Sinclair C5 for 2017

Community General Discussions
1

Hideho anyone good enough to be reading this. I’ve a little project I’m working on and having posted on the Arduino forum and suffered a bit of annoyance in being treated as a 5 year old I thought I’d post here since everything I need is sold here so saves me a ton of time shopping about.

Anyways, if you’r British and over a certain age you will probably remember the Sinclair C5. If you don;t it’s a 3 wheel electric recumbent trike with pedal assist, it was a bit too modern for 1985 and only sold 10 or 12000 units (crappy marketing to blame). I have 2 here I’m restoring- one is almost finished and is kept as original as possible but the 2nd one I want to bring upto speed with things that are available in 2017 quite easily but weren’t in 1985 when the C5 was launched.

Originally it was driven by a single motor driving a single wheel - not the best. It used a simple caliper brake front and single drum brake on one of the rear wheels, again, not overly clever. Only display you had was a ‘pod’ that simply showed motor load and battery voltage through LED bars, no speed or anything so yet again, NOT THE BEST! lol.

To bring it upto speed I’m going to add in a second motor (a hub motor for the front wheel which will only act as hill assist so controlled by accelerometer), a more modern display system with the info needed like speed, incline, load, motor rpm, heat etc (either as hard mounted display or relayed to a smartphone app via bluetooth), modern lighting with LEDs, possibly with downlighters for better visibility (from cars) at night and to look cool lol, a bluetooth system to act as a key (paired to a smartphone, when the smartphone connects via bluetooth the power switches on (with a kill switch for backup as well) and anything and everything else within weight limits and reason.

As far as I can see I need various switches, a bluetooth controller, accelerometer, 2 x motor controllers (I imagine about 40A but I need to double check things at max load), lighting controller for LED downlighters (maybe get em to dance at power on or something) and the all important main micro controller. If I’m honest there’s so many options that I haven’t got a clue where to start. I’m a quaified Marine Engineer so know my way round circuit boards and also HVAC (not really needed lol), I’m also a developer so know code and a few other things so I have a good foundation behind me to get this sorted but I need a starting point and any tips, tricks and help from anyone who has attempted anything similar in the past.

Suggestions for the hardware- NEED!
Suggestions for how things should work together- NEED!
Absolutely any useful tidbits- absolutely NEED!

So folks, give me some advice here so I can get the ball rolling, price up the components, get em ordered so I can start making this thing happen.

The C5- seriously simple, seriously 1985. If you like cars then you’ll Lotus, Lotus actually designed the body and the thing was wind tunnel tested to 100MPH lmao! If you Google Sinclair C5 you’ll find a ton of stuff from it’s launch videos (so bad it’s funny) to modified ones with engines…if you like retro stuff then you’ll have a good laugh if you have a look

2

Hi,

Here are answers to your questions & comments:

Well, this is quite the interesting project you have there. There has been certainly quite a few major changes to the technologies available for such a product, such as much better (and much, much cheaper) microcontroller with ridiculous capabilities for < 1$ and newer things in the sensor world, such as amazing accelerometers and wireless communication modules. In such an application, I think the biggest improvement would be to battery life due to modern LiPo cells with their very high power density.

You can find most of these under our “Electronic Components” category here and “Contact & Proximity Sensors” category here. Depending on the type of parts you need, you can do a search for switches, buttons, etc. You can also filter the results by choosing categories from the left side bar.

You can find plenty of options for Bluetooth over here for telemetry/control. Since you wish to use modern smart devices, we recommend that you go for a device that uses Bluetooth 4.0 BLE as some smart devices requires that protocol to allow a connection (cough cough iOS cough cough). Be careful though, as some of these devices are Bluetooth 4.0 BLE “single mode”, which means they only do BLE and will not be backward compatible with hosts that use Bluetooth 2.0, 3.0, etc.; basically anything not 4.0-BLE.

You can find those here. There are many flavors of sensors, so choose whichever you prefer. Most of them have extensive libraries in the open source community, so none of them should be a major issue. We’ve tried the RB-Pol-230 recently and really like the fact that it includes the 3-axis compass, since it allows you to perform tilt-compensated heading (neat to know for someone traveling!).

For powerful motor controllers, you’ll want to look here. Depending on your setup, you may prefer having 2 single channel controllers or one dual channel. In the single channel category, some to look at would be the RB-Cyt-179. For dual channel, check out the RB-Cyt-169, RB-Dim-44 and RB-Bat-56.

Depending on how much control you want, this could go from a simple relay to something more complex with multiple channels to control each LED/LED-light individually.
You may also be interested in EL wire/panels or RGB LED strips, which both can add a certain amount of flare to a project quite easily. You can find such products and more (LED panels, displays, etc.) in the Lighting category.

There are certainly many options there. That being said, if you want something simple, cost effective, well supported but incredibly powerful, the [Rb-Prj-08] might be a good fit. Since it is running on a Cortex-M4F, it is plenty powerful to do most projects. The one caveat is that it is strictly 3.3 V tolerant and therefore any interfaces to 5 V DC devices would need level shifters/translators/converters. Luckily, there are plenty low costs ones available, such as the RB-Spa-879.

Indeed, such a system can certainly be approached from many directions. The best in such a case would be to settle on specific hard requirements (ex: 40 A per motor required) as early as possible in the design. These requirements will remove choices, thus making is simpler to choose components, technologies and implementation techniques.

Considering the amount of current you expect to pull out of your power source for these motors, you’ll most likely need a high discharge, high capacity battery pack. If interested, you can take a look at our LiPo packs here. Depending on how much voltage you want on your motors (most likely 12-24 V DC), you may be interested in RB-Hyp-01 (3S), RB-Hyp-15 (4S), RB-Hyp-14 (6S), each @ 5000 mAh. Of course, you may want to use multiple batteries in parallel for more total capacity / running time.

We hope this helps getting you started!

Sincerely,