Never been one to let the carrier drop

Well, I identified a few items that didn’t make it to the list..

I’ve ordered a replacement for the 12V system battery, because it’s been sitting dead for over a year and is unlikely to take a charge.

I’m thinking more and more about the mk3 inverter interface. So far, here’s what I’ve come up with:

Using one of the mk3 boards with mostly the standard mk3 codebase, wire up inputs to the inverter’s three system failure outputs (via 1k resistor), and wire up outputs to three reed relays – one of which will then drive a pair of paralleled ATO relays to bypass the accessory switch and turn power on to the car’s main 12V bus, and one of which will activate the start switch, and one of which will ground the brown input wire. (I could probably just use a opto for everything but the bypass relay, but the nice thing about relays is that they’re pretty much trouble free). Note to self: do not forget bypass diodes or relays will set fire to microcontroller.

I think that this board will probably get installed before the rest of the BMS – possibly before I take the car to the DMV. Properly programmed, it will remove the requirement for any complicated instructions prior to having someone new drive the car..  and, as another neat trick, it can also close the main contacter on the inverter to let it charge up the 12v battery whenever it gets low.

Mental note to self: probably it would be a good thing if it was not *possible* for the drive enable relay to close while the car is on bypass power. This shouldn’t be that hard to finangle.. if the reed relays are SPDT, I could just have the ground for the enable be provided via the NC contacts on the bypass relay. Maybe I’m overly paranoid here, but I really don’t think I want the car to be able to engage it’s own drive without a key inserted. Kit is cute and all, but…

I also think the inverter interface board will be a good programming exercise to get me back into the mk3 project – probably at first it won’t include a bootloader and won’t actually be able to measure voltages or be network addressable or anything.. then as I get the bugs out of the mk3 codebase, I can make it a proper mk3 node.

I really could kick myself for letting this project drag on so long. I’m a little apprehensive of the paperwork that’s going to be required to get the car street legal again – but once I get the drive to spin up, I will call Geico and put the car on my insurance, then try driving it around the neighborhood to make sure everything’s intact (and hopefully the inverter won’t blow up again)

I’ve decided to leave the pack positive point under the car, although I’m upgrading it to a plastic junction box *with a cover* and a real binding post to connect everything to. I’m also tempted to go ahead and wire back in Bruce’s nifty watthour-meter-widget while I’ve got the whole front of the car taken apart. If anyone wants pictures, let me know 😉

I’ve also been trying to decide what to do about the climate control. My last attempt at peltier devices was kind of dissapointing, but the complexity of a freon system disturbs me. If I were a better hardware hacker, I would just build myself a inverter / motor control and get all the guts out of a commercial heat pump. However, I think I may take another stab at the peltier thing instead because at least there’s no high pressure hosery needed. I’m thinking maybe I will get another motorcycle radiator and install it in the space where the rack for the peltier devices was, then build a cold-plate sandwitch of two peices of aluminum with holes drilled in them, then run two seperate liquid loops. Anyone know where I can get small, quiet, low-flow 12V pumps? Ideally for a very low price? 😉

Obviously climate control is not a very high priority..  but recently I’ve been reminded that even in SoCal, cars need heat.

I seem to be returning to my 2002 obsessing on this. I don’t know what that means, but it’s better than some of the other things I’ve obsessed about since then.

Things needed to make the EV mobile again:

1) Complete the positive-side high voltage wiring under the shifter.

(need to get 1″ conduit nipple)

2) Rewire the inverter interface

(first phase: just connect the activation line to FWD instead of REV – need to look up which color FWD is)

(second phase: build interface board for mk3 controller with sensor inputs for all inverter outputs and relays for all inverter inputs.)

3) Fix the power line leading to the water pump and vacuum pump

(Probably temporarily with crimps, because it will need redone as part of the second phase of the inverter interface rewiring)

4) Install HV shield on inverter

5) Reinstall inverter and reconnect cooling system and refill

(Should be no big deal)

6) Reconnect front battery pack

(maybe should order some new washers)

7) Replace access cover on motor

While in the past this has looked completely overwhelming, today I’m not feeling like it’s that much work. I already swapped the L1 and L2 input wires on the motor to deal with the whole forward-reverse thing today. While not as ideal as being on a lift, the jackstands approach I’ve taken seems to be totally viable – I was able to work under the car fairly easily. I’m hoping to have it back on the road by the end of the month. Of course it helps that my #1 job is paying me in stock again, which gives me incentive to work on my own projects instead.

Well, tomorrow is election day, and I still don’t know who I’m supporting in the Democratic primary.

Kucinich is the closest to my ideals, but he’ll never win. (Face it, Sheer is not in the majority)

Clinton is a end to the stupid-rich-white-male-with-misplaced-priorities game, and also is very interested in improving our health care situation, which I’m also very interested in.  So she’s tempting.

