The original way you built an e-bike was with a motor hub, wires, some sort of speed controller, and a battery pack. You had to figure out what that all meant in practice for your frame of choice but there were several forums for bikes that could help. I’m sure all that is on Reddit now as well.
Framework is solving the “I’d like something modular but slicker than a Clevo and with a support line that is willing to go a bit further than selling an ODM unit to a middle man like Sager.”
If you don’t know who Clevo is but you know who Framework is, that means Framework’s plan is winning.
For E Bikes there are a couple big brands with good support and some boutiques that will take care of you. The big box store stuff using Bosch parts are more of a Wild West.
We have most of those, but they're high-level abstractions (voltage levels, Vulkan), so you need bulky translation layers (shims, drivers) to interoperate with the hardware.
What I really want is detailed schematics, ideally machine-readable, so I can attach things together at the lowest level that my use-case requires, while still able to use high-level interfaces if I need to.
When two devices that naturally speak the same, simple wire protocol have to interoperate via USB-C because of regulations, I cry a little. This isn't how things were meant to be, and isn't what the regulations were meant to achieve.
There already are ebike conversion kits like that. The problem is they generally aren’t legal since they aren’t capped at a certain speed. And the battery packs have a history of exploding in flames
Framework is solving the “I’d like something modular but slicker than a Clevo and with a support line that is willing to go a bit further than selling an ODM unit to a middle man like Sager.”
If you don’t know who Clevo is but you know who Framework is, that means Framework’s plan is winning.
For E Bikes there are a couple big brands with good support and some boutiques that will take care of you. The big box store stuff using Bosch parts are more of a Wild West.