Better Quality Video of First Drive

SORRY - I'LL FIX THIS WHEN I FIND THE VIDEO AGAIN.

I have uploaded a better quality version of the Video to Youtube.

First Drive - It's Not a Mixmaster!

The first time Laurel, my other half, saw and heard the motor running in the Vogue she indicated that she hoped I wasn't building a Mixmaster - a device that made whirring noises but didn't move. The Mixmaster joke has been ongoing in our family for almost a year now.

I put the Driveshaft in last night. We waited all morning for the rain showers to stop then just after lunch checked the weather radar map again and it showed clear for a couple of hours. The covers came off for the first time in about a year. I'm holding the keys.

The bonnet closed. Curously I was glad to see it still did!
Some quick video editing and...

Laurel says it's officially NOT a Mixmaster.

I should have put the dashboard in but I was really wanting to see it move. The fiddling with clip leads is to select forward/reverse. The ignition system and safeties were all operating.

Some stills.

About the only electric thing left to do is mount those rear chargers that you can see lying around in the boot.

There was an interesting moment halfway up the street where I stopped and some neighbours were in their driveway putting stuff in the boot of their car. The Vogue brakes gave a little squeak when it stopped and they looked up in time to see it silently take off in reverse - a priceless look. It's the next driveway up on the left from where the Vogue is in this shot.

Now for some lights, trim, glass, rubber, pinchweld, etc....

Some Fiddly bits

I hadn't expected to remove the controller tray quite so soon so had short-cut on a couple of items. The outputs of the DC-DC convertors were wired directly up to the 150A relay and since it had now become a "wiring loom" I needed to add some easy-to-unplug connectors. I also hadn't put a connector in the wire to the +300V contactor coil. I cut them both at a carefully considered point when removing the controller tray.

Here's a trick when soldering small connector pins. A handy vice made out of needle nose pliers and a rubber band. (Speaker connectors from SRM9000 radio.)

I use the same trick when holding connectors to be soldered. For the 20 Amp DC-DC wires I used a couple of XT60 connectors. These are another connector favoured by the serious RC Aeroplane guys/gals. I wish I had known about these before using the Deans connectors on the chargers.

Car side of connectors finished.
Ya gotta love heatshrink!












Once everything was refitted, the motor went fine with no battery warning alert when run. Strangely, the blue LED on battery pack #2 is faulty again. I'll get to that one night next week - maybe it's just coincidence. Now to fit the tailshaft.

Reversing solved and Battery warning identified

Shortly after the previous post and before removing the controller tray, I got reverse working. I had removed a 'function block' from the FB list in the controller knowing that my configuration didn't use it and the Lenze manual said they didn't - well they do! It was a block called ANEG which takes an analogue signal and makes it negative. The particular block was used to feed the low torque limit in the motor control block.
Anyway - now the motor runs either way - good.

The problem of the low-battery alert going off was not caused by the battery pack. The pack/BMS tested out fine using a couple of fan heaters as a load. I was able to duplicate the error by lifting a connection from one cell-pair to another momentarily and it got me to thinking. The motor cables go very close to the pack that was spitting the error.

Right at the point where the motor cables go next to the pack - on the inside of the pack - are the BMS wires - lots of them and running almost parallel to the motor cables.







So it's reasonable to assume that there is either capacitive or inductive coupling  at play here.
To help with capacitive coupling I did the following:

Take an offcut of brass fly wire and attach some heavy wires.

Cover the mesh with waterproof gaffer tape. What a mess - but I'll hide it under the trays so no-one will ever know. Well almost no-one....












And re-install the pack in the car, adding bullet connectors to the wires connected to the fly wire sheild and grounding them. Actually the pack from this location is now in the boot and this is a different pack (pack #5) - just to see if pack #10 really did have a fault that I missed.
To help avoid inductive coupling, the motor cable conduit is now tied well away from the pack.

A vew from another angle to show height separation, grounding wires - and the messy tape.

Now to stick the trays back in and try it...

Commissioning Woes

Well the Engine Bay wiring was pretty much completed by Monday at about 4PM. Everyone stood back at a safe distance and we turned the key to 'Start' - nothing happened. A quick think and I realised that the Charger inhibit wire to the boot (so the car will not go if the charger is connected) was not connected to anything. I clipped it to vehicle ground and turning the key to 'Start' resulted in a satisfying clunk as all the contactors closed. The 12 V battery now read 13.7 volts - good.

The completed engine bay.

Now the problems.
The controller has 4 digital outputs and 6 digital inputs. I need 4 of each. One digital output is used as a 24 VDC source for the 24 V logic on the digital inputs to the controller. This output appears to be 'fried'. No matter what I do it stays at 0 V. It turns out that digital input 4 is the culprit. For some reason it draws enourmous amounts of current and destroyed the output I was using for 24 Volts. I had assumed (when you assume you make an Ass out of U and Me) that the outputs would be current limited - not so - they just blow up. Anyway, I stopped using that particular input and swapped to another output for 24V and got a bit closer to everything working.

