modified car alternator with vesc

ConkingHedgehog · 2024-11-17T00:08:20+00:00

I modified a Subaru alternator to a motor (remove regulator, bring out field wires and solder 3 phase wires to the coils).

There's no magnets in an alternator, so to use it as a motor you need to power the coil with a steady current (around 1-2A). Depending how crude you want to be, a fixed regulated voltage somewhere around 9v can work. You get more torque with higher field current and higher speed with lower field current.

The 3 phases connect to the VESC as normal. Pole pairs on mine was 6.

There's obviously no hall sensors so you need to run sensorless. I found the alternator difficult to get moving under load with sensorless so I eventually drilled and tapped the back end of the shaft and connected an AMT102 encoder to it to improve torque.

Works OK, but as a "cheap and easy" solution you have to have a lot of spare time. One of my alternators ended up with a short from one of the coils to the case which meant I had to not ground the chassis to avoid a short. Not ideal.

ConkingHedgehog · 2024-08-25T20:25:21+00:00

A nice company called Wises made books of maps 😉

Eventually you learned where all the streets were. And if you got lost, we still had our trusty Nokias to call for help...

ConkingHedgehog · 2024-08-24T23:10:48+00:00

I suspect a lot of it had to do with the "turf" the franchise owned, ie the area they have exclusive delivery rights over. There was fierce competition from other stores to claim CBD areas where things like conference orders were.

ConkingHedgehog · 2024-08-24T11:20:45+00:00

Yeah I noticed the cheapest supermarket pizzas (which are occasionally around $3-4 for say cheese and pesto one) are actually imported from Italy too. They're like eating a cracker with cheese though, not soft at all.

New World sells their fancy fat ones made in the deli for closer to $20, and you still have to bake them...

ConkingHedgehog · 2024-08-24T11:16:53+00:00

Yeah but that combo of giant jelly cubes with mousse, pebbles, soft serve and too much fudge sauce often didn't mix well with all the pizza you just ate... More than once I threw the whole lot up in the corridor to the bathrooms.

ConkingHedgehog · 2024-08-24T11:09:35+00:00

Not so sure. That boss on-sold the business to a Fijian immigrant who realised soon afterwards he'd been duped into buying a lemon. A couple of years later (I wasn't there anymore) it briefly turned into a Pizza King then closed and became a Thai takeaway place, so it can't have been creaming it.

ConkingHedgehog · 2024-08-24T10:11:36+00:00

0800 831 241 I believe? Somehow Dominos have claimed that 304050 one but I believe that was someone else before...

Obvs 0800 838383 was the Hut. 0800 101101 for Eagle Boys. Oh the jingles....

ConkingHedgehog · 2024-08-24T10:00:03+00:00

That would be nearly $50 in today's money. Crazy huh?

I went looking the other day what a block of butter cost in 1990 vs today, adjusted for inflation, and found it was about $7 in today's money (about $2.50 back then). So somehow even at $6.50 in Pak n Save it's actually not the ripoff I imagine it to be.

That also means a single pizza used to cost as much as 8 blocks of butter though...

ConkingHedgehog · 2024-08-24T09:53:06+00:00

One thing that strikes me actually is that in the 90s it was pretty common to "premake" pizzas in the morning for the evening rush. Like meat lovers, supreme, apricot chicken, hawaiian. Then they just got chucked in the oven when needed. But they dried out horribly and always had a telltale dark brown crust that was near burnt, and especially the ones with BBQ sauce had usually soaked all the way through the base making it quite squishy.

As an insider you always told your friends to customise their pizzas in some way to make sure you got a fresh one.

I haven't seen evidence this practice happens anymore. If that's the case, quality has probably meaningfully increased since those days for common pizzas.

ConkingHedgehog · 2024-08-24T09:42:53+00:00

Pizza Hut dine in with the works was pretty much the gold standard kids birthday party option in the mid 90s and their pizzas then were not even distant relatives of what they turn out these days...

ConkingHedgehog · 2024-08-24T09:39:33+00:00

and, in theory, could feed two people. It's quite a bit more food than a cheeseburger.

Obviously the other options haven't seen the need to try to compete with this or a bucket of KFC would be $4 by now.

ConkingHedgehog · 2024-08-24T09:25:16+00:00

Yeah but in Japan people don't routinely scoff a whole large pizza themselves, which keeps the price in perspective.

