Time for some progress

Over the last few months, we've been stuck with budget problems. Getting a motor (like an E-tek R), a controller (like an AllTrax AXE), batteries (4 standard 12V car batteries), battery charger and various parts (cables, components) would've easily set us back 1500 euros, which is quite expensive for building a prototype electric car, just for the fun of building it.

But today, we're at the end of a long quest trying to find a solution for this problem. We've found an importer of Chinese electric scooters in Turnhout. His warehouse/garage is packed with a bunch of electric scooters that aren't allowed on the Belgian market, or on Belgian roads as they're not licensed.

This afternoon, we'll be picking up one of these brand new scooters for about a third of the price we would've paid for separate parts, and we'll have a complete kit to build our kart. The scooter will have a motor, batteries, various electronics and wiring, even stuff like a battery charger will be included. So the plan for the rest of today is to go and pick up this scooter, drive a few rounds with it in order to see how great it is, and then, immediately start tearing apart the shiny, brand new scooter. We'll be extracting the electronics from the scooter, get it back to work outside of the scooter's body, and in the mean time we'll research ways to mount it on our kart.

It's a bit of a shame that we'll be destroying a new scooter, but it'll save us quite a few bucks.

More updates will arrive soon, as time is becoming sparse. We have 1 month left before our showcase at Hacking at Random.