Once the above was sorted out we broke for dinner and afterwards I downloaded the prepared configuration into the controller. This is the first time I have run the controller in Torque mode and - IT WORKED!

Next problem - it would not make the motor go in reverse. I left that until I had time to think about it and review the configuration.

One final issue is that when I selected forward or reverse, both of which enable the motor outputs of the controller, I get a warning from the low 3 battery pack opto bus - the packs UNDER the controller tray. (Couldn't it have been any of the other seven battery packs?) Crawling under the car showed the the indicator light for pack #10 (the rearmost of the three packs under the trays), was going out when the alert sounded. Strangely, measuring the voltage of the pack when the problem happened showed 52.7 VDC - the same as the rest of the packs.
So 2 hours later with pack #10 removed for examination, I took this picture.

Pack #10 is now on my bench inside with the lid off. According to my modification notes (when I modified the packs), pack #10 was the only one that had clear signs of a short when it was being made. A flat washer had a quarter blown off and there was black residue on the top of the cell it was attached to (no, I didn't do it).

Now where do I get a 5 Ohm, 200 Watt resistor to use as a test load? Counting portable electric heaters now - each one is good for about 2 Amps at 50 Volts...

Back into it - Rear packs permanently mounted.

We took a brief holiday up to Hepburn/Daylesford on Wednesday/Thursday (just the better half and me) - back Friday lunchtime so I didn't get much done since my previous post. On Friday afternoon I removed the rear packs, added the tie down straps and mounted the tray permanently. The tray is held in by 6 x 1/4"  high tensile bolts with large flat washers under the bolt head and and underneath the car (not that the Vogue bodywork needs them on the underside).
I also added the charger connections and made the BMS monitoring cable then added the connectors to the cable running up to the engine bay. I used a DB-9 male/female pair. I had a little setback when upon testing the BMS monitoring. Pack numbers 2 and 5 didn't light up the Blue LED. Pack 2 had a cooked LED (to enthusiastic with heatshrink me thinks) and pack 5 had the +/- connections for the 12V enable back to front (didn't I test that?). I fixed both of them Friday night. I haven't mounted the rear chargers yet.
Here is a picture of the five rear packs plugged into their chargers temporarily.

The packs without the blue LEDs on are already charged and are balancing internally.

Engine Bay BMS and Charger cables connected

A task I have not been looking forward to is trying to get the tangle of cables for chargers and BMS monitoring layed out so they look halfway reasonable. The result is about what I expected - I hoped for better but....
The grey cables are for the BMS monitoring bus. The small red and black wires connect the chargers to each pack via a fuse and a pair of diodes. (The charger has a fuse in the positive lead - I added one in the negative lead).

 

This is typical of the wiring mess that I'll have to clean up. The big black box is the 150 Amp relay that isolates the DC-DC convertors from the battery - overkill, but as I said in an earlier post - I had it.

The lower of the two grey relays is the motor fan relay and the upper of these two is the start/run latch relay.

Chargers, Contactor/Fuse and DC-DC Mounted

It's been a pain getting everything mounted. Even though I made the hard-to-get-at bolts captive (epoxied from underneath), it still took an hour and a half to get these components mounted.
Then the thought struck me. I had always intended to make everything on the controller tray plug into the rest of the wiring so I could get it out easily - fully populated (except for the actual controller).
Why on earth didn't I mount everything first?
The reason is that the controller tray does not easily go in if the top battery tray is in - well it isn't.
Never mind - as long as I remmeber it next time I have to remove the trays. Remove the top battery tray FIRST!
Picture of chargers (right and centre), Contactor/Fuse box and DC-DC (left).

Now add the motor Controller.

I am using Anderson PPL connectors for the + and - 300 VDC (and pack centre) connections to the DC-DC and heater. Shown are the blue/white/black connections for the DC-DC convertors. (The DC-DC convertors take the + and - 300 VDC and change it to 13.7 Volts DC at up to 40 Amps to run the Vogue 12 V electrics - headlights etc.). We carefully set both of them to 13.7 Volts with a 200mA load so that they draw the same from both halves of the full pack.

Lower Batteries Re-Installed

I have started re-asembling the electical system in the car. The lower three battery packs have been secured and the charger cables attached. I used two 300kg camlock straps per battery pack for these three. It's going to be a real pain tightening them later on. Even so I decided not to have the buckles under the car. As mentioned earlier in the blog, these three have waterproof tape around the joins as they are more exposed than any of the other packs in the car. (Note that packs #10 and #12 have their numbers transposed here - this has been corrected.)

The grey wires over the top of the packs are for the battery monitoring system.
After tidying up the wiring, the controller tray was installed.

Shortly after taking this picture I realised I had trapped the motor temperature monitor wire under the tray (the black wire at the rear right). I loosened the rear bolts and freed it - fortunately it wasn't damaged.