Someone found
the article on Auntie Helen's blog, so I wrote a long-term review as a comment. I'll repeat it here:
It's been a few years now, and while poor health hasn't allowed barakta to do much cycling in the last year and a half, that's not the trike's fault. Overall, we've been pretty pleased with it. There have been a couple of issues though, and decisions that we would make differently with the benefit of hindsight.
The DIY battery pack has performed flawlessly. I genuinely thought this was going to be the weak point, but it's been fine, in spite of the occasional ride on really rough surfaces.
The motor itself has been extremely robust, though an experimental attempt at removing the freewheel was a failure. (I've never had much luck removing freewheels, and dread what happens when the sprockets wear out.)
No problems with the crank sensor either, it was fit and forget.
We had a problem with the console randomly losing its wireless connection to the motor (requiring a wait for the console to go to sleep and a power-cycle of the system to re-establish communications). This was less annoying than it might have been, as the system is capable of operating without a console, but you need it to change assistance level. This was eventually resolved by obtaining a newer version of the motor's Ant+ dongle from Falco.
The Falco console itself is rubbish though. It's a silly shape that takes up too much space, the screen has poor contrast, the assistance level display is too small, and the membrane switches are horrible to use (there's no tactile feedback). More critically, the waterproofing is pretty much non-existent. It didn't occur to me to open it up and disconnect the internal battery after a ride that ended in monsoon conditions, and when I tried it the next day I discovered that the internals were corroded to the point of permanent damage. (We removed power from the motor immediately at the end of the ride, and once dried out it was fine.)
To their credit, you can use an Ant+ equipped smartphone app as an alternative to the console. But that's a poor solution for all the usual phones-on-bikes reasons.
There's Windows software for fine-tuning of the motor parameters, which is a good thing. It's buggy and completely lacking in documentation, which isn't.
More practical considerations:
Torque sensing is great, but it's not really compatible with gearing down and climbing slowly. Barakta's preferred technique is to engage 'Turbo' mode (which puts the motor to full power irrespective of torque) for serious climbs, and wait for me at the top. As such, we'd quite like easier access to 'Turbo' (you have to hold down one of the console buttons for just the right amount of time, which is awkward on the fiddly membrane switches) - eg. as another level of assistance beyond '+5'.
Having a massive battery pack on the rear rack is good for rear-wheel traction (often a problem of tadpole trikes), but the handling of the trike really suffers. This isn't a deal-breaker for us, as barakta isn't really a speed-demon, but I'd advise against it. With hindsight I overspecced the capacity of the battery, but that's more down to barakta's health not being up to the longer rides that we initially anticipated.
Our main reason for choosing a hub motor was that it was the easiest way to fit a motor to the trike in a way that was removable in future. In practice, this hasn't been as useful as we anticipated. The only times I've really wanted to use the trike myself have been *because* it's got a motor on it (for hauling a heavy trailer, and when recovering from injury), and barakta prefers to have the option of assistance for hills, even if she's mostly pootling on the flat under her own power.
The console being wirelessly connected to the motor remains a pointless complication. I can see it might be beneficial on a mountain bike, but it's really not worth the faff of an extra battery to worry about otherwise.
If I were doing it again, I'd go for a lightweight motor at the bottom bracket and a much smaller battery mounted under the seat. I've recently helped a friend choose an upright bicycle with electric assist (they settled on a high-end Kalkhoff with a STEPS system, and it's revolutionised their mobility), and have been very impressed with the current offerings from Shimano and Bosch.
Falco are still going, but seem to have lost the plot slightly, concentrating on using regeneration as a fitness aid, rather than improving their console.
Team Hybrid are no longer a Falco importer. I believe they had too many quality control issues. Make of that what you will.
