I finally reached the end of this tread, it took me a couple of days but it was worth it Thank you everybody for this educating and entertaining journey.
I now know for sure i want to convert a car too. Too bad i dont have any way to do it i dont have a job at the moment so i have to put it on hold for now and try to put my eurocent aside until i have enough to buy some parts.
Again thank you all for sharing the different controllers and Open Revolt in total. And Paul please tell those that helped you with your designs how thankful i am. At least now i know how a controller can work and i may be able to build one some day.
for now i do have a question is anyone using the ev as a main drive or is it more a second car for fun?
My EV is my main car. I never drive more than 30 km a day in a city I live in. I can go 100 km/h if I need to. I clocked 5000 km last year using OpenRevolt. There is another gasoline powered car in our family in case we have to take longer trips somewhere. I'd make another conversion for longer range immediately if I only had funds to make it happen.
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i also read that your ev didn't had problems with the cold while the diesels did had trouble.
Yes, that's true. Thanks to electrolytic capacitors selection I can drive during coldest days too. I think those capacitors are only limiting factor when it comes to cold weather. Their operating temperatures range from -40C to +105C. I talk about power board. I haven't checked if small electrolytics on control board have same low temp ranges.
I know AC is more popular here in other conversions. Inverters they use are in most cases meant for industrial use and their temp range starts from +0C or -10C. I've asked some manufacturers why it is so and they say it is because electrolytic capacitors don't withstand cold. They've tested their inverters in cold enviroment and have had all kinds of trouble. None of them recommended their inverters for outside use if temps go below 0C. Mostly because of moisture getting into casing, freezing and then unfreezing and becoming fluid again. That's no problem if inverter is kept running all day long. It stays warm enough to drive away all the moist air. But what if you left your car parked outside for a week? You might suddenly have all kinds of trouble. I believe many people haven't thought of this while making their conversions. Some have pretty airtight boxes around their inverters but it doesn't stop electrolyte from freezing.
Several people have been asking me lately how to use the revolt 500amp control board with a hall effect throttle pedal. The procedure is simple. First you need some custom software (thanks Paul!) that lets the micro use the full 0-5v input of the adc. This also allows for the throttle range and error limits to be set using RTD.
Next the hardware. Following the attached photo , remove R10 and replace R8 and D1 with wire links. Pin 5 now outputs a +5v supply for the pedal and pin 4 is now the input from the pedal. Ground can be connected to pin 2. Just a case of disconnecting the traction supply and using RTD to setup the range. My E46 bmw pedal has been running just fine the last 9 months.
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Now, Cole, when you shift the gear and that little needle on the ammeter goes into the red and reads 2000 Amps, that's bad. www.evbmw.com
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Yes. There's a fault if the throttle goes out of range, which disables the PWM. And there's no clearing it until the power goes off and on again. For those who are curious, Mora's fault was similar to Joe's. They both had an etched board and somehow there was a short from the top to the bottom of the board. Maybe due to the heatshrink around the bolts?
hahaha. ya it's long. Isaac, I can confirm that you can't just program the micro through the serial port until the initial programming has happened. [/url]
Paul (or anyone),
This implies that you can program through the serial connection (not the ISP) if the chip has the bootloader. Are there details on how to do that somewhere? Is it just a matter of a standard serial cable and ponyprog or equivalent?
This implies that you can program through the serial connection (not the ISP) if the chip has the bootloader. Are there details on how to do that somewhere? Is it just a matter of a standard serial cable and ponyprog or equivalent?
Be very, very careful if you use a serial bootload on the AVR.
We built our first controller around the Arduino Mega board, with signal conditioning and the CAN controller on a shield and a separate isolated gate driver board. It was very convenient for development. The 'C' build environment took only a few minutes to work out, programming was easy and reliable, and serial output came over the same USB cable used for programming. (Quite unlike the nest of cables we now use to program and monitor our STM32 board.)
However, the system had a serious flaw. The serial bootloader takes over for a few seconds after reset, listening for a re-program command. During that second, it controls a bunch of pins. Including our gate drive output. It would switch the gate driver full-on for a second or two. That's 100% duty cycle into a stopped motor. If we left the contactor turned on, we were almost certain to burn something out.
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This implies that you can program through the serial connection (not the ISP) if the chip has the bootloader. Are there details on how to do that somewhere? Is it just a matter of a standard serial cable and ponyprog or equivalent?
Thanks
Kevin
IF the chip has been loaded with the bootloader already, you simply have to attach the controller to the computer with a straight through serial cable. This would be the same serial cable that would be use for RTD Explorer.
Here is a video I made tonight showing how to connect the controller to the controller, where to get RTD Explorer and firmware files and how to upgrade the firmware.
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