Paul & Sabrina's cheap DIY 144v motor controller

[emeded]

Originally Posted by Flatmann100

emeded, I just swapped out my Advance motor for a Mars Electric ME1002 10" and the controller works great with the bigger motor. I spun the tires going out the garage yesterday!

Hey, that's great to hear. I was going to send you a private message to get some more details about your conversion, but do not have enough posts yet. You converted the car that I wanted to do conversion on too. Wanted to ask you about your motor, adapter plate, batteries, and of course this amazing controller! Did you write your progress somewhere?
It looks like Mars Electric ME1002 10 is reasonably priced for it's performance. Keep us posted.

[lespaul109]

First a huge thank you to Paul and others who have developed this amazing piece of home engineering! I have assembled the control board easily enough, but I have no experience with programming......anything......not even my ****zu. Is there anyone who can give me a fast rundown of it, or maybe a web site that does? At this point I am stuck and can't move forward with my conversion.

Jake

[lespaul109]

That's funny, just noticed that the automatic word police screened out the first part of the type of dog I have in my last post. Anyway, forgot to ask what this max232 chip is for. Is it in the BOM for the controller? Just received my donor car today! It's a '92 Prelude with a locked down motor.

[emeded]

Originally Posted by lespaul109

First a huge thank you to Paul and others who have developed this amazing piece of home engineering! I have assembled the control board easily enough, but I have no experience with programming......anything......not even my ****zu. Is there anyone who can give me a fast rundown of it, or maybe a web site that does? At this point I am stuck and can't move forward with my conversion.

Jake

Hi Jake,
I believe you will need one of those:

Atmel Store / Atmel STK500

where you will plug in your ATMega168 Microcontroller. Then you will need to connect the board to your PC, on which you'll install this IDE:

Atmel Products - AVR Solutions - AVR Studio 4

In which you'll put the program file, compile and flush it into the microcontroller. Voila, you are all done. .

Hope this helps at least a bit.

Erni

[lespaul109]

Thanks for the fast reply!
Is there a method where I only need to put the atmega chip into its socket on the revolt controller board and use the DB9 serial connection?

Jake

[emeded]

Originally Posted by lespaul109

Thanks for the fast reply!
Is there a method where I only need to put the atmega chip into its socket on the revolt controller board and use the DB9 serial connection?

Jake

Good point. Not sure. Maybe somebody could chime in and clarify this.
I am also curios as I do not want to buy a dev. board for $80. :-)

[Flatmann100]

Originally Posted by emeded

Hey, that's great to hear. I was going to send you a private message to get some more details about your conversion, but do not have enough posts yet. You converted the car that I wanted to do conversion on too. Wanted to ask you about your motor, adapter plate, batteries, and of course this amazing controller! Did you write your progress somewhere?
It looks like Mars Electric ME1002 10 is reasonably priced for it's performance. Keep us posted.

Emeded, I saw your friend request the other day. When you can, send me a message. I taken pictures and videos about my car but haven't set up much to see. I've been fabricating stuff for 45 years. I'm sold on having an electric car. If you have any questions feel free to ask. My new Mars Electric motor is sweet and the Cougar controller works soooo smooth I drive it more all the time.

[jyanof]

Originally Posted by emeded

Good point. Not sure. Maybe somebody could chime in and clarify this.
I am also curios as I do not want to buy a dev. board for $80. :-)

If I remember right, the software can be written to the micro through the serial port only if the micro already has the bootloader programmed into it. So, no, it can't be done with a brand new micro.

Paul may still be selling pre-programmed micros - that'd be pretty easy. Once you have that, you can modify the software if you wish and I think Adam's RTD program can load it onto the micro using the bootloader.

[adamj12b]

Thats correct Joe.

If you have gotten the chip from paul, it should have the bootloader and a version of firmware already on it. If you bought it from digikey, you will either need to build or buy a programmer to get the basic program on the chip. If you search this thread for pony prog you will find some info. it might also be found under pony-prog.

-Adam

[apowers]

here is the link to a programmer AVR Programmer
here is another you will need avr dude with it.AVR Tutorial #2