The OneDock universal micromobility locking & charging station

Last week iMOVE and microFleet held an event at which the OneDock system was unveiled at a live event in Port Melbourne. The event was recorded, and below we have two videos, the first the product launch speech from microFleet Chief Operating Officer Al Reid, and the second a Q&A session.

What is OneDock?

The OneDock is a The OneDock is a universal locking, charging, tracking, and sharing system for all electric bikes and scooters. The iMOVE project from which the OneDock is being developed is a result of a winning bid in iMOVE’s Impact Extension Program.

In the two videos below microFleet COO Al Reid runs over what the product is, and what it will become. A transcript of each video appears below the two video players.

Video: OneDock launch

Video transcript (edited for clarity)

This is OneDock. You’re looking at the charging dock itself. There are two parts to our system.

Let’s start with the dock itself. This particular dock can charge two vehicles and you can see the charging cables up here. As well as being charging cables these are locking cables. They have a stainless steel cable inside and are quite strong. You lock and charge the vehicle with the one cable.

Inside the post there are programmable smart battery chargers and they can charge any lithium-ion battery chemistry, plus lead acid batteries plus nickel metal hydride batteries. They basically cover every type of battery on the market ranging from 24 up to about 60 volts so very smart chargers sitting inside the dock.

Probably the secret sauce to our system is the other little device that you can fit to any micromobility vehicle in about five minutes. I’ve got one sitting here. This we call OneKey. It’s fairly compact, with a whole lot of smarts built into it. I’ll show you where you can attach this to a vehicle then you can use it to lock and charge the vehicle first of all, then I’ll point out some other features.

The dock holds the front wheel. Now if he pulls out one of charging cables from the dock and then you plug it into the socket on the side – you can hear a little beep there – and the vehicle is locked into the dock.

In that box is a unique digital vehicle ID. It tells, via the charging cable, the smart programmable charger in here what sort of battery is on this vehicle. In this case it’s a  Bosch 36 volt battery. It tells the charger please switch to the charging program that matches a Bosch 36 volt battery. It even does the electronic handshake so that it can open up the battery’s Battery Management System (BMS) and start the charging cycle.

The LEDs on the back change colour depending on what the charger is doing – whether it’s locking, charging, or whether it’s not in a dock at all. At the moment, we are sort of fudging slightly a bit just using a phone to force change the colour, but obviously the production version will automatically tell you what sequence the vehicle is in, whether it’s locking, charging, and so on.

There are some other smart features. So let’s first of all unlock the vehicle. We’ll tap that with an RFID tag. In the production version you’ll actually use your smartphone to unlock the vehicle.

Let’s say you’re now taking this bike out and about, we’re designing a locking cable that is actually part of the OneKey device or you can work with a chain lock as well. So you can pull up to an ordinary bike hoop, thread the cable through the bike and plug the cable back in the socket, and it locks again. You don’t have to end your trip in one of these charging docks, but the point is that as long as you do this from time to time it’s going to recharge your battery.

These docks could be at your workplace for example, when you take your bike home at night or ride it to the train station, you can use your own cable just to go into the socket and lock it to another object at the train station, or at home. And then when you come back to work, plug it into OneDock to start charging again.

The beauty of this device is that we can layer all sorts of technology with this. It also has a GPS tracker. So this works for private and fleet vehicles. You can see in real-time where your vehicle is, you can see its battery charge status as well, how full your battery is, whether it’s run out. It has an accelerometer, which detects movement. Let’s say you’ve docked the vehicle and somebody comes along and tries to steal it. It will then detect that movement and send an alert to your phone and there’s an audio alarm on the device which is quite loud. So that will help deter people from nicking your vehicle.

It has the LEDs which can work as a taillight facing to the rear or as a headlight facing forwards. And of course it comes with a smartphone app that includes a fleet management dashboard. That’s all built into the system. I’ll come back later to what tech we’ve built into the system.

So why does any of this matter? Who is this for? Well, it turns out that OneDock has lots of lots of applications. We are talking to, for example, lots of universities. There are two main ways you can use OneDock. You can park and charge private vehicles provided they’re fitted with the OneKey. It only takes 5 minutes, and once fitted it is permanently connected to the vehicle. And by the way, I should point out this little cable down here is then joined to the vehicle’s battery. It stays plugged into the battery so every time you lock and charge.

As well as private vehicle locking and charging and tracking – it can all happen using this –

probably the primary use is for share fleets. So at universities, they’re looking at both of those cases (private and share vehicles) because they have lots of students bringing their privately-owned bikes and scooters into lecture halls, finding any available power point and plugging it in. The university has no control over the quality of the batteries that people are using. And as you’ve heard before this can start battery fires plus all the cables are tripping hazards which has become a new, big problem.

