Events

Since its completion, the kart has been in-and-out of the garage quite frequently. At each opportunity to take the kart out on the street we don't miss it. Everywhere we go, we're approached by crowds of interested onlookers, people turn their heads to see our contraption drive around, people smile. Our kart draws attention from very young to very old, and everyone seems to welcome the growing idea of using electricity as a resource for transportation. We're glad that our kart is becoming an example and a first experience for our audience. (yes, taking the kart out is becoming some sort of a performance)

Here's a long post with summaries of events that we attended with the electric kart.

13-16 August 2009: HAR2009

The first trip with the electric kart was to HAR2009, the event that was our deadline for completing the kart. The kart was very well received by the participants/hackers/technologists/nerds/... at the conference. Over 100 visitors tested the kart.



In the picture below, you can see the kart in the camping field in front of our tent.



If you look closely to the front right wheel in the above picture, you'll see we encountered a small problem, a burst tire. A friendly karting center in the neighborhood provided us with new front slicks, for free! We tipped the guy who willingly changed our tires generously, this saved our weekend!



Here's the rear "blinkenlights" light for the electric we constructed while at HAR2009, doing its thing:



I love the following shot of the electric kart. Hiding from the sun behind a towel, I'm trying to get my EEE PC working on the wireless network of the hacker camp site.



Summary: Visiting HAR with the electric kart was wicked. We had a blast with our kart and so did many others.

20 September 2009: Car Free Day in the historical center of Antwerp

On this sunday, the center of Antwerp was car free. People were invited to come onto the streets, but without their car. Well, as our kart is not considered to be a car by law, we took it downtown and drove it around in the midst of a less technically oriented audience (as compared to HAR2009). The response was beyond what we could've expected, people were very fond of the electric kart. We had various chats with many people, took the kart for some wild spins on the usually crowdy downtown streets, and had lots of fun.

Obviously, some hacking was required as well. In the following picture, Tim and Walle are fixing some wiring of the kart at a café on the central market place, smack in the middle of the historical center of Antwerp.



17 October 2009: Spa Francorchamps

Across the street from my house is a garage that specializes in Citroën 2CV cars. Pieter, the owner of the place, has an extremely modified 2CV car that he enters in the yearly 24 hours endurance for 2CV race cars at the Formula 1 circuit in Spa-Francorchamps.



Pieter wanted to take the kart along as a gadget to drive around the terrain. He had a blast, and obviously we (Tim and Anthony) also attended the race to play around with our electric kart.



Here's the kart in a pit stop, in the same place where F1 cars come for their maintenance :)



3 November 2009: Indoor karting

Unexpectedly, Pieter had arranged for us to take the kart into the indoor racing track of Inkart. So I got out of work, drove down to the track and had fun to demo the kart to the track owners.



Everyone who could gave it a try driving it around the track and everyone had experiences to share. Yes, this kart drives very differently because of its non-stop high torque, batteries on more powerful karts unfortunately suck (for now) and no, you don't have the smell and sound of a gas guzzling engine. Developments in technology and the market of batteries are promising and may very soon be changing the whole market of karting as entertainment. It seems that electric karts may just as well become widespread in just a few years' time. We'll keep on evolving and developing our kart to try and get ahead of the hype. Electric kicks gas!



So, what's up next? Electric kart version 2.0? More soon.

Walle drifting with the e-Kart

Time to step from behind the camera and have some fun ;). Carmen was nice enough to film me testing the kart's drifting capabilities :



We noticed drifting to left is easier than to the right. This might be due to the worn tires. The other possibly is that the weight of the batteries needs some redistributing. This is something to look at together with pimp'ing it with leds during HAR 2009 ;)

Tim has worked out a simple analogue circuit for breaking and head lights.

Second video with even more drifting action from Anthony and me coming soon. Need to capture it from an analogue camera first ;).

Protective hood

After bumping our elbows on the motor a few times, we were very happy to see Dirk bring the protective hood he made for it. A nicely constructed glas-fiber-epoxy-resin-compound-material that fit perfectly...

Here is Anthony fixing it on:

The cart with the hood attached:

And the builder of the hood testdriving this excellent addition. Thx Dirk!


Oh and here is Anthony again enjoying the fact that now increased the safety of the cart... while driving with no hands... hmmm...

The observant viewer maybe saw that the batteries now have a cardboard cover... Not quite as high tech as our epoxy motor cover, but it keeps us from short-circuiting a55V17A system which does produce quite some fireworks... (trust us)

To close this post maybee just one more of Anthony actually trying to lose grip and skid, drift and the likes...

Photosynth of the kart

Here is an attempted PhotoSynth of the kart... (you will need to install the silverlight plugin) You can click for different angles and detail of the cart.

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=9F016576-2354-4CB7-8D08-DABE51D48299

As we are getting more and more comfortable with the safety of the kart, we're taking our kids along in the testdrives now...

A few videos of test driving our electric kart!

Finally, here's a video, one of the first test drives of our electric kart, me and Staf doing a little driving for you:

Here's video giving an overview of the kart, where you can see many details of the kart's parts.

Additional construction pictures

Some pictures of the final building session have turned up.

Here I am starting the final build day with some adjustments for the engine-sprocket connector, to allow the chain a bit of space.

Tim (Lucason) joins in on the fun and starts hacking.

Finishing the final details for the first test ride, getting the tires pumped up and the last wires fixed to the frame.

Here I am, during the first test drive. Currently, we can use the foot throttle to speed up, instead of holding the original scooter's throttle, as in this picture:

Here's Lucason with a very suspicious "is this safe?" look on his face, during his first test.

As you can see, more people turn up as we're making progress. I'm pretty sure most of our neighbors know of my project by now ...

The drawing board

Today, we've been playing for about 3 hours with the kart. I've seen the whole neighborhood about 10 times, while driving around for about 10km, on a single charge. The kart is an awesome toy, I've had lots of fun practicing drifting and such :)

Here's something different about the kart. My garage door is covered in blackboard paint, and is the perfect place to do some brainstorming, think out little details, and make miscellaneous notes. Here's a picture of the door:

From top to bottom, you can see a solo brainstorm on how big the threaded wire needed to be to fit the sprocket on the motor, placement of these threads, some small notes on wiring batteries and the length of the chain, some feminine shapes that Els drew because she felt the garage could use a couple of boobs, a sketch of what the battery frame needed to look like, and various drawings by Staf and Louis.