CONNERLABS

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  • Zero X facts

    [Fork about and find out]

    Here I’m documenting the things about this bike that I couldn’t find out anywhere else. This post will be updated as I find out more.

    FORKS

    They look cool AF but have no identifying markings and there is no service information to be had anywhere. Google AI thinks they were Zero’s own design.

    They had absolutely no damping and made horrible clunking noises, so we (myself and the bike’s actual owner 🙂 ) decided to open them up and try to service them anyway. Sorry for the lack of pics.

    They turned out to have a quite similar design to mountain bike forks that I’ve serviced in the past, like the Rock Shox Pike and Domain. Indeed the Zero has a standard 1 1/8″ threadless MTB headset, and downhill MTB forks would probably fit and work well.

    The left hand leg (the one with the brake caliper) contains a coil spring. The adjuster knob on top is coil spring preload. There is an air valve in the bottom of this leg that just seems to generate more preload. We added a small amount of oil to this leg and put it straight back together.

    The right hand leg is a combined air spring and damping cartridge. The adjuster knob is rebound damping.

    This one was squirting oil from a blown O-ring when we got it. We replaced all of the O-rings with ones from a kit bought from Amazon. 🙂 They seem to be metric but a bit fatter than the most popular metric sizes.

    To open this leg you have to release any air pressure, unscrew the top, empty out the oil (there was practically none left) and compress it fully, which will reveal a nylon nut on top of the inner leg. Undo this nut and the damper innards will come out of the inner leg, which can then be slid out of the outer if desired.

    This leaves a floating air piston in the bottom of the inner leg which can be ejected with air pressure to the Schrader valve. (If you forgot to release the air pressure, it has already hit you in the forehead.) The piston has 2 O-rings that probably need replaced too.

    We had to figure out the oil volume for this leg by trial and error, by adding more until the damping started to work. It ended up about 250ml. I tried searching for this info online, but the internet couldn’t decide if it was 85ml or 350…

    10wt Castrol motorcycle fork oil was used, because that was what Halfords had on the shelf. 🙂 40psi of air pressure in the coil spring leg and 85-100psi in the damper leg felt about right.

    ORIGINAL BATTERY

    The original battery was completely missing. It died on the previous owner and got lost when it was sent back for repair.

    It was a 14S12P arrangement of Molicel 26700 lithium ion cells. These were some of the first high-drain cells, capable of much higher discharge currents than the typical laptop battery.

    After studying the construction I can’t imagine how this battery could have failed prematurely 🙂 but here we are…

    MOTOR

    A Motenergy ME0708 brushed permanent magnet DC motor. Capable of 4.8kW continuous and 15kW (20.1hp) for one minute.

    CONTROLLER

    An Alltrax NPX 300A model with custom firmware for Zero. Not reprogrammable or tunable.

    DASHBOARD

    Has a LED bargraph voltmeter, a LED that turned green when I stuffed that resistor in the battery temperature sensor plug, and two switches: 25/50mph speed limit and low/high torque.

    The power has to be cycled using the ignition key or handlebar kill switch to make these switch settings take effect.

    More info: The LED goes solid green when the bike is ready to roll and flashes various error codes when there’s a problem. I verified 6 flashes for battery undervoltage lockout, the other suggestions might be AI hallucinations…

    I opened up the dash and it looks hella complicated! There is a Microchip dsPIC in there. I think it must be performing some kind of throttle mapping to make the bike feel less like a golf cart 🙂 The Alltrax controller has a half throttle input, but it isn’t connected to anything.

  • Tesla Space Gun 2000

    Tesla Space Gun 2000

    For this year’s Gaussfest I decided to make a dub siren and connect it to Odin.

    A dub siren is basically a very simple analog synth used to make sound effects for dub reggae. The original ones were a simple circuit with two 555 timers, but there are all sorts of variations on the theme. I was especially impressed by the Rigsmith GS1, which seems to contain some sort of toy sound effect IC.

    I’m sure I had something similar mounted on the handlebars of my Raleigh Chopper in the 80s. How hard could it be to build one?

    After some Googling and searching eBay, I found a surplus dealer selling some promising looking chips: the HK620 and HK623.

    To make my dub siren I copied the data sheet application circuits almost exactly. The only change I made was to replace the timing resistor (“Rosc” in the datasheet) with a 1M pot in series with a 47k fixed resistor. I also added a 3.3 volt regulator so it could run off the standard 9V guitar pedal supply.

    Buttons… So many buttons…
    And a Hammond diecast box and some other bits and pieces

    It sounds identical to the Rigsmith! Have they been shopping at Budgetronics too? 😀

    Testing with a delay pedal and guitar amp

  • And we’re back

    Finally got round to fixing the server yet again

  • Odin construction videos





  • Error codes of history

    -100,000: Come down from the trees? [Yes|No]

    -99,999: Are you sure? This operation cannot be undone.

    …….

    1066: Invalid media in I: (Fatal)

    1492: Unexpected “Indians” in atlantic.c

    1690: Oppress any Catholic to continue

    1861-1865: Slave not responding

    1920:  Distiller performed an illegal operation and will be closed.

    1939-1945: You must be an administrator to install the Third Reich.

    ……

    2000 and above: Volume “La-Z-Boy” is full. Please delete some of your beer gut and try again.

  • The Tesla Guitar

    My Tesla Guitar video has got quite a lot of views lately, so I’ll try and address some of the comments people have made on it here.

    1. Yes, the sound comes out of the sparks. There are no other amps or speakers involved.

    2. Yes, it sounds pretty harsh and horrible, no matter what pedals I try. It also needs a different playing style than you would use with an ordinary amp, and even then it sounds awful! Any chords more complex than octaves or fifths just sound like noise.

    This is a consequence of the way the signal is processed into pulses for driving the Tesla coil. I’ve not figured out a way to improve the tone without losing the lightning-like look and large size of the sparks.
    It works much better with bleepy waveforms from a monophonic synth, which is why the other famous musical Tesla coil sounds better. The only part of the video when you can actually hear a melody, is when I played a lick that I’d found to work well with guitar synths in the past.

    I think some Youtube poster suggested a hexaphonic pickup and six channels of processing, one per string, and he is right, this would help a lot. But I don’t really want to build another five channels of electronics and recharacterize everything for EMI all over again. Anyway, the terrifying distortion might even be useful in some kinds of music!

    3. What pedals did I use in front of it? For the video, a Marshall Shredmaster distortion pedal. It actually makes no difference to the tone, but adds sustain, which it was sadly lacking otherwise.

    4. It is possible to mic it up safely, I’ve done it!

    5. I’m still waiting to hear from Trent Reznor and Muse :-<

    It’s not the easiest or safest instrument to practice with, but I’m working on improving the sustain and adapting my playing style to it. Watch this space for a better sounding demo!

  • Hello world!

    #include <yay4wordpress.h>

    int main(void)

    {

    printf(“Yay my blog is working\n”);

    return(0);

    }