# New controller prototype



## ga2500ev (Apr 20, 2008)

Impressive!

ga2500ev


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

I am drooling on the keyboard as I type this 

There is an empty spot in my EV that wants to be filled by this baby


----------



## TheSGC (Nov 15, 2007)

Just WOW. Can't wait to see that thing in action. Let us know if you need any 3rd party testing, I bet this thing will be amazing compared to my 96 volt Kelly.


----------



## ClintK (Apr 27, 2008)

Very beautiful! You're like the Steve Jobs of motor controllers (meant as a compliment).


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

ClintK said:


> Very beautiful! You're like the Steve Jobs of motor controllers (meant as a compliment).


As long as you don't call us the Windows Vista of motor controllers...


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

Speaking of calling names  ... have you come up with the product name yet? Or shall we call it "new controller" ? 

Do we need a name contest? Don't look at me, I suck at creative tasks...


----------



## bblocher (Jul 30, 2008)

Very cool! Can't wait to see what all the specs are on it and pricing.
Best of luck guys.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

bblocher said:


> Very cool! Can't wait to see what all the specs are on it and pricing.


Specs so far is 750 Ampere peak and 500 Ampere continuously (provided it's properly cooled) for the "small" one and 1500/1000 for the next step. Voltage is, uh, to quote Tesseract "North of 200 Volt" or however he put it. Not sure if he's finally made up his mind about HOW much north of 200 Volts...

Most stuff is controlled by a microcontroller (some panic stuff is made in hardware just for added safety/reliability) and all user settings will be done through an ordinary browser (yeah, the serial port got scrapped). Price is not decided yet, but expect it to be at Zilla levels rather than Nice Price.


----------



## bblocher (Jul 30, 2008)

Qer said:


> Specs so far is 750 Ampere peak and 500 Ampere continuously (provided it's properly cooled) for the "small" one and 1500/1000 for the next step. Voltage is, uh, to quote Tesseract "North of 200 Volt" or however he put it. Not sure if he's finally made up his mind about HOW much north of 200 Volts...
> 
> Most stuff is controlled by a microcontroller (some panic stuff is made in hardware just for added safety/reliability) and all user settings will be done through an ordinary browser (yeah, the serial port got scrapped). Price is not decided yet, but expect it to be at Zilla levels rather than Nice Price.


Nice, I'll have to keep my eye on it then. I have no idea what Zilla pricing used to be or what Nice Price is  Either way, keep us posted when all the specs become final and pricing is decided.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

dimitri said:


> Speaking of calling names  ... have you come up with the product name yet? Or shall we call it "new controller" ?
> 
> Do we need a name contest? Don't look at me, I suck at creative tasks...



Well, we've been calling it "BigMoFo" around the shop...


----------



## bblocher (Jul 30, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Well, we've been calling it "BigMoFo" around the shop...


Well there you go.
BMF 750
BMF 1500


----------



## Camaro (Jul 29, 2008)

I'm curious as to why you program your speed controller through a browser? An Ethernet port? Don't get me wrong it looks rock solid, and I'll definitely consider it when I look for a controller in a month or so. I'm just wondering what the interface will look like.

Why don't you call it the Titan? It looks like one!

In Greek mythology, the *Titans* (Greek: Τιτάν - _Ti-tan_; plural: Τιτᾶνες - _Ti-tânes_); were a race of powerful deities that ruled during the legendary Golden Age.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(mythology)


----------



## bblocher (Jul 30, 2008)

Camaro said:


> I'm curious as to why you program your speed controller through a browser? An Ethernet port? Don't get me wrong it looks rock solid, and I'll definitely consider it when I look for a controller in a month or so. I'm just wondering what the interface will look like.


That's not uncommon at all. The interface will be a webpage much like configuring a router for broadband. You'll have fields you can change the values of and then probably be able to save those settings. The other option being a serial interface with either a clunky text interface or the need to install software on the client machine which needs to be OS based. This allows you to connect a computer running any OS with a browser. Pretty cool, can't wait to hear and see more about it.


----------



## dogstar74 (Dec 6, 2008)

How about:

Power House 750
Big Block 750
The Flood Gate 750

"What kind of controller are you running in that EV?"
"Well I have a Warp 11 with a Power House 750 Controller!" ARR ARR ARRR!

"What kind of controller are you running in that EV?"
"It's a Big Block 750 coupled to a Warp 11" ARR ARR ARRR!

"What kind of controller are you running in that EV?"
"I just installed the latest Flood Gate 750 from TQ enterprises. It can cause a brown out in southern california if you floor it at a green light."


Yeah, they all sound about right. I like the look of this thing too. Takes that chinese crap out into a dark alley and kicks the crap out of them. 

Good luck with the name! Can't wait for it to hit the markets.

Aaron


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Qer said:


> Specs so far is 750 Ampere peak and 500 Ampere continuously (provided it's properly cooled) for the "small" one and 1500/1000 for the next step. Voltage is, uh, to quote Tesseract "North of 200 Volt" or however he put it. Not sure if he's finally made up his mind about HOW much north of 200 Volts...
> 
> Most stuff is controlled by a microcontroller (some panic stuff is made in hardware just for added safety/reliability) and all user settings will be done through an ordinary browser (yeah, the serial port got scrapped). Price is not decided yet, but expect it to be at *Zilla levels* rather than Nice Price.


