Velo Plus employee Manuel Maier has hacked together an power drill motor, Lupine light battery and some buttons to create an electronic dropper seatpost.
He told us the actuation time from top to bottom is around 2-3 seconds. It’s controlled via a switch on the left that flips the current so the post will go up or down, and a button on the right to send the current to the motor. Before anyone even says it’s a slow, inelegant system, know this: It’s only version 1.0. He’s already working out improvements for the system.
Push that button and drop below the break for more…
The motor drives and achieves 75-80mm of travel, but Maier says that can be increased. It’s built into a no-longer-offered Maverick Speedball adjustable height post and drives a threaded axle through a fixed “bolt” in the top part. The axle has bearings to keep it in place and spinning freely.
Where could this go? The first thing that comes to our mind is building something into the smooth, minimalist Fox iRD lever and use a Di2 battery…if it could deliver the power necessary to drive a motor like this.
Actually, Maier told us he did have a smaller battery hidden in the seat tube until accidentally shorting it out, now it’s external and borrowed from a Lupine lightset. Among other features, he’s working on a smaller, single sided control unit that uses two simple buttons, one for up and one for down. He’s also working on adding programmed stops throughout the travel.
