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Nitty gritty, sweating the small stuff

A project log for DIY Electric Vehicle from Recycled Parts

Converting a car to electric drive using recycled and salvaged EV and hybrid components.

mauswerkzmauswerkz 09/27/2016 at 04:045 Comments

I'm in to the details now. Lots of small things to get sorted out in preparation for the first drive. The down side is that there's a LOT of small things to do. The up side is that it really feels like I'm making good progress since I can get so many things done in a single day. The last two weekends have been extremely productive.

Here's a quick video of the charge port LEDs reacting to the plug being inserted. The light comes on when the door is opened to illuminate the port. Once plugged in, the light "breathes" with the color ranging from red to green depending on the state of charge.

The car is really coming together. I've managed to make enough torque to fight the parking brake and pull the hanging suspension back up in to the wheel wells. Getting some details wrapped up with hopes of moving the car under its own power next weekend.

All the components mounted and the cooling system plumbed up. The clear tube is there to be able to confirm flow through the inverter and other power electronics and verify that bleeding of air is complete.

This photo is before any tidying. The wiring is much more organized now, with well defined harnesses routed around the various components.

I made a nice little panel for the top of the front battery. It holds the HV cables as well as the LV logic connections. It makes installing the cover for the front battery much easier than it used to be.


Discussions

Ned.funnell wrote 03/17/2017 at 14:51 point

No thoughts?

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Ned.funnell wrote 02/25/2017 at 23:57 point

This is awesome. How easy was it to work with the Chevy charger? I am curious if it is willing to boot up and provide charge with just basic commands. My thought is that it might be able to add a second OEM Chevy Volt to double the power. Do you think that it could be as easy as wiring in HV and AC, connecting it to the CANBUS, and letting it rip?

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mauswerkz wrote 03/17/2017 at 16:12 point

The CAN messages for controlling the Volt charger are in a thread on the EVTV forum, possibly elsewhere. I don't have a link handy, sorry.

Yes, you can use more than one charger to increase the power, but you'll need a separate CAN bus for each charger since they're identical nodes. These chargers are easy to use once you have it wired up and something to send CAN to it.

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Ned.funnell wrote 03/17/2017 at 16:39 point

Thanks! Do you have any recommendations on CAN hardware for this purpose?

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mauswerkz wrote 03/17/2017 at 18:01 point

Wouldn't let me reply to your last comment.

An Arduino with CAN shield or Teensy 3.2 with CAN transceiver are the most accessible way to play with CAN, I think. There are several libraries and examples out there for them.

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