Zilla Pricing

http://www.cafeelectric.com/shop/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=1

Model Z1K

950A peak @ 200V, and 300A cont.

Price: $2,675


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

dogstar74 said:


> Power House 750
> Big Block 750
> The Flood Gate 750


Hmm. I kinda like Power House and Big Block makes me think of V8's and POWER. Dunno why... 

Flood gate gives me a bad feeling, probably because of the image of water and electronics...


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Camaro said:


> I'm curious as to why you program your speed controller through a browser? An Ethernet port? Don't get me wrong it looks rock solid, and I'll definitely consider it when I look for a controller in a month or so. I'm just wondering what the interface will look like.


The ethernet port isn't just for programming settings in the controller, it will also be used for networking together future products such as a touch-screen, smart charger, etc... And the "API" for this will be made public to allow others to develop their own add-ons, gadgets and what-not. 

Anyway, the advantages to going with ethernet over RS-232 and RS-485 are numerous: it is a "more standardized" interface, it has much better noise and fault tolerance (because of transformer isolation), it is possible to provide a small amount of power to peripherals (PoE). That it runs at a much higher speed than RS-232 (or even RS-485) is not terribly important. That it uses cheap, easily available Cat5 cables you can get most anywhere IS important.




Camaro said:


> Why don't you call it the Titan? It looks like one!...



Hmmm... weren't the Titan's overthrown by their children?!


----------



## major (Apr 4, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Next is a view of the laminated bus structure made from two pieces of 0.090" thick copper plate


Hi Tesser,

Nice looking gadget. You might want to have those copper plates plated. I have used tin for copper bus bars.

Keep at it.

major


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Nice, what are the physical dimensions?


----------



## judebert (Apr 16, 2008)

Just here to vote for the name: Hemi.

"You got a Hemi in that thing?"

Awww, yeah.


----------



## etischer (Jun 16, 2008)

Wow, that is pretty sweet. nice attention to detail. Does one fan blow in and the other blow out? You're a great inspiration to all us diy folks.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

major said:


> You might want to have those copper plates plated. I have used tin for copper bus bars...


For standard bus bars that are separated by inches I would totally agree with you, but the two plates here are only 0.01" apart and pure tin has a bad habit of forming whiskers while tin/lead plating (ie - solder), which doesn't whisker, is no longer permitted because of the RoHS directives in Europe... It does make for quite a dilemma...


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> Nice, what are the physical dimensions?



Big and heavy? 

Without the mounting plate (size not yet determined) it is approx. 18.5" long by 7.75" wide by 4.5" tall (not including the fans, especially since they might get thicker). It weighs about 28 lbs as of now. I definitely wouldn't want to drop it on my foot!


----------



## major (Apr 4, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> It does make for quite a dilemma...


How about nickel? My 5 cents worth


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

major said:


> How about nickel? My 5 cents worth


Funny... we were just discussing that as a result of your post and my response... And we decided that nickel might be the way to go. One of the requirements is that we have to be able to do all of the assembly in house because as soon as we send something out the price triples (like having the copper plates cut by waterjet - $80 per set...  )

Anyway, if electroless nickel seems feasible for us to do in-house then that is the one that looks best overall (so we are in agreement again... hmmm.. either I'm getting smarter or you're getting dumber, major...  ).


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Big and heavy?
> 
> It weighs about 28 lbs as of now. I definitely wouldn't want to drop it on my foot!


28 Lb ???  well, we can call off the name contest, BigMoFo it is...


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> For standard bus bars that are separated by inches I would totally agree with you, but the two plates here are only 0.01" apart and pure tin has a bad habit of forming whiskers while tin/lead plating (ie - solder), which doesn't whisker, is no longer permitted because of the RoHS directives in Europe... It does make for quite a dilemma...


Tin plus a thin plastic sheet between them? Do they have to be that close? Couldn't current jump between them?


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> Tin plus a thin plastic sheet between them? Do they have to be that close? Couldn't current jump between them?


Polyester (mylar) has a dielectric strength of 1kV per mil, so that 10 mils is good for 10kV. It's actually pretty tough stuff.

But there are some very good electrical reasons for putting those plates as close together as possible: it helps the magnetic fields from the outgoing and incoming currents to cancel out (minimizing radiated noise) while the mylar film in between the plates forms a low value (1000pF or so) capacitor that will reduce switching noise and transients.

EDIT - just noticed you quoted the tin whiskers post. Yes, tin plating would be a bad idea in this instance because the whiskers will eventually cause a short circuit. More than likely the current capacity of the battery pack will be enough to "clear" the short (that's an engineering term that really means "vaporize" it  ) but who wants tin vapor floating around their motor controller? If you want to see some scary stuff do a google search on tin whiskers...


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Polyester (mylar) has a dielectric strength of 1kV per mil, so that 10 mils is good for 10kV. It's actually pretty tough stuff.
> 
> 
> EDIT - just noticed you quoted the tin whiskers post. Yes, tin plating would be a bad idea in this instance because the whiskers will eventually cause a short circuit.