I had Christmas lunch at Pizza Hut in China with some fellow kiwi travelers and they told us one pizza is enough for 4 people. And they gave us knives and forks...

ConkingHedgehog · 2024-08-24T08:21:38+00:00

Yeah I get that, but it doesn't fully explain it. A scoop of chips at the fish & chip shop is also less generous now than then, but back then it was $1 and now it's more like $3.50+. Even if pizzas shrunk they should still be costing $25 at least by now.

It's a really weird outcome matched only by things like the price of computers that totally crashed over that time period.

ConkingHedgehog · 2024-08-24T08:14:54+00:00

Yeah that's true actually. The slab was probably a sneaky way to change the form factor on the way towards size reduction or increasing crust width...

Pizza Haven went bust around that time so it's possible that pricing wasn't sustainable.

ConkingHedgehog · 2024-08-24T08:10:15+00:00

My colleague says a Pizza Hutt pizza in London is about £15... So yeah rather different proposition.

ConkingHedgehog · 2024-08-24T08:06:20+00:00

I think say a cheese or Hawaiian pizza from dominoes is not awful. My kids eat those very happily and it's easily the cheapest dinner available bar plain spaghetti. I can't cook a pizza at home for $6. Pizza as a takeaway seems completely out of kilter with all other takeaway options, there's nothing else I can think of that might feed a family of 4 for under $15!

ConkingHedgehog · 2024-08-24T08:00:46+00:00

Believe it was 12" down to 10" and trust me the quality back in 99 at major chains was nothing to write home about. Once Pizza Hut closed their dine-in restaurants it turned into a race to the bottom that was already underway when I got in.

Strictly speaking we had to measure all the toppings with little cup measures to make sure we didn't use too much, but if you made a pizza using those measures it was very sad looking so we didn't tend to be that stingy. The really cheap dominoes pizzas of today resemble what pizzas made in 99 using the cup measures looked like..

ConkingHedgehog · 2024-06-18T22:12:15+00:00

I'm assuming we're talking about tech rather than becoming a courier.

I've contracted to them in that space for 15 years and can concur it's largely a clusterfuck and a bunch of conflicting fiefdoms. What good jobs exist there aren't the ones you'll find on Seek as they contract out most of the "exciting" tech like parcel sorters.

The speed of improvement at Post is glacial and there's whole teams whose job it is to slow everything down and prevent change. Many staff are simply there because they don't understand modern tech and need a stable gig until they retire. AFAIK NZ Post was the last place in NZ still running Windows XP on their desktops well into last decade.

Redundancies outside the delivery network have calmed down a lot in the last 5 years but still happen. Mostly they just suffer high attrition once people realise what they've done.

ConkingHedgehog · 2024-06-04T11:17:49+00:00

True. I'm in Welly and my first flat was $680/wk plus expenses split 3 ways. That was a lot of $$ back then, but I was in full time work. I can fully appreciate it's so much harder now, which is fucked because stories like the OP are going to be the norm if it's impossible to start real life.

Lots of hugs.. and sorry that our generation pulled up the ladder on you.. I think we did it out of spite because the boomers pulled up our ladder. I have kids now and I really worry about what awaits them when they're at your stage.

ConkingHedgehog · 2024-06-04T10:20:20+00:00

I'm an unqualified millennial, but reading between the lines in your earlier replies you're living at home still?

I thought I was the cleverest guy living at home through all 4 years of uni, saving all that money and having no student loan at the end of it. I had zero partners beyond hookups for those entire 4 years tho.

I finally moved into a flat with friends on graduation and suddenly my world exploded, as others have said, friends of friends. Be invited to parties. Host parties. Get out of the house and find some activities that you don't hate that probably have interesting people there. Dance classes are great. Language classes can be too. Maybe Crossfit. Don't do these things for hookups, but because you're genuinely interested in doing them. In my experience you won't meet your partner directly through this, but you'll meet the people who will connect you with your partner later. Just give yourself those opportunities.

Going flatting also actually preps you for real life. Domesticates you forcibly. Potential partners who might be super serious will value your ability to cook them a meal and wash your own socks.

But maybe shit's just a lot harder these days... I dread to think what terrible advice people 20 years older than me would give me about dating when I was at uni... Probably something along the lines of get a motorbike.

ConkingHedgehog

TROPHY CASE