# List of motor drivers of EVs



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Thanks for making the effort to compile this list, Davide. In the spirit of "no good deed goes unpunished", here are some suggestions:

1. Be consistent with specifying absolute maximum or nominal operating voltage. E.g. - you use the maximum voltage for Cafe Electric and Netgain Controls but nominal voltage for pretty much everyone else. 

2. I would change the classification Shunt/PM to just Series or Series/PM. Virtually no one uses a shunt motor in an EV. Also, Kelly's controllers that claim regen will only do so with PM motors (or Sepex, but that's a completely different type of DC motor controller).

3. Brushless DC = AC. More specifically, brushless motors are synchronous AC motors with permanent magnets in the rotor that must be driven by an inverter.

4. The DCP controllers are a bit unusual in that the maximum motor current is much higher than the maximum battery current (more current handling ability in the freewheeling diodes than in the switches) but maximum power is determined by battery current so it is perhaps more fair to use it.

5. You left off the Curtis 1221 (400A) and 1231 (500/550A) models, which are far more popular for EVs than the 1209 and 1244.

6. It might be useful to specify the programming interface, if used, for all controllers, rather than just pointing out whether CAN is used or not. E.g. - Zilla and Kelly use RS-232, Synkromotive uses USB, Evnetics uses Ethernet, some Curtis don't have an interface but ones that do use a proprietary RS-232 "programming pendant", etc...


----------



## PhantomPholly (Aug 20, 2008)

...and of course add Solitron Jr....


----------



## Elithion (Oct 6, 2009)

> Solitron Jr

No such thing exists.

Your search - *http://www.google.com/search?q="solitron+jr"* - did not match any documents. 



;-)


----------



## ishiwgao (May 5, 2011)

Davide, give the guy a break haha. 

anyway, great job on the website. It was very helpful for me, and I'm sure for many others to come


----------



## Jimp (May 21, 2009)

Very good job on the site.


----------



## hbthink (Dec 21, 2010)

I have an older Curtis 1221B which I don't see in your table. The sticker on unit says 72-120v and 400amp. Does anyone know if its possible to push this up to 144 Volts? I'm moving to lithium and would like to move up in voltage without replacing this fine motor controller.

Thanks,
Steve


----------



## EVfun (Mar 14, 2010)

The 1221B shuts down at 155 volts. They have been run at 132 volts but I don't recommend it now that the controller is old. These controller have 3 issues.

The controller barely has enough ripple capacitor when new. As they age these electrolytic caps tend to loose capacity and increase in internal resistance. At some point they will let MOSFET killing spikes get past them. I would recommend considering cap replacement or lowering the pack voltage back to 96 volts as most of these (B model 120 volt) units are 10 years old already. 

The controller does not measure the freewheel diode temperature. More voltage tends to increase time at low duty cycle and that increases diode heating. For this same reason you should limit low motor rpm operation to low loads as much as possible. 

The controller has a rather high minimum duty cycle. They can't apply less than about 10% of pack voltage to the motor. With more voltage this is more current when starting from a stop. It is not uncommon, especially if using a low impedance motor like the ADC FB-1, for these controllers to allow quite a bit more than 400 amps flow below 100 rpm. This is hard on them and it doesn't need to be made more difficult. Lee Hart wrote a great little story about this.


----------



## hbthink (Dec 21, 2010)

Humm might be time to upgrade my controller. I was worried also that it does not provide the ability to cut off at low voltage to protect the lithium battery pack. Question now is do I keep my FB4001a and get a Evnetics controller or do I spend an additional $2000 and go with the AC50 brushless system? Is it worth the added cost?


----------



## frodus (Apr 12, 2008)

hbthink said:


> Humm might be time to upgrade my controller. I was worried also that it does not provide the ability to cut off at low voltage to protect the lithium battery pack. Question now is do I keep my FB4001a and get a Evnetics controller or do I spend an additional $2000 and go with the AC50 brushless system? Is it worth the added cost?


you won't be protecting your lithium pack until you get a BMS, no matter if you go with an Evnetics or AC50. A controller should not be the thing protecting your pack, and it won't. A cell could go low and you'd never know it because the pack voltage looks "ok".

Get a cell level BMS.


----------