Gotcha, I didn't realize you did use plastic between the plates already, I thought it was bare plates that close


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> Gotcha, I didn't realize you did use plastic between the plates already, I thought it was bare plates that close


Na. We might be crazy but we're at least crazy in a paranoid way...


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

dimitri said:


> 28 Lb ???  well, we can call off the name contest, BigMoFo it is...


Yeah, I like the BMF controller, let people figure it out


----------



## ElectriCar (Jun 15, 2008)

bblocher said:


> Well there you go.
> BMF 750
> BMF 1500


My thoughts exactly! 

Or Big Mo & Sumo!


----------



## piotrsko (Dec 9, 2007)

electroless nickel is easy, we used to do it in kids swimming pools, like the ones you buy a K-mart. hard and soft anodize (mil-a-8625 ty 1 or 2), and chromate too. chrome was too hard because of the polishing required.

NASA style QC would be out, but you can get really close by being a control freak. some of the cooling pockets on top won't plate all that well on the bottom.

look up local planning rules. Some places like LA county get really strange about "hazardous metals" processes disposals.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

piotrsko said:


> electroless nickel is easy
> ...
> look up local planning rules. Some places like LA county get really strange about "hazardous metals" processes disposals.


This is exactly what I was thinking when I wondered if it would be feasible or not for use to do it ourselves - that the regulatory hurdles might be more than we want to bother with.


----------



## piotrsko (Dec 9, 2007)

the actual only hurdles are the chemical handling pre and post treatment.

elec nickel has fairly benign characteristics to the environment. I suggest a "visit" to a local processor on the pretext of doing a bid for your current object d' art. pick their mind. if they are a good shop, they will share their knowledge because they know what a PITA pollution controls are.

all the tables and equioment requirements are available online.

Yes it is cheaper to plate in house, but ONLY because your overhead costs are lower. The only other reason is wierd quality or timing issues that cannot tolerate a vendor's quirky schedule.


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Very cool about the prototype, keep it up!

What is the max voltage again...200v??


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

piotrsko - I did some more research and it appears there are RoHS-compliant EN processes that, unlike their soldering counterparts, are just as good as the old formulations that contained lead and cadmium. Thanks for nudging me along on this. 

Bowser330 - I expect 340VDC input will be the final safe rating as the IGBT and capacitor are both rated for 600VDC. I won't know for sure, though, until I've pounded the crap out of the controller with at least a 24 x 12V battery pack.


----------



## ElectriCar (Jun 15, 2008)

Any possibility of regen on these?


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

ElectriCar said:


> Any possibility of regen on these?


The controller hardware is capable of regen (half-bridge configuration with both legs pwm'ed) but it won't be implemented in the software until extensive testing of many motors on a dyno has been done.

You've been around EVs long enough to know that doing regen with a series dc motor - without blowing up the motor, battery pack or controller, that is - will take something just shy of a miracle to pull off.

My understanding is that if your motor is not neutrally timed with interpoles then you can pretty much forget it, no matter how fast and well-compensated the feedback loop inside the controller is. I intend to find out, though, as this seems to be one of those things that if you ask 5 different engineers about you get 6 different answers...


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

I think Zapi did regen with some of their controllers, but some models died, don't know the specifics but it might be worth investigating.


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> piotrsko - I did some more research and it appears there are RoHS-compliant EN processes that, unlike their soldering counterparts, are just as good as the old formulations that contained lead and cadmium. Thanks for nudging me along on this.
> 
> Bowser330 - I expect 340VDC input will be the final safe rating as the IGBT and capacitor are both rated for 600VDC. I won't know for sure, though, until I've pounded the crap out of the controller with at least a 24 x 12V battery pack.


Can't wait to hear about the testing results...thats the only way to really know the limits...

About Regen...I really wonder about the calculable benefit, especially if you do more highway driving or driving during lighter traffic times...in some cases it could be a waste..


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> I think Zapi did regen with some of their controllers, but some models died, don't know the specifics but it might be worth investigating.


Their H2 model has regen as an option, but from what I've read it seems to blow up with alarming regularity if it is actually enabled. That may be more the result of attempting regen with an advanced timing motor rather than a design fault with the controller (to be fair, though, the controller still ought to be able to protect itself).

Unfortunately, Zapi's website is just a step above useless and no one over here seems to have the H2 in stock... Ah well, we'll go it alone as usual 




Bowser330 said:


> About Regen...I really wonder about the calculable benefit,


From a recovered energy standpoint it makes very little sense, especially with lead-acid batteries because the Peukert Effect affects charging just as much as it does discharging. Yep, the more amps you try to cram back into a Pb battery the more get converted into heat. If the charge rate is kept at 1/5C or less then charging efficiency can be as high as 90% efficient, but at higher rates the charging efficiency can drop to 50%, and is awfully dangerous to boot (raise your hand if you want a battery chock full of sulfuric acid exploding inside your vehicle!).

