Making prototypes

So far I have made a handful of prototypes for friends & family:

Doing them by hand is quite a lengthy process. The general workflow is

• applying solder paste to the PCB and placing the SMD components
• reflow soldering in oven
• first power up test slowly going from 0V-60V while checking that there are no shorts and all power converters are working correctly
• flashing the firmware and bootloader
• configuring the bluetooth LE
• soldering the THT components 
• cutting the aluminium heat sink, drilling 6 holes and cutting the M3 threads
• applying the kapton tape and mounting the MOSFETs
• drilling a hole in the panel for the grommet
• mounting the whole board on a bike and doing a test ride

All in all it takes me well over three hours to make one controller by hand.

Currently I am looking into producing a batch with seeedstudio. The goal is to achieve a very competitive price tag of ~90$. This is about half the cost of what you currently have to pay for a cycle analyst and a controller while being a lot more powerful and lot less cabes.

Stay tuned for more updates....