Solar charged, 18650 powered recumbent bike

So I built this a few years ago, it's a vintage American made recumbent frame with a 9 Continents 2809 clone hub motor in it running on Tesla style fused 14s20p 18650 cells housed in a custom battery box situated for best handling, the bike actually feels better with the battery than without. Cruise on the straight and level if and when I can actually find any about 45 kph or 28 mph, range maybe 50 miles or so at top speed, considerably more if you throttle back to 20 mph..

The solar charging trailer was an experiment that turned out to be beyond me to make work reliably in the harsh environment of an ebike. I could make the boost controller charge the much higher voltage battery but the proper control turned out to be beyond the hardware I felt comfortable sinking money into. Both the technology and my understanding have advanced in the last few years but my balance has deteriorated to the point I had a fairly major crash and now I don't ride two wheelers any more.

Looks like it would have been one of those converesation starters & and an enjoyable hobby

Cool project! I have started to look into building myself an e-bike that i can cruise to town for getting stuff.

I have also looked into some kind of trailer for extending battery range. The solar part on it was nice too. Not sure if its usefull for just going back and forth to town here

Daromer, it was your comment about the 7210 being a boost controller that reminded me of my bike, a boost controller was exactly what I needed to make the solar work...

I wanted to do something like this at the time, the bike is a masterpiece... Now I've been more or less forced into another path but that's life.

Cool!

That last bike more look like an attempt to a bike-airplane Wouldn't want to drive that one when the wind is picking up

My biggest gripe about the trailer was it having two wheels, then you have three tracks to worry about dodging debris and potholes with instead of just one. I've dropped a trailer wheel into a big pothole after dodging it with the bike and had it nearly flip the trailer over.

The bike in the video won the race by a substantial margin, not even close. I can see how the panels would both help and hurt stability, help by raising the center of gravity and as you point out they'll catch the wind some but all of the competitors had the wind problem with panels.

Regarding trailer. Im using this kind of trailer behind one of my bikes:




It tracks really good.

Thats a cool idea lets face it you may as well catch some sun while your out and about and minor range extension :] my ebike pulled 1400 watts so id need a few panels