coldturkey

Hey Zeb, in short yeah but we are leaving Thursday night and staying the night in Timaru or somewhere similar. Then we'll be back in Dunners on Sunday night. If that suits then you are more than welcome to jump in.

Yesterday I got my bike into a working state. It has to be in a specific gear for the chain to not fall off, but bring it on!

Thanks, yeah I have read the guide and understand fully etc. Does that seem funny to anyone else that the car manufacturer factory can but the suspension manufacturer factory can't.

Hello fellow enthusiasts. So it looks like my factory original strut has Cast welded to steel, would this mean I cant use it for a coilover mod? Seems kinda ridiculous. Also it's unclear in the photo if these are welded at the bottom or not, what do you guys reckon? The pic is off Yahoo Japan so its not simple to ask the owner for clarification. Cheers

I finally get to find out if yoeddynz speaks in Will Shatner's voice like he does in my dreams.

Fuck yea. What a coincidence, I am a fan of beer!

I plan to be in chch about mid day so can pick up any stragglers

Fucken choice. Stickers? So what's the consensus on getting a bicycle going for this. I have yet to see if my tyres hold air and if it moves forward at all, and if not its a question of do I throw some money at it to make it so. How many people are bringing bikes?

I wouldn't worry too much though, dane may accidentally be left behind

does it come with bumsecks?

That radiator overflow bottle cap is really letting you down homes. Looks fucken amazing. Does it have inner guards cause it would suck to get gravel rash all in your engine bay.

Cool wheels. Did you end up getting raped for gst

Me and danger will try join up with you, we are coming from Dunners/Invers but staying the night somewhere so hopefully will be near Timaru on Fri morning.

fuck I would be keen to get my hands on some of that spray on chrome shit. Nothing much on the website they mention though http://www.chromesolutions.de

No, don't be ridiculous, just make it so the wheels lift 15mm off the ground.

Oh, I studied engineering so I know all about that stuff. I also work as a control systems engineer, so I also know that in real life situations that shit hardly ever works as intended and educated trial and error yields sufficient results

Sorry corbster, bit early for me as will still be travelling north then. But @TenFive if you land around lunchtime then I could prob give you a ride?

Yep anything like that is possible. Problem with that is by doing that you are essentially messing with the PID variables, and if depending on the road ahead (hills and shit) you can mess it up and get overshoot/undershoot oscillations. Unless you opted for a different form of control. I have thought about some kind of custom control based on acceleration/decceleration and the target speed. But then that is basically what PID control is so didn't bother re-inventing the wheel. Edit: As phib3r said there are options that can simplify aspects of it like a prebuilt controller board. Theres certainly way more than one solution. Im not sure what they are like but there is a lot of code overhead for the continous servo and speed stuff. You want a pretty high clock speed (the PIC is 4Mhz), at least a couple high speed timers and multiple IO interrupt capability. Vacuum control could be another option, instead of a rangi servo pulling on a string

Ha. It's hardly something that I would want to build and offer up to someone else, due to the backyard spec-ness of the whole thing. But I mean I could help out with aspects of it and program a chip if you were serious and were prepared to mount all the gear yourself. The only problem is that it would probably take a lot of jiggery pokery in the code to get it working right, I doubt it's a one-size fits all thing. And you aren't just around the corner in case a code change needed to be made.

Ah I follow you. Problem with that is you still need circuitry to drive anything that requires resonable current etc. Most of the stuff is external to the main circuit anyway, as you can see from my schemiatic the main board itself is pretty basic. It would be handy to be able to plug directly into your computer though I was getting really sick of pulling out the chip each time I wanted to change something. Should have engineered in some programming headers.

What do you mean exactly by that Simon? Like a pre-programmed chip with some inputs/outputs?

To be honest I can't actually tell how much the servo is moving while driving. It would be interesting to know though, I could write some code to flash an LED every time the Servo moves more than one increment. The only thing I can tell is when it backs off the accelator sharply and I get some spluttering, but after getting the parameters right I dont get any more of that. The PI control is sweet, it does overshoot a little when hitting the top of a hill etc but thats to be expected (it cant tell the future).

To be honest it took a while. Most of it was re-learning shit that I learned over 7 years ago at Uni. Maybe like 20 hours all up including all the installation. Of course it would be like a third of the time if I did it again. But it was a fun challenge, so the time didnt really matter.

lol cmon bros, way ahead of you all. I have finished posting now.

The verdict: It actually works pretty damn well considering. It struggles a bit at the beginning of a hill, might lose 10kmph, and over the crest of a hill it might go 10kmph too fast. But modern cruise control isnt much better and the beauty of it is that I can modify my algoritim. Adding the derivative PID term will probably help but cant be bothered at the moment. Hmm so the total cost of components was about $80. The thing to program the micro was about $200, but I have wanted one for ages anyway and will use it for many more wacky and zaney shit. Im not sure how to demonstrate that it works, apart from a big thumb's up and bring on the 8 hour drive to hamner! Discussion Thread/Tell me im crazy