I Hacked My E-Bike To Earn Power-Ups | Berm Peak

The Gist

A cycling creator modifies a Specialized Levo e-bike by reverse engineering its Turbo Control Unit and writing custom firmware, creating gamified ride modes like Mushroom Mode and Gaslight Mode that require pedaling effort to earn motor power.

Quick Overview

Seth Alvo from Berm Peak hacks his Specialized Levo e-bike to turn exercise into a gamified experience resembling video games like Mario Kart. By decoding the CAN bus communication protocol, building a custom ESP32 microcontroller setup with a touch screen, and writing Python scripts to monitor rider torque, he forces the motor to withhold assistance until the rider earns enough energy joules. This setup introduces custom ride modes like Mushroom Mode for timed bursts of full power and Gaslight Mode to secretly drain rider assistance.

Key Points: Seth Alvo uses a Specialized Levo e-bike as the base platform for his custom electronic hacking project. He discovers an existing open-source GitHub repository by Jamie Magee named specialized-turbo containing Python libraries for BLE communication and telemetry. Using a digital multimeter and an FNIRSI oscilloscope, he decodes the bike-side and TCU-side CAN bus wiring pairing 36-volt, 12-volt, and CAN high/low lines. He builds a breadboard-based TCU sniffer using an ESP32 microcontroller and a CAN transceiver to listen to conversations between the stock TCU and the motor. The custom Mushroom Mode requires the rider to generate 3,600 joules of pedaling effort before rewarding them with sixty seconds of full motor boost. Gaslight Mode silently reduces the rider assist level bit by bit to trick them into questioning their own fitness levels. The final 3D-printed custom enclosure houses the ESP32 microcontroller, touch screen, and Julep connectors directly inside the bike top tube.

Context: Modern e-bikes provide motor assistance that makes riding easier and less physically demanding. To counteract this and make exercise more addictive, tech-savvy cyclists can modify the proprietary electronics of their bikes to alter how power is delivered based on earned physical exertion.