Paul & Sabrina's cheap DIY 144v motor controller

[ianbartie]

COUGAR POWER BOARD PARTS AVAILABLE

I have some components left over from building the Australian COUGAR controllers.
There are a few sets of MOSFETs, power diodes & power capacitors (Panasonic).

Contact me via my web page below if you are interested. I can ship them anywhere.
Digital Home Technology

[MPaulHolmes]

OK, I made a tiny booboo on the SR schematic. hehe. The low voltage cutout will only work for one of the isolated supplies. But you get to pick which one it works for! hurray! I have an idea how to fix it, and I'm converting things to the software that lets me send it to the cheap place. And the 2 or whatever people that ordered will definitely get a free one of the board that will be out soon that will fix the low voltage cutout. Sorry you guys. It was a subtle mistake. The only reason I noticed it was that someone emailed me asking about how the low voltage cutout works, and I walked him through each resistor and transistor. As I was explaining how it worked, I realized I made a mistake.

The good news is, the board as it is right now can be used as an SR board (with 1 safety feature not working), a standard control board for a motor controller with all the safety features working, or as a control board for a charger with all the safety features working. It also has CANbus, and stuff, so it's not complete crap. So you couple guys that preordered it, you get a free charger board (or whatever you want to use it for) AND a SR control board (slightly delayed)! hurray!

[mrbigh]

Originally Posted by MPaulHolmes

OK, I made a tiny booboo on the SR schematic. hehe. The low voltage cutout will only work for one of the isolated supplies. But you get to pick which one it works for! hurray! I have an idea how to fix it, and I'm converting things to the software that lets me send it to the cheap place. And the 2 or whatever people that ordered will definitely get a free one of the board that will be out soon that will fix the low voltage cutout. Sorry you guys. It was a subtle mistake. The only reason I noticed it was that someone emailed me asking about how the low voltage cutout works, and I walked him through each resistor and transistor. As I was explaining how it worked, I realized I made a mistake.

The good news is, the board as it is right now can be used as an SR board (with 1 safety feature not working), a standard control board for a motor controller with all the safety features working, or as a control board for a charger with all the safety features working. It also has CANbus, and stuff, so it's not complete crap. So you couple guys that preordered it, you get a free charger board (or whatever you want to use it for) AND a SR control board (slightly delayed)! hurray!

To resolve the omission of controlling the 2nd LV cutoff is necessary the addition of extra parts? and if so, can this parts be top mounted in the board for this first PCB release?

[MPaulHolmes]

Ya, you could do that (a few extra parts). One path would have to be cut (no biggie), and then that path would have to get jacked in to a few components that would not be on the board. It would be a little annoying. To be specific, you would need an extra comparator (8 pin DIP chip).


Right now, I'm just converting PCB Artist to DesignSpark libraries. I'm up to 14 custom components now. Then I can order the boards from PCB Cart, and in bulk, they would cost about $4 each.

[sawickm]

Hey Paul,

I know that this is an after thought, but a word of wisdom.

It is always a good idea to put a beadboard section on a development PCB. If you forget something you can always jumper it in.

- Mark

[reissmachinist]

I had the controller on the bench running a wheel chair motor successfully. Good, I thought. I will have this back in the subaru and be operational before
night. The details are foggy, sometime near the end of unclipping the wires to the batteries, controller and the motor and then discharging the capacitors by touching the motor wires to B+ and B- on the power board, I thought I saw the
yellow fault light blink on. Oh No, did I drag a live wire across the logic board or
ruin something from discharging the capacitors in that way?
So I hooked up every thing again. The yellow led blinks and the motor is running. Remove power from the logic board and the motor stops.
RTD Explorer shows the v-ref fault lit up at the bottom of the screen. It shows throttle graphing and a ragged blue line near the bottom of the graph
So, I need to know how to determine the problem, the lem or more. There is +5v at J3.
If I remove the LEM from the circuit, and apply 5v power to the LEM, I should measure 2.5v between lem pin 2 (output) and pin 3 (0 volt) and also 2.5 v between lem pin 1 (v ref) and pin 3 (0 volt)? On my lem both measurements are 0v. Bad?
With the lem disconected and power off, at control board J3, there is very low resistance between sgnd and out and open between sgnd and v ref. Is this proper?
Will I need to order more than a new lem? I think etlaare had similar problems. Thanks

[Grimm]

First off, I'm really impressed with how much has come out of the hard work of Paul, Adam, and all the testers. It's part of the reason why I started a conversion and read through as many pages of this thread as I have

I currently have a WIP EV sitting in my driveway waiting for a controller and two friends with EVs within a 10 mile radius. My father also has a professional-grade CAN reader and software on his work laptop we can use to interface with the controller. Is there any way I could still get into the group of preorders or beta testers?

I unfortunately couldn't test full time as I'm already back in school, but nights and weekends are fair game.

[jackbauer]

Jim and I took the bmw for a test run today. Watch out near the end as Jim (ex racing driver) almost does a Vanishing Point on my car

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MtCwhEfS-U

[MPaulHolmes]

Hi Reiss! If you take the blue back off of the LEM sensor, it will quickly become obvious if you burned something up in there. There's a tiny circuit board inside.

[jackbauer]

Paul , would it be possible to have a brake signal input to the controller from the brake light switch? If throttle is non zero or motor current greater than 10amps and brake is appled kill power.