equals zero

I can finally call the thing “done for now” after about a month of on-and-off work. It can run in its current condition, and just needs the battery charger (which the company I ordered from conveniently left out in my order for a battery charger).
Things left to do:

1. Tuning
2. Battery armor
3. COLD CATHODES!

Anyway, no Major Build Disasters were logged, which is fortunate. It had its share of problems, however, including misfitting components, random switch shorts, and way too many hot soldering iron burns.

Some final build pics!

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Another day of work and the Electric X²/2 is within a few hours more work of movable! Electric X²/2 is now the official project name, and it is a play on the original Sharper Image Electric X2. It’s not mathematically sound, but you shouldn’t be reading this page for mathematical discourse anyway.

Pics!
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What an exciting day. The ginormous brushless controller arrived from Hong Kong today, and it is ginormous indeed. In fact, it’s bigger than I had planned for, warranting a slight on-the-fly redesign of some of the structure. It also turned out to be quite troublesome – in that whichever sweatshop worker in Southeastern China assembled it was sufficiently drunk at the time to reverse the power input wires.. that is, red to – and black to +. This led to quite a harrowing adventure where I just barely manage to tie down the controller’s white, poofy soul.

And also some mechanical work.
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…but I’m getting other things done while it floats over by the Trade Currents. It really should be here tomorrow. Meanwhile, battery chargers and battery maintenance equipment are also on the way. This is turning into a usual engineering project for me – that is, it ALL gets done in the last week.

Things that are done:

1. Powertrain mechanics
2. Battery pack
3. Power-converter-signal-generator-thing

Things that are not done:

1. Throttle assembly
2. Electronics mounts / side panels
3. Instrumentation
4. Wiring
5. Testing
6. Breaking
7. Crying
8. ..and Aaron, I didn’t forget this time: Cutting self and ranting on MySpace!

Pics from the past few days:

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I should have picked express shipping on that controller. But meanwhile, here’s some more random tidbits I am working on in preparation for it.

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