But universities can also put shared fleets in the same docking station. You can have a fleet of scooters for example that can be shared by everybody. And you mount the OneKey device almost anywhere on the vehicles. And we’ve got this special v-shaped clamp on the back, which we’ve put a lot of thought into and made it completely universal. We’ve got different sized clamping mechanisms in there, so it doesn’t matter how thick the frame is you’ll fit it on.

So universities are a big use case, and then there’s private enterprise. If you run an organisation you can provide a fleet of vehicles for your staff or they can dock their own private vehicles. Local government are very interested in this for a similar reason as universities, but they are also looking at bike share libraries. If you’re a property developer, and you’re building say a build-to-rent residential apartment building, and you put in a OneDock station, then all tenants in that building can share a fleet of electric bikes, cargo trikes for disabled people or even quadricycles, for example. The same goes for office buildings in cities, so at the end-of-trip facilities you can put in OneDock stations like these and that will do the same thing.

Tourism, we’re speaking to a few different tourist operators, obviously you can have rental fleets, unlike current day rental fleets our system, which is completely vehicle agnostic, you can put anything into it. And via Brite, one of our partners, you can provide vehicles designed for disabled passengers. You can roll a wheelchair up and carry wheelchair passengers around.

Transport. To cover first and last mile gaps, and I’ve mentioned train stations a couple of times. Really big OneDock stations could be installed at every train station. I don’t know if you know, but in Victoria at metro train stations the government has provided 40,000 car parking spaces free of charge. Now imagine the amount of land that occupies around train stations which are incredibly valuable plots of land. That’s where you want to be putting shops and things like that, but no, the land is taken up by car parking spaces. At the same time, only 3,000 bike hoops are provided at those same train stations. 40,000 car parks, 3000 bike hoops. That just makes no sense to me. Each of those car parks cost between $14,000 and $60,000 to build. So for that in each of those car parking spaces, you can not only have a OneDock station, you can have all the vehicles to go into as well at the same price. I just seems nuts to me, what they’ve done.

Anyway, so that is a huge opportunity. You could ride your e-bike to the train station, dock it knowing it’s safely charging and locked, get off at the other end, say Southern Cross station in the city, pick up a scooter from a OneDock station and ride to work. So you can see how OneDock could help fill those first- and last-mile transport gaps.

Finally, in regards to last mile delivery, our sister company Electric Vehicles has been around for about 20 years. We’ve had the Australia Post e-bike contract for about the last 15 years. We have about 2,000 of our e-bikes running around most cities in Australia and Australia Post is very interested in OneDock because it will give them all that live data that they can’t currently get from their vehicles.

Because of the in-built accelerometer it can detect if an Australia Post worker has a crash, it will detect that sudden deceleration. Send off an alert to head office, “You know it looks like there’s been some kind of crash”. So this system has lots of other good features like that. And of course there’s the lock and charge feature. At the moment when the postal delivery riders get back to the depot you just plug your e-bike back in, and one of the problems we have at the moment is that often they rip the chargers out of the walls because they forget to unplug the bikes when they leave the depot again.  That’s quite good for our business, replacing chargers, but it’s not really good for Australia Post. So yes, there are lots and lots of different applications.

But how do we make all this happen? Where did we come from to get to this point, and how do we take OneDock to the world? Well, Scott Dixon and Steve Smart are the two directors of our company, and they self-funded the development of OneDock for the first two and a half years, and I’m really grateful to them for having faith in my vision. We were then very fortunate in September last year that iMOVE Australia gave us a $500,000 grant to accelerate the development of OneDock and get it to the point where it is today and take it right through to the point where we can actually start to build these things.

This launch is not only about our having nailed the technology, but also to let people know that there is an investment opportunity. You can invest in microFleet which is the company behind OneDock, so if there’s any investors in the room, we’re very keen to talk to you.

Once we launch, which will be later this year, we will be building these in Melbourne, so we’re also interested to speak to local manufacturing partners. We’ve acquired a lot of interest here in Melbourne, but of course our eyes are fairly set on Europe which is the biggest market in the world for this. We’re fortunate in having partners who come from Europe and the North America too, so we have a bit of a lanchpad into Europe and the US.

But our ultimate goal is to make OneDock the industry standard for micromobility connectivity. Because if you fit one of these to any vehicle suddenly that becomes a connected vehicle, it becomes a smart vehicle, it’s part of an intelligent transport system and that really is a big change.

So I’d like to thank our supporters. First of all iMOVE Australia, who have been incredibly generous with the funding this past year – they’ve been great partners so thank you.