And keep in mind that regen requires twice the conversion, so you have to multiply the efficiencies of every part in this chain _twice_! For the sake of example, let's assign: 85% for the motor, 95% for the controller, and 50%-90% for the battery. Motoring efficiency, ie - driving, will range from 40% on the low end to 73% on the high end (neglecting drive train losses). Efficiency during regenerative braking will then range from an unremarkable best of 53% (0.73 x 0.73) to a truly awful 16%  ...

That said, there is one benefit to regen that makes it a compelling feature despite the abuse it heaps on batteries, controllers and motors: it enables an electric motor to simulate "engine braking" just like an ICE. Since pretty much everyone learned to drive on a vehicle that behaves the same way, regen will help make the transition to electric seamless. Also, psychologically speaking, it really seems to annoy the hell out of EV drivers when they have to convert their forward momentum into heat via the brakes (rather than convert it into heat in their batteries, I know, I know... not rational, but we all have our moments...  )


----------



## ElectriCar (Jun 15, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Their H2 model has regen as an option, but from what I've read it seems to blow up with alarming regularity if it is actually enabled. That may be more the result of attempting regen with an advanced timing motor rather than a design fault with the controller (to be fair, though, the controller still ought to be able to protect itself).
> 
> Unfortunately, Zapi's website is just a step above useless and no one over here seems to have the H2 in stock... Ah well, we'll go it alone as usual
> 
> ...


Must be why some are using super caps with regen. This will allow a quick capture ability with a slow discharge into the battery or back to the motor on restart.

In my area at the foothills of the Appalachian mountains their isn't anything flat so I'm constantly accelerating and breaking. If I could capture that energy and not use the breaks so much I would feel better anyway.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

ElectriCar said:


> Must be why some are using super caps with regen. This will allow a quick capture ability with a slow discharge into the battery or back to the motor on restart....


Sure, but it's not as simple as just wiring some super caps in parallel with the battery pack. You have to feed them the regen output current separately, then use another converter to "parcel out" that stored charge at a slower rate to the batteries. This is a lot of extra circuitry just to accommodate the Peukert effect in lead-acid batteries. The LiFePO4 chemistry, in contrast, can absorb huge peak charging currents just fine.

If you live in hilly terrain, and regen is important to you, then you pretty much need to go with LiFePO4... if it's too expensive, then so is regen


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

dimitri said:


> Sorry, we really took this thread off course here. Regen via controller only applies when you use main motor to regen, not separate alternator. Maybe this discussion can be picked up in another thread?
> 
> Tesseract, back to BMF 750 and BMF 1500 controllers. Any more pictures?


+1

pictures please


----------



## redbull (Mar 4, 2009)

Qer said:


> Specs so far is 750 Ampere peak and 500 Ampere continuously (provided it's properly cooled) for the "small" one and 1500/1000 for the next step. Voltage is, uh, to quote Tesseract "North of 200 Volt" or however he put it. Not sure if he's finally made up his mind about HOW much north of 200 Volts...
> 
> Most stuff is controlled by a microcontroller (some panic stuff is made in hardware just for added safety/reliability) and all user settings will be done through an ordinary browser (yeah, the serial port got scrapped). Price is not decided yet, but expect it to be at Zilla levels rather than Nice Price.


 

Will it do serries/parrarel like zilla and can i use for drag racing?


----------



## Harold in CR (Sep 8, 2008)

Sorry for side tracking the thread. What John and I wrote can be deleted. Sorry.

*Moderators note:* No need the tangent has been relocated to this new thread


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

redbull said:


> Will it do serries/parrarel like zilla and can i use for drag racing?



Eventually, yes, as it will only require a code upgrade. Somewhere between 4 and 6 of the terminals on the barrier strip are for "expansion", and the ethernet port will interface with future products to make adding new features a lot easier.

And, hell yeah you'll be able to drag race with it. What does that controller look like to you? Some pansy-a$$ thing one step up from pushing a golf cart around? Hell No! It means business!


----------



## Technologic (Jul 20, 2008)

Are you going to be casting that case? 

If so you should really rethink placement of the fans. They're currently not blowing across the sink's fins making it nearly worthless to have the fans (unless there's another sink underneath that sink, but even then). Likewise even if they were it wouldn't be much heat removal (fins are not very deep)

The sink will effectively act like it had no fans at all in that set up, even if you have another fan on the side to blow air through the circuit ... the sink's design (with turns in the sink fins I assume to increase convection pick up) isn't being utilized.

You should also look into mounting the IGBTs on a circular fanned sink like I attached.

If you built a decently tight case around that (and forced air at high speeds though the sink) it would be significantly more efficient and keep the IGBTS cooler (which of course helps efficiency).

Also current copper prices are extremely low... copper sinks are beyond reasonably priced now 

http://www.metalprices.com/FreeSite/metals/cu/cu.asp

it's down to what aluminum prices USED to be $1.25/lb... Not bad for twice the thermal conductivity.

If you're casting that case in china (which you should definitely look into first since mold costs would be a mere $1000 or so), expect to get copper for about $0.60/lb in ingots


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

I kinda wondered about the heat sink design and fan placement as well, unless the fans are over the potential hot spot on the controller?


----------



## Technologic (Jul 20, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> I kinda wondered about the heat sink design and fan placement as well, unless the fans are over the potential hot spot on the controller?


