Comment by oulipo2
3 days ago
(Gouach co-founder here) We're happy to be on the front-page, here to reply to any of your (many) questions!
We've been testing our batteries for 3+ years on an existing free-floating mobility fleet with our friends from Pony in France, they've been sustaining heat, cold, rain, snow, shocks, people throwing them in rivers, etc, and we've been able to improve them incrementally!
Today we're very proud of our product: it matches the performances of the best brands, it offers connectivity, and we plan to open-source the protocol and make it hackable, so you anyone can use it on any bike!
For now we've reverse-engineered and reimplemented major protocols (Bosch, Bafang, Brose, etc)
Happy to take any question you might have, and if you're interested, you can order a battery here :) https://gouach.com/products/infinite-battery-complete-kit?va...
(BTW: we've been trying to reach out to Louis Rossman to talk about what we do on his Right to Repair podcast, but couldn't reach him, perhaps he's here, or someone could ping him to know if he'd be interested? we love what he does and he was a source of inspiration for us!)
Oh: and of course, since this is HN, I have to mention that we coded our firmware in Rust!
Looking at your roadmap (I appreciate the transparency): https://gouach.com/pages/roadmap
> Implementing Geolocalisation [sic] on Batteries
It should be fairly easy to integrate them into Apple's and Google's FindMy networks, as they are BLE-enabled. Maybe that's your plan? This is the kind of improvement an open source firmware would enable (though if you document the internals well enough, we could also bring our own microcontrollers or custom firmware).
Anyway, I am itching to buy one, but I do not own an e-bike yet (just a few old "La Poste" batteries I would like to salvage the cells of). I will be in the market of an e-bike next year, and would love it if your battery was an option offered by bike shops with new bike purchases.
Have you considered expanding this idea to more than just ebikes?
For example at least here in the US lithium ion tool batteries come with lots of different connector shapes just to lock users into a brand and are not repairable. Manufacturers charge a lot for the batteries, often more than the tools, and if (when) they go bad they just have to be thrown out. Manufacturers even occasionally "upgrade" their battery designs so that they're not backwards compatible to force purchase of new batteries for newer tools. A universal repairable tool battery would likely be a big hit!
Another use case might be USB power packs. These are all sealed and not repairable. They go bad after awhile and the whole thing is waste when it's most likely just a single cell failing.
'Oulipo' nice username, you have a background in litterature?