Obama appears to be a honest politician, which might make for a refreshing change, but is a little too religious for my tastes.

I think the winner will be Clinton – but I may not know myself until I push the button.

If anyone is looking for something silly and small to buy me as a gift – http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=USB-THINK-LIGHT&cat=CON 😉

All the tracks that are getting all the downloads were not major production numbers.. the best of them were recorded in a few hours, the worst of them were just captures of jam sessions. The Mischief Committee album, which had hundreds of hours of work put into it.. the most downloaded track on it got 30 downloads last month.

Please, if you haven’t listened to it yet, download the Mischief Committee album.

As I recall, at some point about this time a few years ago I was convinced that earth was a radio star – after all, we do emit a buncha electromagnetic radiation.

Come to think of it, I may still think that 😉 But, anyway, I also had some explanation for why all humans were rock stars, which I don’t remember at all. That’s *not* what I mean here.

Also, in all fairness, if one had a sense of proportion about the numbers I’m about to recite, one would admit that they don’t even stand up to the coffeehouse circuit, much less make me Bono.

However, a track I did with the lovely and talanted Esen had 811 downloads last month. I have more than ten tracks on my web site that received more than 100 downloads each in December, and more than five that received more than 200 downloads. Mischief Committee has several jam sessions which received more than 100 downloads. And, the trend in my web traffic has consistantly been upwards the entire time I’ve been maintaining sheer.us.

To me, these are rock star numbers. This is a larger audience than I ever dreamed of reaching.. it inspires me to want to write and release more tracks, to say the very least.

Speaking of books, my friend How Kuff wrote one that I’ve been slowly working my way through – it’s not a traditional novel, but it has a lot of good ideas. A lot of the same things that bother me bother How, and he has a little more distance from them so he expresses them more artfully. His characters are fighting with problems like what to do about the moral repercussions of your day job (if you make bombs, are you responsible for those they kill?), what the costs of endless commercialization might be, and what it might cost you to try and fight the Powers that Be – and what it might gain you.

You can buy a copy of his book at www.changing-history.com. I suspect that it’s one of those works that will take me many passes to fully appreciate, but there’s definitely some good content there.

I should really post about this on the EVDL or evtech, but I lack the energy at the moment and besides, I’d like to get the idea kicked apart on my journal first.

It seems to me that you could build a very cheap, very powerful drive for a EV that had a lot of the advantages of a DC drive combined with a lot of the advantages of a AC drive by having a standard DC series motor which did not have the commutator mechanically connected to the shaft – instead, the comm would be driven by a stepper motor controlled by a microcontroller which would have a rotary encoder to tell it the current position of the main drive shaft (the output from the ‘power stage’ of the motor), the current position of the commutator, whether any arcing was occuring, etc.

Maybe I misunderstand some of the theory, but I think that such a motor would be able to do regen braking fairly easily, would not fail in a full-throttle on mode (because the only way it produces motive power is if the comm is staying synchronous with the main output shaft, which requires that the microprocesser be doing its job), and that you would be able to get considerably higher power drives in considerably smaller spaces because you would only need a single H-bridge of power silicon to control power to the motor instead of the three H-bridges that a AC drive requires. However, you would still be able to get AC’s flat torque curve because you would in essence have the same amount of control over the magnetic state of the motor that a AC drive has.

Anyone want to kick a hole in it? Yes, it has brushes, which are mechanical and therefore frowned upon. However, I think it could be made simpler and cheaper than a ‘real’ AC drive, and aside from needing to swap the brushes every few hundred thousand miles – which a sensor could tell the micro about – it would have all the advantages of ‘real’ AC.

My next challenge on this vein of thinking is to mentally walk through all the failure modes – i.e. what happens when the comm gets energized in the wrong position -out of sync – with the current shaft position of the rotor..

You all are wonderful 😉 I appear to have more than enough work for the next few months.. thank you to one and all, and sorry it didn’t work out to the people who I had to turn down.

(I hate turning people down, because I feel like I’ve lost the opportunity to work for them forever… and I really do want to help people do things, beyond the money aspect)

I think I’m maybe a bit overly afraid that I’ll be unable to find work. Thus far I’ve never had to look very hard to find someone who wanted me to do something for them – I just feel like surely there are a million people who are better, faster, smarter, and more creative than I am – but what I forget is that there are probably billions of things that want to be built – far more things that need fixed or created than people to fix or create them – and that I do genuinely produce – eventually – good products. I’m sure that there’s still much to be learned, but I’m also sure, at least on some level, that I’m not completely worthless.

as usual, sysinternals.net had a tool. 😉

What’s really terrifying is what I found out *using* that tool. I was having trouble starting IIS on my win2k machine, because something else was already bound to port 80. Guess what it was…

…. skype.exe

Yes, boys and girls, *skype* is a web server. I guess that’s one way to get around those pesky firewalls – almost *everyone* lets people open a connection to port 80…