling hard. That’s 12v at roughly 10a (actually a bit more, as the meter topped out at 10), or 120watts. Since the LWB recumbent took 350w of energy to travel at 25mph, and that was about as fast as I could go on it, that gives an efficiency of less than 50%. Not good, but not surprising.