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amiga10/01/20242 repliesview on HN

I'm a guy who has disassembled and reverse engineered a standard Jazzy power chair, and what I noticed was the attention to detail regarding failures. The chair is thoroughly designed to shut down at the slightest bit of trouble. There's some redundancy in things like the controller, where it used redundant hall effect sensors that were identical to the others, but ran in an inverted power profile, to detect any weirdness in the sensor outputs.

I ended up adding a long range remote control to it. A remote control power chair is fun to drive around. People do get a little concerned when they see a chair rolling around without a driver


Replies

orlehuxwell10/02/2024

My mum recently had a curbside crash while she was riding an e-bike. This resulted in her breaking bones in both her hands, which resulted in a surgery in her left hand and various problems (tcl fracture related) with her right hand.

This makes me actually appreciate reliability in e-vehicles motor cutoffs etc. I keep thinking if this could have been avoided with a better quality e-bike or if actually it would be even worst with a cheaper one.

Which makes one think, how often a wheelchair with cheap e-scooter parts would crash people into staris, cars etc

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crooked-v10/02/2024

> People do get a little concerned when they see a chair rolling around without a driver

Add a hat and a scarf on a wire and you've got a Halloween prop.