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Yesterday, I pulled the Cougar controller out of the Electro-Metro, and took it with to the Milwaukee Electric Car Club meeting.
Recently, Paul mailed me a new chip (with updated software) and a connector and serial port.
The guys and I yanked the cover off the controller and examined it. Overall, everyone who looked at the controller was pretty impressed with the construction. It's very beefy, and has plenty of Mosfets and Capacitors in there.
The new chip was easy to deal with - just a matter of pulling the old one out and sticking the new one in.
The serial port was a little more work.
A small, three-pinned connector has to get soldered to the J2 point on the logic board. I pulled off the plastic nuts on the mounting spacers, so that the logic board could be gently flipped up, to get soldered from behind. I have poor soldering experience, and it has tiny connections, so I made Tom do it. All those years of building robots really show up as soldering experience!
Next, I drilled and Dremeled a hole in the end plexiglass to accept the Serial port. It's not too pretty. I still plan to eventually replace the end cover with something a little nice some day. I did put the serial port away from the bus bars to make it easier to access.
I am still working with Adam to get the Cougar control software up and running on my pc. It appears that I am missing some bit of software that I need to update. Once I get that, I should be able to do some bench work with the controller. That should be fun!
-Ben
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