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Switching to neutral on a bike engine

PostPosted: Thu Apr 26, 2012 9:17 pm
by KdGAutomotive
Hi all,

We're using a M800 for our FSAE racecar. There's a bike engine with a bike gearbox (obviously). We want to use MoTeC to control a pneumatic shifting system. Is there a way to set up a function for going into neutral? Seeing as it would only have to do half the stroke. I also don't find the function for making it so that while shifting you can't go into neutral, but only if you use another button to go to neutral. I can figure something out but I can't believe someone hasn't done this before?

Regards

Re: Switching to neutral on a bike engine

PostPosted: Fri Apr 27, 2012 2:23 pm
by MileyCyrus
Somewhat depends on you system. Do you have a physical method of mesuring gear position, rather than just calculated in MoTeC. If so, depending on how keen you are to do some programming, running your paddles (?? I'd assue you were using this for shifting) into possiblly a PDM (not really sure havent had much experience with them) or just a microcontroller, allowing for it to recognise the gear the gearbox is in and be able to fire the shifter arm in reverse, from when viewed from the idea of shifting down, for half the time. A slightly more sloppy way is just detecting when the nuteural switch is active, which I think may be vissible at a high enough resolution (some testing for you to do) when shifting from 2nd to 1st allowing once again for the microcontroller to fire the shifter in reverse for half the time agin.

Also, depending where you at with your design with everything, have you considered changing your rear sproket size, allowing 1st gear to be removed from your gearbox? ie. rather than 1st N 2nd 3rd etc it will become N 1st 2nd. Allowing a shift all the way down to land in neutral rather than 1st.

Apart from that, there is no simple way for MoTeC itself to do this.

Cheers,

Re: Switching to neutral on a bike engine

PostPosted: Sun May 20, 2012 12:01 am
by KdGAutomotive
Sorry for the late reply. We have a gear position sensor sending out a voltage depending on the gear. It's a shame there's not a simple way for doing this with MoTeC, it's not that difficult to implement this I think.. We were planning on using paddles but for now we use buttons. I think I will try the sloppy way for now and see how it works out. Using a microcontroller solely for getting into neutral seems like overkill. Thanks for the advice so far!

What is (a) PDM?

Re: Switching to neutral on a bike engine

PostPosted: Thu May 24, 2012 9:05 pm
by MileyCyrus
Good luck, let us know how it turns out.

For reference a PDM is an a device that basically replaces fuses and circuit breakers, as well as having the functionality of being programmable. You can find more information here:

http://www.motec.com.au/aboutpowerdistr ... noverview/

Cheers,