Archive for category Recumbent Bicycling
Baofeng Bike Helmet Headset Wiring Repair
Posted by Ed in Amateur Radio, Electronics Workbench, Recumbent Bicycling on 2020-01-20
The audio output wire from the Baofeng UV-5R to my bike helmet headset adapter broke after a year and a half, far longer than I expected:
It’s the green one, over on the left, pulled out of the heatstink tubing that should have provided some strain relief, having broken at the solder joint to the resistor.
A quick & easy fix, after which I reapplied even more tape to hold everything in place.
Maybe it’ll last two years this time around …
Blackburn Flea Bike Headlight
Posted by Ed in Electronics Workbench, Recumbent Bicycling on 2020-01-13
A Blackburn Flea bike headlight and its USB charger emerged from the packs on our Young Engineer’s Tour Easy, but the battery was completely defunct. With nothing to lose, I applied a small screwdriver to crack the case:
The battery is a single cylindrical lithium cell:
The USB charger seemed defunct, as it produced only a few dozen millivolts when connected and plugged into its wall wart. Cracking its case revealed a tiny buck power supply with no obvious damage, but also no output.
So I manually charged the cell:
Definitely not recommended practice, but a bench supply set to 4.1 V and current-limited to 100 mA gets the job done: the current stays at 100 mA while the voltage rises to 4.1 V, then the current drops to just about zero over the next few hours with cell held at 4.1 V.
Unfortunately, the cell really was defunct, even after a few cycles, so I conjured a not-dead-yet lithium cell from the heap:
Given a good supply, the Flea still works perfectly:
The yellow trace shows the battery holding at 4 V while the LED current runs at 150 mA (3 div × 50 mA/div). You wouldn’t want to run ordinary 5 mm LEDs at nearly 40 mA, but Blackburn surely specified good parts.
Replacing the Flea’s internal cell seems impossible, given its peculiar form factor, and grafting the PCB to an external cell makes no sense, given that it’d then need a custom bike mount.
So another chunk of electronics goes in the e-waste box.
Ride on!
Tour Easy: Fairing Strut Mounts, Redux
Posted by Ed in Machine Shop, Recumbent Bicycling on 2019-12-22
Our Young Engineer’s Tour Easy followed us home, due to a non-survivable cycling commute and inadequate apartment storage space. What with its Zzipper fairing being off and having easy access to the strut, I conjured & installed another set of fairing mounting blocks:
Should you be in need of a Tour Easy recumbent in good shape, well, have I got a deal for you. I’ll even conjure a Daytime Running Light mount, if that’s what it takes …
Wasabi NP-BX1 Teardown
Posted by Ed in Electronics Workbench, Machine Shop, Recumbent Bicycling on 2019-11-26
Thinking of strapping a big external cell next to my Sony HDR-AS30V helmet camera, I took a look inside a defunct NP-BX1 lithium batteries:
It’s a scant 43 mm long, 9.5 mm thick, and 29.5 mm wide. You’ll find more grisly details in the solid models for the NP-BX1 battery test fixture and battery holders for blinky LEDs.
Peeling off the wrapper holding the end caps in place reveals some ID on the cell:
The bottom end cap is just a plastic bumper held on with glue and tape:
The top end cap has keying indents, identifies the terminals, and falls off without the wrapper:
The C and – terminals use the same PCB pad.
The black plastic around the PCB pulls just far enough away from the cell to expose the tabs welded to the terminals:
Snip ’em and it’s done:
As with all lithium cells, the can is + and the isolated tab is -.
Given that I have a stack of tabbed 18650 cells, I’m thinking of building a cell into a structure snapping into the AS30V’s helmet mount, along with a charge controller PCB. I normally remove the camera from the helmet and bring it inside and, since I must open the back to extract the MicroSD card, plugging a USB cable into the charger isn’t much of an imposition.
More pondering is in order.
DOT-01 NP-BX1 Battery Status
Posted by Ed in Electronics Workbench, Photography & Images, Recumbent Bicycling on 2019-11-14
Back in February, a quartet of DOT-01 NP-BX1 lithium batteries for my Sony HDR-AS30V helmet camera had mediocre performance compared to an older Wasabi battery:
After eight months of regular use, they’re even further into mediocre:
In round numbers, they’re down from 2.8 W·h to 2.5 W·h and now run the camera for about 70 minutes, rather than 90+ when new. Our typical rides go for about an hour, which means I must swap batteries somewhere along the way.
I still dislike the notion of sticking a 16850 cell next to the camera and powering it from the USB charger running the M20 rear camera requires another helmet cable, but it’s obvious NP-BX1 batteries lack enough active ingredient for the long haul.
Tire FOD
Posted by Ed in Machine Shop, Oddities, Recumbent Bicycling on 2019-11-12
We rented a van to haul our bikes on a vacation trip, but the tire pressure warning alarm sounded when I turned into the driveway. Measuring the tire pressures showed the left rear tire was at 51 psi, far below the 72 psi shown on the doorframe sticker, and a quick check showed a possible problem:
The small circle in the tread to the left of that mark turned out to be a metal tube:
Their tire contractor determined the tire wasn’t leaking, the metal tube hadn’t punctured the carcass, and all was right with the world. After, of course, two hours when we expected to be loading the van.
The rental company was good about it, perhaps because I reported they sent the van out with the other rear tire grossly overinflated to 86 psi (!); obviously, their prep didn’t include checking the tires. Somewhat to my surprise, the space under the passenger seat for a jack was empty.
During the trip, the van laid an egg:
A good time was had by all, but our next bicycling vacation will definitely have much more bicycling and much less driving!
Monthly Science: Concrete Bridge Flexing
Posted by Ed in Oddities, Recumbent Bicycling, Science on 2019-10-01
Riding south on Rt 376 takes us across the Mighty Wappinger Creek on a four-lane concrete bridge built about 1995. This Dutchess County Aerial Access photo shows it in 2016:
A pothole opened up on the south end of the span last year:
NYS DOT patched it a while ago:
This year, we’ve been avoiding a new pothole opening on the north end:
It’s difficult to ride between the right side of the hole and the weeds growing from the curb joint under the guide rail, so we take the lane whenever we can. The extensive vegetation growing in the bridge structure can’t possibly be a good thing.
The bridge deck rests on steel beams across the creek, with plenty of corroded concrete along the edge:
The concrete seems to be failing by tension overload as the beams flex downward under traffic loading and pull the top surface apart. The surface has irregular transverse cracks across the deck width, not all of which look like control joints.
With potholes and surrounding cracks allowing brine into the deck, we expect much worse deterioration during the next few years.
My Professional Engineer license has long lapsed, not that I ever knew anything about bridge design, so this is mostly observational.
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