IGBTs should be directly mounted to the sink similar to output MOSFETS in an amplifier... that'd be the best way to rig up the setup which is why I suggested another heatsink type as well.

You definitely would want fairly thin fins but lots of them, copper and probably an axial or cylindrical fin design for efficiency. Likewise controllers are bound to be a tad noisy... so I say just dump as much velocity from a fan system as you can get... (ie. 2000-4000rpm fans through a small area of case surrounding the sink).

Might as well make it 25C all the time 

I'm not sure how much heat is actually produced though... any sort of wattage figure would be helpful in figuring that out. I've seen 2000-3000w of heat be dissipated without fans before (class A amps)...


----------



## aeroscott (Jan 5, 2008)

2x better than al . that makes it a no contest . I wonder about the high tin bronzes (2000 types of bronze if memory serves ) and water cooled with MB or BMW magnetically coupled heater pumps . 18.00 at pick and pull or 150.00 new ( 12 volt 3 amps )


----------



## Technologic (Jul 20, 2008)

aeroscott said:


> 2x better than al . that makes it a no contest . I wonder about the high tin bronzes (2000 types of bronze if memory serves ) and water cooled with MB or BMW magnetically coupled heater pumps . 18.00 at pick and pull or 150.00 new ( 12 volt 3 amps )



Tin has a very low thermal conductivity:
Thermal conductivity (300 K) 66.8  W·m−1·K−1


Vs. Copper's:
Thermal conductivity (300 K) 401 W*m−1·K−1

And of course Diamond's:
Diamond 900 - 2320 W/M-K


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Technologic said:


> Are you going to be casting that case?


Only if annual volume exceeds 500 or so units. The aluminum alloys suitable for casting are very different, thermally and mechanically, from machined 6061-T6 and it would pretty much require a total redesign of the housing.

That said, the goal with this enclosure was to require as little human labor as required to make it. Same with the mechanical design of everything else. 




Technologic said:


> If so you should really rethink placement of the fans. They're currently not blowing across the sink's fins making it nearly worthless to have the fans (unless there's another sink underneath that sink, but even then). Likewise even if they were it wouldn't be much heat removal (fins are not very deep)


Impingement cooling - in which the fans blow down onto the fins - is actually more effective than the traditional method of directing the airflow across the fins. Every CPU and high end graphics card uses impingement cooling, btw.

All of this is mostly irrelevant, though, because forced air convection is only the backup cooling method - the primary means is liquid cooling.




Technologic said:


> [Copper is] down to what aluminum prices USED to be $1.25/lb... Not bad for twice the thermal conductivity.


Copper machines very poorly (it galls and work hardens), it is still more expensive than aluminum and it is a lot denser. The thing already weighs 28 lbs, you know.

That said, there is a copper heat spreader in between the module(s) and the heat sink which effectively multiplies the baseplate area of a two-module controller by 53% and a single module controller by a ridiculous amount (~3x). This is mainly to let us get away with drilling fewer liquid cooling passages.




Technologic said:


> If you're casting that case in china (which you should definitely look into first since mold costs would be a mere $1000 or so), expect to get copper for about $0.60/lb in ingots


I am not nearly the Sinophile that you are, but even if I was more favorably disposed to outsouring manufacturing to that country I doubt I would anyway because the expected annual sales volume won't justify it. And then there is the "slow boat from China" problem - a lean manufacturing setup can not afford either to wait around 10-12 weeks for a shipment to come in, nor hold a massive amount of inventory to cushion against demand.

As of now the machining time per controller is... rather long, I'll admit, but after optimizing the tool paths we expect to be able to crank one out every 6-8 hours. If it looks as if sales volumes are even approaching that limit then we will next look into having one of the local places that does custom aluminum cylinder heads and such into making sand castings for us.


----------



## Technologic (Jul 20, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Only if annual volume exceeds 500 or so units. The aluminum alloys suitable for casting are very different, thermally and mechanically, from machined 6061-T6 and it would pretty much require a total redesign of the housing.
> 
> 
> As of now the machining time per controller is... rather long, I'll admit, but after optimizing the tool paths we expect to be able to crank one out every 6-8 hours. If it looks as if sales volumes are even approaching that limit then we will next look into having one of the local places that does custom aluminum cylinder heads and such into making sand castings for us.


6-8 hours is beyond a bit long from my perspective, but to each their own.

Casting for copper is why I was suggesting it since even at 500 controllers/yr you'd still make your mold costs back in about 4-5 controllers worth of labor (not to mention saving thousands of dollars in needless scrap)

At any rate I was suggesting this because they would plate it for basically nothing (50 cents or 1 dollar a case) for generally anodize it for free.


----------



## piotrsko (Dec 9, 2007)

lets see: 5 a week, 250 a year, need more just add 'nother machine, don't even change code.......

6061 can be cast, but not there in FLA unless there is huge aerospace facilities using same process. still at least 3 hrs machining, just less chips to recycle.

Looks to me that you have covered multitudes of really intricate and obscure details, and done so in an impressively sophisticated manner not readily apparent to the non-production-manufacturing oriented.

Is it done yet??


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

piotrsko said:


> Is it done yet??


Let's just say there's still a few details *cough* that has to be *coff* ironed out. 

