Eco-Friendly Electric Cart / Scooter

Low budget go-cart for fun build utilizing various discarded elements.

xobmo

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Description

I have always wanted to build a go-cart or scooter but never really got the chance to. My parents owned a dirt car racetrack for a few years when I was younger, but I always had to work there, not race. Doesn't everyone love that need for speed feeling? How about we save a little trash from the landfill and a few of our fresh air molecules and take this project for a little spin.

Details

I want to use as much of the treadmill body as possible for the frame, and mechanicals. I was looking at how the motor was mounted and belted to the front roller and I thought, If I could make a chuck for this it could be a really nice drill press. :P Alas, I have no lathe. Another day. Anyways, here's a few pictures of the broken down treadmill. The board that was bolted to the frame could be used as well to mount the seat on. Gotta find a seat!

The control panel for the treadmill I will attempt to hack and make a dashboard for the cart. Hoping I can squeeze in a voltage display for the batteries, and control the screen to display other stats.

Few pictures of the 18650's I am sorting through right now:

Well I guess that's one picture.

Components

1 × Non-working Treadmill from Craigslist - Free The guy who listed it said the controller had some kind of issue - stuck in demo mode and no stop key. Don't care, took it apart. Thanks Dave Jones!
1 × 18650's from discarded/salvaged laptop batteries - Free http://www.electricbike.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/AllcellPCM.png

Project Logs

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Project Scrapped
xobmo • 08/01/2016 at 14:32 • 0 comments

Project Scrapped - Literally. Sorry but not. Now I can use the motors for something else!
Building the batteries
xobmo • 06/24/2015 at 00:28 • 0 comments

Well, I don't care if it has 5 minutes of run time at this point. Still looking for more batteries. I plan to use a Texas Instruments MSP430 for the battery monitor as we don't want to undervolt the batteries to a unsafe level (>3.2 volts.) At this point I am building a lithium ion battery charger for three 18650's in series.
http://shdesigns.org/pdf/lionchg2.pdf
Credit to http://shdesigns.org/lionchg2.shtml.
To be able to run this motor on 3 of these 11.2-12.3v batteries which is roughly 1/3 of the rated 95 volts, how much current draw will I have?
Half finished prototype of the charger circuit: Can you see what is missing? besides solder and skill of course.
Front:
Back: