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Build Your Own Solar-Powered Scooter
An anonymous reader writes "CBC is reporting that the Biomod company in Montreal has released plans for building your own solar scooter for only $1600 (in Canadian funds, no less!) Hopefully the engineering community will take an interest, and add brakes to the blueprints..."
Those aren't penguins, they're Microsoft's answer to AOL's "Oscar" icon. They're supposed to be people, but they look like a failed attempt at bringing eWorld's people back from the dead...
I don't know if I've seen anything that stores energy from pedaling (b/c when you're riding you really don't want something dragging on the wheel & slowing you up). There were some kits that, I think recharged during breaking, but from what I remember because of the light weight of bikes (?), the amount of energy gained from this wasn't too great.
Do check out electric-bikes.com, it's an interesting website. I actually purchased plans to make a Slipstream Electric Bicycle, but it's a bit too much for me in both the money and being-able-to-put-it-together dpts.
Those already exist, kinda. They have regenerative breaking on some models to put power back in the battery when you hit the brakes when going down hill.
None of them actually store energy while you just pedal though, as far as I'm aware.
It is a proven fact that most nerds spontaneously combust at the site of the sun.
Also, I would be willing to bet that the starter from a small 4-cylinder car would provide the torque that you need for something like this. They run on 12v DC, and usually have an internal flywheel that spin up for a second before engaging the shaft so that you don't have a stall time while the motors output is balanced equally against the resistance on the shaft, causing it to just make a sad whirring sound and not actually doing anything.
On the downside of your plan, unless you deviced some craft gearing scheme, you would be petaling against the extra drag of the electric motor all the time (with the plus that you would generate a little electricity - not nearly as much as you are putting into it, tho). On the other hand, I wonder if the above mentioned starting motor might not solve that problem by disengaging the shaft from the motor while there's no juice being applied. If so, you would be just spinning the extra weight of a smallish gear and a short steel shaft... nto much in the grand scheme of things.
I should look into that... could make a cheap bike mod.
By far the coolest-looking solar bike I've seen is the XR2-solar that won the 2001 Australian Solar Challenge. It's just a slight modification of the standard Ground Hugger XR2 plans that are available online.
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