It's been just over a month since I bought my new Connie. I have been busy with a few modifications that I will outline over the next few days. I will be starting with my installation of a cruise control. After all, when riding the bike home, it reminded me of my Busa. It is very hard to maintain a speed and very throttle sensitive.
I talked with my brother, and we decided to build a cruise control using a Arduino Nano, other support electronics, and a GL1800 servo. Here is an article where another guy started to do the same, but didn't get anywhere with the project after this article:
http://moto-abruzzo.com/active-cruise-control/. The servo is 3 steps per revolution. With the gear ratio, it provides about .015" of cable pull per step. The servo unit also has a clutch that can disengage the cable pull. We use this funtion by pulling the brake, clutch, or killing the power with the switch.
In order to decrease lag time, you have to pulse the servo 70 steps just to start pulling the cable. After that, you have another 110 steps to actually control the speed. The stepper motor made the best torque with a 15ms pulse duration. So far, the best response and speed control happens with a 25ms delay between the 15ms pulses. We can set the speed tolerance above and below the set point. Right now, I'm running a -0.5 mph and a +1.0 mph tolerance, which also seems to hold the speed to somewhere around 2 mph total variation with a fair amount of ups and downs in the road. I'm sure speed will be lost on very steep grades, because the level ground speed is limited to something just over 100 mph. This is because I'm not actually pulling the throttle lever, but instead a custom lever that is also actuated by the secondary butterfly servo. This design gives very high resolution, with a cable movement of about 1" to only rotate the butterflies about 20 degrees. When you rotate the throttle, the throttle lever simply pulls away from the cruise lever. Since the throttle movement is limited by the cruise lever, the cruise cannot give the bike enough throttle to create an unsafe condition.
For the controls, I wanted something that was clean and simple. The waterproof switches are mounted in the tank cover. Once you get to the speed you want, just flip the rocker switch on, and it will lock on that speed. The momentary contact push button has two purposes. It is used to resume speed, and it also has a 1 mph per push speed increase. I like to turn the rocker switch on at a speed just shy of my intentions, and then add a few mph with the push button. At this time, if I have the speed set around 70 mph, and I hit the resume from 45 mph in overdrive, it will only overshoot my set speed by about 2 mph. I know with more testing, and more work on the program, we will be able to further refine the performance. Right now I'm very pleased with the results, and plan on making a 400 mile trip in the next week or so.
Michael