Here's a tidbit about the software as a contrast to all this hardware talk, software controlled soft start:










Something is acting up slightly right now, it shouldn't take 60 ms for the PWM to start running. It probably has something to do with the recently added www-server that has had some unforeseen effect on the code. Gonna look into that tonight, really. Anyway, here's a close up of the soft start:










As you see it dithers the PWM to compensate for the fact that the pulse has to be a few us minimum to not blow the IGBT to Kingdom Come. Hopefully that will mean that the controller can start the car without a jerk.

Oh, and here's a test web page that the controller serves while running the pwm:










And no, the teddy bear won't stay. It's just there for testing that the server can handle both pictures and html. Anyway, this does not mean that the software is finished, but I'm getting there. Sloooowly...


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

Oh man, doesn't look like my EV will meet the road anytime soon 

Being an IT project manager and programmer myself I should have known that last 20% of work usually take 80% of time...

Oh well, since I am determined to use BMF-750 in my EV, all I can do is sit and wait


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

dimitri said:


> Being an IT project manager and programmer myself I should have known that last 20% of work usually take 80% of time...


But that would also mean you know how important it is to not rush like mad to hit an impossible deadline to guarantee the quality. After all, you don't want to drive a version 0.1 alpha pre-pre-release, do you?


----------



## ClintK (Apr 27, 2008)

dimitri said:


> Oh man, doesn't look like my EV will meet the road anytime soon
> 
> Being an IT project manager and programmer myself I should have known that last 20% of work usually take 80% of time...
> 
> Oh well, since I am determined to use BMF-750 in my EV, all I can do is sit and wait


I do software programming as well. I use the approach of trying to convince the user he doesn't need the 20% of features that take 80% of the time.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

ClintK said:


> I do software programming as well. I use the approach of trying to convince the user he doesn't need the 20% of features that take 80% of the time.


Believe me, there's several planned things that are post-poned to a later date. First the controller has to work in a rather basic way (ie move a car in a safe manner), after that we'll start adding functionality...

The advantage of software that can be upgraded at a later date.


----------



## grayballs (Aug 27, 2008)

'When' production becomes a problem, talk to me. I'd be interested in trading finished product for the machine work. My mill just sits in the garage unless I have a project. Old guys and their toys,,,,, sheesh


----------



## Madmac (Mar 14, 2008)

I rather rudely expanded a reply in another posting thread that took it off topic. At Tesseract's suggestion I am reposting in a more on topic thread

The original posting


> Quote:
> Originally Posted by *Madmac*
> _$8 microcontroller
> 
> ...


It is of interest as the company legal briefing I have had indicates that if a companies products cause injury or death in the US and any part of the development took place in Europe this allows legal action over here at both the company and individual designers by the US injured party and being fully liable.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Madmac said:


> ....
> It is of interest as the company legal briefing I have had indicates that if a companies products cause injury or death in the US and any part of the development took place in Europe this allows legal action over here at both the company and individual designers by the US injured party and being fully liable.


Sorry, I'm not a lawyer (wait... should one every apologize for _not_ being a lawyer?!?) but this doesn't make a lot of sense as written. That said, the whole point to incorporating is to shift liability from the individual members to the group as a whole.

Perhaps someone who is a lawyer, or at least plays one on TV, can clarify this, but regardless we will ask our legal counsel, not rely on info posted to a forum, for the obvious reasons.

Otherwise, please note that unlike any other controller out there (that I am aware of, anyway), ours has the main contactor built into it, with an externally accessible normally closed (NC) loop for the end-user to insert any variety of other NC switches like an emergency stop pushbutton, inertia switch, what have you.

And yes, while most semiconductor devices do fail short (some don't), the tremendous amount of peak current a battery pack is capable of delivering will almost certainly clear that short within a few milliseconds.

Furthermore, there is hardware level over-current/short-circuit protection in this design that shuts off the IGBTs within 5uS (DESAT), independent of the uC. The IGBT modules themselves are short-circuit rated - as any IGBT used in a motor controller should be - and self-limit to 6x their continuous rated current (approx. 3600A peak). Note that DESAT protection only comes into play if the uC somehow loses control over the current feedback loop. With any reasonable amount of inductance in the motor loop that won't happen; it will take a direct short across the output terminals to trip DESAT (or some similarly catastrophic failure inside the motor).

In short, pardon the pun, we have tried to anticipate everything bad that can happen. There are some things that cannot be protected against, of course - if you connect the battery pack backwards to the motor terminals you will immediately vaporize the anti-parallel diodes inside the IGBT module(s) - but you have to draw the line at some point between providing protection against a particular mistake and the cost of that protection. 

Now, with all that said could we still be sued? Of course, we can. As fellow user Evan put it so succinctly in another thread, "this is the land of the million dollar coffee burn." But will Qer be held personally liable because he developed the firmware for the controller in the capacity as a technical consultant while the controller itself is manufactured by an American corporation? Good question. I doubt it, but we'll find the answer to it.

However, if Qer can not be protected against a lawsuit, and he decides he'd rather not take the risk then congratulate yourself for killing this project.


