An idea occurred to me regarding the issues of throttle legality and also the level of assist a bike gives you relative to your cadence.

 

Why not make an electric bike that has a throttle but it only works and can only be used to give assistance when the pedals are rotating? In effect it would be like having a variable assist level control.

 

Then whatever cadence you like to pedal at you can decide on the amount of assistance you want

This is fine now, and allowed within the EU regs. They also allow you to have a throttle that works without the pedals rotating, up to a max speed of 6km/h.

 

It's pretty straightforward, in principle, to change the controller firmware so that the throttle works on it's own to 6km/h, then switches to a variable assist level control above that speed.

 

It would even be fairly straightforward to make a simple add-on interface between the throttle and the controller to do just this, I think, by intercepting the bike speed signal and assist level and throttle inputs to the controller and smoothly allowing the transition from throttle only to variable assist pedelec as speed increases.

 

It's not at all hard to do, but I wonder if having to maintain a throttle position to get a particular level of pedelec assist might get tiring after a while?

That's zackly what my missus' Powabyke X6 does: Still eating battery though, so I'm going to have to fit one of d8veh's limiter pots. to compensate for ham-fisted throttling.

That's not a throttle though is it? It's an infinitely adjustable power level control. The new Tongxin kits have exactly this type of control.

I have arthritis in my right wrist and it gets to be agony after a while, so I have a version of the d8veh mod and just use my throttle at the top of hills. If I do ever convert the bike its going to have a display unit with power control.

Many Chinese made e-bikes destined for Europe have been like this, throttle operating though the pedelec's overriding control.

It's a really good idea Oigoi - as long as you don't have a problem pedalling. BMSBattery sent out a batch of KU63 controllers that oprated like that, but by the time I found out, they had all gone. What I'd do is substitute the throttle for a potentiometer, and then you could adjust the power/speed to anything up to the maximum, but only get it when you pedal. The Storck Raddar works like that and the EMotion Neos are similar. I asked Speedict to incorporate this function into their next software release, but I'll have to wait a day or two to find out if its done.