Outerspace Design in Melbourne have been fantastic to work with. Dave here is the lead Mechanical Engineer who has done a lot of work on all of the complicated stuff that goes on inside this and inside the dock here as well. Outerspace Design has been fantastic and have been working with us for a couple of years now.

Grin Technologies have provided the smart programmable charger that sits inside the dock, which is the best battery charger in the world. Trackap is a French company (our launchpad into Europe), have given us the iOT module that is embedded in this device that has all sorts of smarts built into it, plus the front-end and back-end software and software as well.

And finally Brite, who I mentioned before, will hopefully build these for us here in Melbourne, using intellectually disabled people in a supportive workplace which is what they specialise in, and that’s a really good story.

In summary, OneDock is about connectivity for micromobility. There are lots of opportunities for people here to get involved. We’d love to take you on a journey with us and we plan to export this to the world.

Video: OneDock Q&A session

Video transcript (edited for clarity)

The units you’ve got here aren’t plugged, Is that just for just for demonstration, or are they wireless?

No, that is just a demo. When we mount this in production models, we will actually put a cable down to the battery. As you can do now as with any bike lights, we can move it down closer to the battery.

So, it requires professional installation?

It requires somebody without too many skills because we’re developing all of the different plugs that go into all the different battery types. And that’s the only bit of the system that changes. It’s literally the end of the cable. Different plugs to go into different batteries. This unit is smart enough to know what sort of battery it’s plugged into so nothing else needs to change.

And is the tracking accurate enough to know what the rider is doing? Because one of the big problems with shared fleets is that riders don’t obey the road rules. The fleet should be policing that. Will the system provide that sort of accuracy?

That’s a good question. I’d have to go back to the specifications of the IoT module, because that’s what does the GPS tracking. The accuracy of that is within a couple of metres. Whether that’s quite enough in some circumstances to tell if somebody’s riding a footpath, for example versus riding on a bike lane, probably not, but one of the things we could do in the future is actually embed more smarts in this box, providing much more positional accuracy. So that sort of capability could be built into it.

Just on that, I think there are others out there that specialise in very detailed stuff. But where this could become a box with third party things, put API into it, in a sense it becomes the container for a whole range of micromobility tracking sensors for different purposes.

That’s right. That’s very much how we view this box, it’s just a platform and we’re really happy to partner with other technology providers to embed their technology into it. I can see cameras, I can see Lidar. I can see a whole range of things being embedded in the box. That’s pretty much the plan. That might be in a third or fourth generation system but it’s certainly on the roadmap.

Are you considering an inbuilt model. You’ve obviously got your own bikes are you looking at an inbuilt model where this comes as native?

Possibly the ultimate goal with this would be to shrink that device down to the point where we can give the specs to bike makers and it gets built into the frame of the bike at that point of manufacturing.

So rather than it being a device you add later, it becomes an integral device within the bike. Or scooter. And for that reason we do talk to Bosch, Shimano and other industry leaders. As we’ve been working in this space for a long time, we do have connections in the industry. So that would certainly be our goal would be to make it one integrated device.

Could batteries still be plugged into their regular charger when they’re plugged into the dock as well?

One of the things we’re looking at is to have a piggyback plug, and what I mean by that is the OneKey device is plugged in, and on the back of the plug is the same socket, so you charge it using your ordinary battery charger.

Our hope is that OneDock will become so common that they’ll be on every street corner and you won’t need to bother with that, because you can plug it in anywhere. This will be like bike hoops, but smart bike hoops. That would be the ultimate goal.

Does OneKey attach to one type of battery, or do you need to program it?

We’re actually looking at both options in mind. We can certainly program it because we have a microprocessor that sits in there and we can programme battery type into it. But some of the batteries we can detect automatically because the module is a smart IoT from trackap and they’re partnered with some of the battery makers.

The reason I ask is that I imagine a lot of people wouldn’t know what kind of battery is in their vehicle, and the device might not pick up what type of battery it is.

At the moment this device we aren’t just giving to the end consumer. The idea would be that this would be with our technicians, but also potentially to bike shops. And we’ll train the bike shops in how to fit it and how to program it so that it has as the right factory settings programmed into it.

And once it’s on you cannot take it off unless you’ve got the right tools to take off so it’s ‘married’ with that battery once it’s been programmed.

Will it detect unsafe batteries?

Yes. What happens is because we and bike shops, for example, are the ones who control the fitment to the device, if anyone encounters a device that doesn’t have a battery that meets the Australian standards, they won’t fit the device. So this is a point at which you can check the compliance of the vehicle, or the compliance of the battery.