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

I believe when historians look back at the death of modern western civilization, it won't be that oil ran out, or nuclear war, or crash of financial system, or stupidity of the government, although these are all very plausible causes. I think it will be the legal system that chokes the living force out of it, driven by all blood sucking lawyers just looking for new ways to sue people out of their lives.

I would tell you how I really feel, but it might be in violation of forum etiquette 

Being first potential customer for this controller, I would sign any liability waver, as long as I get standard technical warranty and support, provided I use the controller in the way it was designed for.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Madmac said:


> It is of interest as the company legal briefing I have had indicates that if a companies products cause injury or death in the US and any part of the development took place in Europe this allows legal action over here at both the company and individual designers by the US injured party and being fully liable.


I've verified this with a lawyer now and it boils down to this:

FUD

I like this word. Fud. Fudfudfudfudfud! Fudfud-fudfudfud! Fudfud! FUD! 

Ok, seriously. If I'd work with exactly the same thing for a Swedish (or European) company and the same accident happened (either in USA or Europe) I could be sued as well, no difference. It's true that USA might be a bit more trigger-happy about suing people, but it's also true that a lot of Swedes and Swedish companies have a daily business with people and companies in the States and it's rather uncommon that it goes to court.

It's probably much more likely that I get killed in an accident or die of high age (curse that high age, can't someone invent a vaccine?!) than that someone will bother to sue the pants of a poor SPD, especially since it's probably not very profiteable to sue me to begin with. They'll look once at my bank account and then they'll recoil faster than you can say "OBJECTION, YOUR HONOUR!".

Is this the international FUD-week and I never got the memo..?


----------



## Madmac (Mar 14, 2008)

From an engineering point of view


> And yes, while most semiconductor devices do fail short (some don't), the tremendous amount of peak current a battery pack is capable of delivering will almost certainly clear that short within a few milliseconds.


As you know at these voltages and power levels this is not entirely correct. Metal will start to vaporise and an arc will start. This is a dead short and can take very high currents, thousands of amps, and can extend quite long distances. The arc will only extinguish when the current is interrupted ( or goes thru zero on an AC supply)

Business wise 
The interest is in obtaining insurance, the products that I am involved with are used in large public events and US insurance requires a lot of work to prove that faults in our products could not result in injury or loss of life. It was an expensive and long process to make sure our liability was fully covered under all circumstances at a sensible price. There is no point in not giving all information to the insurance company as non disclosure of relavent information is a reason to not honor the insurance. 

Designing and manufacturing of a product is only 50% of the work these days, the legal and regulatory requirements (EMC, ROHS recycling etc) are as much work. 

In our legal briefing the observations were, injury leads to litigation for damages and if there are no funds to target legal action is unlikely. In the case of death (where the relatives see some one at fault, for example their child run over by an electric car controller failing) legal action is in many cases encouraged by bereavement councilors as a way of closure, particularly when relatives feel that the death would not be wasted by showing that regulation or banning is needed to prevent another case happening. ie their loved one did not die in vain.

In many of these cases relatives will fund legal action. You are planning to manufacture a product that has a dominant failure mode of the motor running at full power. No commercial manufacturer in the US would offer a DC based system these days.

Setting up by incorporating a business allows the cororation to have legal liability. In the States the owners can walk away with their money and let the business go bust. In Europe the individuals carry the ultimate liability.
There have apparently been nearly a 100 (as of the briefing 2 years ago) cases of legal action against European companies by individuals in the US.

Best of luck with your project.... I certainly would not, even for one minute, think of competeing with you on a product like this.


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

> The arc will only extinguish when the current is interrupted


I'm sure you are aware that every EV has a fuse between the battery and the rest of the circuit...so runaway condition, however unlikely it is within the controller, will still only last few milliseconds. 

Also, in ICE world there are many instances when car loses power due to whatever fault in the system, however, that doesn't stop people from buying them and doesn't stop companies from making them. Yes, some risks of recalls and litigation exists, but that should not prevent people from entering a business. Any major product that exists today has started very small by people like Tesseract and the like. If we went by your logic or those bloodsucking lawyers and insurance companies, then technical progress would have stopped years ago.

Also, by same logic, we should not be leaving our beds, ever, in fear of being killed by some unforseen event.


----------



## Anaerin (Feb 4, 2009)

dimitri said:


> Also, by same logic, we should not be leaving our beds, ever, in fear of being killed by some unforseen event.


To quote the inimitable Minnie Bannister:


Minnie Bannister said:


> We'll all be murdered in our beds!


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Madmac said:


> In many of these cases relatives will fund legal action. You are planning to manufacture a product that has a dominant failure mode of the motor running at full power.


Well, we better make sure it doesn't fail that way or, even better, that it doesn't fail at all...



Madmac said:


> In Europe the individuals carry the ultimate liability.
> There have apparently been nearly a 100 (as of the briefing 2 years ago) cases of legal action against European companies by individuals in the US.


Well, as I said, for me as an Europe it doesn't make any difference if I work for an American or European company in that aspect. Besides, why's this a concern of yours anyway?



Anaerin said:


> I'm not trying to spread FUD. I'm just expressing my personal concern that having non-essential tasks happening on the primary control system can lead to distractions, and added complexity where none should be. For instance, would you be happy if the autopilot on the airplane you're flying on also provided the entertainment system?


