Long Story about how I ended up where I am today with my power wheels project.
About 2 years ago a buddy heard me talking about building a power wheels. Said I've got something that might work. I ended up with a motor, transaxle, controller that didn't work and a bunch of cut off control wires. I got it working on a bench by seeing a gap at TH1. The rigid leads to something we're still sticking out of the board like a capacitor or something shot off. I checked voltage and jumped it. It worked on my bench and I thought it was fixed. Life happened and we moved.
Fast forward 2 years to last month. I was given an old pedal go kart and thought there's my frame. Wired it all up. Tried using my RC grade 500w 18v power supply to drive tethered to an extension cord. Assumed throttle cutoff was happening due to less than 24 volt supply. Randomly would stop like an intermittent connection somewhere. Grabbed 2 3s Lipo batteries from my fpv quad. Still am getting the random drop out where it just goes back to neutral, but using the Lipo was able to haul me 250lb plus my 4 yr old 40 lbs around our cull de sac. Including a pretty steep incline up the road via the sidewalk. I drove it through the grass and it would slow slightly and power through and up and over the height variance of the driveway and grass. It gave me a glimmer of what this would be like, the best power wheels ever!
and totally worth my efforts to make this work right.
Grabbed two 12v 8.5 ah ups batteries I had, and it can't put the amps down. Still have some random drop to neutral like a glitch in the 5k ohm throttle. But I just adjust the pot back to 2.5 ohm, it's a wig wag throttle, and start moving again. I can't find a short yet, but if I let the entire pot and wires rotate in my hand, kind of like dropping the pot wire assembly and letting it hang, it drops to neutral.
Bought a volt and amp meter, installed yesterday. Only showed up to 5 amps when applying the parking brake. Previously on my bench using my multi meter I was showing up to 3 amp but that was unloaded with me holding the wires to the leads and I assumed poor connections were limiting my current.
Today two things should arrive. 5 volt foot throttle to try out a different control method and prove out my potentiometer. And a cheap Amazon 40 amp pwm dc controller to troubleshoot my motor. Don't want to use this due to lack of soft start and auto parking brake.
If you made it this far thank you for reading all of this.