This is a project that we have been working on for three years and quite a couple of inventions / redesigns but it is a whole lot of fun!
Some of the interesting features that we added is the auto activation of the station based on soc or battery consumption.
We also have a whole lot of sensors running - checking how big the gates are open , temperature of the alternator , speed that it s running and obvious the amount of energy produced. Most of it was build form scratch so there will always be room for improvement.
Here is the layout the dash with the basic functions (newest addition) the more advance stuff is showed in the video.
I tell you that was a challenge in it self.
So they are designed to have pedestrian and full open with a motion trigger that will fully open the gate if triggered. If I remember correctly that is called free access. More or less the opposite of what we wanted.
If some thing were to go wrong you would prefer to have a one button that closes every thing So the general operation ended up as follow
3 button s
Trigger (T) - Open Gate , Stop gate if opening or closing , Close Gate in that Order
Free Access (F) - Open gate fully - always
Pedestrian - Open gate x amount and then close after y time
Now to the fun part (Keep up )
If free access is pressed the gate will always open doesn’t matter where you have stopped it unless it is fully open then nothing happens.
So to open the gate - F
To stop - T
To close - F - T - T unless it is fully open the only T ( Note that there is NO TTT - as this will result in some smoke)
It took a while to get it all working but now it is running smoothly we can adjust the gates up to 10% accurate.
Yes it is cool but there is quite a large cost to set it all up , personally I am not sure that it is commercially worth it considering what Lithium Ion batterie are doing these days.
True , but there is a lot of custom mechanical parts there. We attempted to keep every thing as standard a possible so that you can easily replace units should the need arise.
Very cool idea I must admit. I can already see some other uses
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