Journal
Overview Video
The wheelbarrow originally came with a small rubber wheel that was 25cm in diameter. This wheel only had an iron axle and had no bearings. An example of this can be seen in the first image. This wheel was then replaced with a larger wheel 40cm diameter steel wheel with tubeless tires taken from a golf cart. Alongside Faris, we fabricated a new adapter hub on the wheel to firstly make it fit the wheelbarrow frame and then improved it by adding steel ball bearings to ensure it ran smoother and could handle rougher terrain. Some of the challenges in this part of the build were finding the dimensions to make it fit and also ensuring that it was bonded to the chassis in such a way that it wouldn't fall off when it took heavy hits (an occurrence which actually took place during testing) . Smaller casters were also added to the rear mounted on a track made from scrap metal, in order to improve mobility and stability. in order to achieve that stability these had to be mounted as far wide as possible.
The Wheel
Motor + Controller
Electrification was the key objective of the project and therefore the motor and controller were one of the key components of the build. The motor, designed for an e-bike, was purchased from Ali express and shipped with the controller. The first issue we encountered with the motor was that the torque being output was way too high for a wheelbarrow of this weight and size. Therefore using a geared sprocket and a bicycle chain the motor was geared up for more power and less torque in a 3:1 ratio.
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Errors-
While wiring the system up the first time there was no power running through it and it produced no drive. In order, to find out what went wrong I had to take apart the controller and motor. However, this exercise turned out to be for nothing as the issue was that we were using a bad wire in the circuit connecting the batteries. Therefore, this taught a valuable lesson in problem solving which is to assess the simpler components first.
The batteries were 12V each and therefore, three of these batteries were wired in series to produce a total of 36V which was the input required by the motor to run
Batteries
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Welding
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