And this is a big problem at the moment, because there are a lot of devices from China, for example a lot of the bikes used by food couriers, with batteries that just don’t meet the standards and they’re the ones that can catch on fire. So we will not connect our device to those batteries. We would check the battery to make sure that it was actually compliant.

That’s the first thing. The second thing is, if someone did somehow manage to swap this device onto a different battery, it will be expecting a different type of battery. It would initially switch to that battery’s charging program and when it gets a different response from the battery it will switch itself off. So that’s actually built into the capability of the charging system.

I assume most of the ‘smarts’ are built into the top, and the tower there is just unused space?

Yes, that’s true. I should probably have pointed out is that the smarts, as you said, are very compact inside here (at the top), so it doesn’t have to be mounted on the post. This is completely modular, allowing you can take it to a smart post, or smart streetlamp you see these days with all sorts of tech built into them. We can create a little collar that has the two programmable chargers and the charging socket mounted on it.

Then you just mount that onto a streetlight that already has a power source. That would be another way to proceed.

Can the space between the vehicle docks be spaced differently?

Absolutely, this is not set. We can change the spacing between the docks. This particular spacing means you can fit five docks and 10 bikes within a shipping container. And that’s one of the versions that we’re looking at, a 20-foot shipping container, potentially with solar panels on top so you can operate off-grid. And all of the docks would line up against the back wall. But you can change the spacing, change the configuration. It’s modular.

What sort of price point do you envisage?

Sure. The price point at first is obviously going to be more expensive because we will only have small-scale production initially. Now we’re looking at roughly $3,000 for the dock which will charge two vehicles and for $400 to $500 for the OneKey device. But we expect those prices to come down a lot as we scale production. That’s our initial price target.

If you consider all of the other benefits, the cost savings for example, if you’ve got a car fleet and you swap that fleet for a micromobility fleet, even though you have this investment up-front, the saving you’ll make on the operation of the fleet will very quickly pay off.

Is there a revenue-grade electricity metering in the OneDock or is the electricity cost so small that you wouldn’t bother?

The second thing there. Just to give you an idea, one 10-amp powerpoint will charge 10 e-bikes simultaneously. If you compare that to an EV, a Tesla for example,  where you need to install something like a substation inside an office building because they draw so much power, this plug in the wall, a standard powerpoint, will charge 10 micromobility vehicles.

And that’s just on a 10-amp circuit. It’s one amp per vehicle. So you wouldn’t bother adding up the electricity. To give you an idea 15 cents charging cost on an e-scooter, and 25 cents for an e-bike, at today’s prices. And that gives you a range of about 50 km for an e-scooter, and 100 km for an e-bike.

The cost of electricity is incredibly cheap.

How long would it take an e-bike to charge?

One of the interesting features is that the smart charger inside actually has a fast charging mode. The issue is that most battery management systems that come with the battery pack don’t have the power output that this system does. So in some ways we’ve made this future-proof. That charger can pump out 8 amps. Most battery chargers are more like 2 amps. The fastest charger I’ve seen on the market is 6 amps, so to answer your question: it’s five to six hours to fully charge this bike.

So it’s not like charging an EV. It’s not like you’re going up the Hume Highway from Melbourne to Sydney and you stop for a fast charge and go on your way. This is much more about urban transport and you can leave your vehicle in a dock and it charges every time you dock it. Also, you can program the dock so that it only does an 80% charge because lithium batteries last a lot longer if you only charge them to that level.

How much of the data is retained inside the device? How much data do you get for building a profile in how your systems work all over the world? And talking about the app, can I use the app to interact with the device without being near a station?

So, for example if you’re parked at a cafe, and rather than using a dock you just use your own chain and plug it into the device you get out the app and that’s how you unlock the vehicle, and you can be anywhere and do that. The IoT tech inside OneKey works off of the 4G mobile network.

In terms of data gathering ability …

Sorry, you’re saying it works off the mobile network? So I’m actually dialling this device and I don’t have to type in a number, I dial into this device directly through the network, or direct?

There’s two options. It can do both. You can actually give user Bluetooth tags and make them and they can literally tap on the device to unlock it, or they do it through the cellular network or wi-fi.

And the data question?

With the data basically, you’re beaming up to a satellite by the IoT module. I’m not sure what the frequency of the data gathering is … it might be every few seconds, something like that. In terms of can we keep the data? Absolutely. Can we see who the user is? That depends on the privacy settings. If it’s a private vehicle, people can choose to mask their ID because they don’t necessarily want us to know who they are.

But you can certainly aggregate the data. If you’ve got a fleet you can see all the vehicles and as the owner of the fleet potentially see the users, but of course that depends on the privacy settings but you can set all of those things in the fleet management.