Nope, but I'm not planning on adding an entertainment system in the controller. I'm also not planning on adding a general purpose webserver for your homepage to be viewed on the Internet. The webserver is there for the end user to be able to set the user parameters and view/clear error codes.

Do you worry about that Kelly and Zilla have a serial port that can lead to distractions? Maybe you should...?



Anaerin said:


> So you have a full prioritised task scheduling system, with forced task abandonment, all on a microcontroller? That is an impressive feat. I know for a fact that even with a 68k-series processor, and a large development team, the best Commodore could come up with for the Amiga was a preemptive round-robin scheme, which could still hang the whole machine if/when it hit an unintended loop.


Nope. There is no such thing, but there are interrupts that runs on different levels f priority where the priorities are:


Catastrophic errors (must execute within 25 us)
Hard real time (a 14 kHz interrupt loop timed by the ADC)
Scheduler (1 kHz that handles various tasks, like throttle control, general IO etc)
Web server (main loop)
And btw, that Commodore completely failed to do better was not because it was technically impossible, it was because they choosed to, probably out of economical reasons considering what market they were targetting. Already the PDP-10 (released 1967) had memory protection and in 1969 the first UNIX operating system with preemtive multitasking saw the day.

That the Amiga "only" had preemptive multitasking but no memory protection was because they decided to not include an MMU in the construction. Sun has made several 68k-based machines that came with an MMU and working memory protection. After all, they ran UNIX. The first one had the same CPU as Amiga, a 68000, and a home brewed MMU since Motorola didn't have one themselves back then and somehow they pulled that off 3 years before Amiga hit the market, however it was probably a lot more expensive than the Amiga and it didn't have a cool blitter or even graphics. So the reasons for Commodores choises were rather based on economy than technology.

I haven't done anything near "a full prioritised task scheduling system, with forced task abandonment", I don't have to since there will be no users or even processes. There are several tasks that share the CPU time between them, but the tasks are hard coded and easy to predict.



Anaerin said:


> That's an interesting approach, and certainly one I'd not thought of. I do hope, however, that you have some kind of watchdog system in effect, to forcibly boot the web server out of control when timing control is necessary.


Now you're thinking from an operating system perspective again. The web server can't hang the system since it IS the idle loop. If there's nothing else to do it waits for data or transmits data, if there's something more important to do the interrupts forcibly yanks the CPU out of the webservers hands (uh, or something). The web server can never hang the system, it's impossible. It can, theoretically (I say theoretically because all buffers are static and the code is properly tested against buffer overruns), crash the system but if THAT happens there's a watchdog...



Anaerin said:


> I would still rather extra functionality like this was moved to a second processing unit, but provided there is no way at all any unintended loops or hangs in the web server can affect the control of the motor, I'm okay with it.


As I said before, are you equally concerned about the serial port in the Kelly or Zilla? We actually were going for a serial port from the beginning but switched to an Ethernet connection instead (very reluctantly from my side, Tesseract is my witness). Now I'm actually glad we did because the serial port is actually more prone to f* up than the Ethernet. The serial port has no buffer (well, 2 bytes, but that's not very much) and therefore has to be real time prioritized with it's own interrupt (or actually interrupts). Since it's an interrupt it might actually be called at an unfortunate time creating exactly that havoc you're worried about! The Ethernet controller, on the other hand, can't cause any interrupts and therefore it's less prone to cause problems than the serial port, believe it or not.

Trust me on this. I have been hacking assembler and low level C since -81. I know my shit.


----------



## Madmac (Mar 14, 2008)

> I'm sure you are aware that every EV has a fuse between the battery and the rest of the circuit...so runaway condition, however unlikely it is within the controller, will still only last few milliseconds.


The fuse is rated to withstand full motor power. An allowance is made for reliable operation by over rating by 25% to 50%. The only difference between normal acceleration at full from stationary and a fault is the controller will slew (or should) the current over a few seconds. To try and reliably detect these two conditions by a battery fuse is unreliable at best.




> Well, we better make sure it doesn't fail that way or, even better, that it doesn't fail at all...


That is unrealistic, design it so that it can fail and a system will protect from full power to the motor. As the number of home built / small shop conversion cars with DC motors on the road increases the chance of an accident rises. A fatality will occur the question is when and who's system. At that point one idiot could result in all DC motor cars being banned ( large manufacturers will waste no time in pressing for that). In many European states it is impossible to modify cars because manufacturers have pressured for regulations to prevent it.





> That the Amiga "only" had preemptive multitasking but no memory protection was because they decided to not include an MMU in the construction. Sun has made several 68k-based machines that came with an MMU and working memory protection. After all, they ran UNIX. The first one had the same CPU as Amiga, a 68000, and a home brewed MMU since Motorola didn't have one themselves back then and somehow they pulled that off 3 years before Amiga hit the market, however it was probably a lot more expensive than the Amiga and it didn't have a cool blitter or even graphics. So the reasons for Commodores choises were rather based on economy than technology.


The original Sun MMU was very clever as the same memory worked for segmenting the memory and as the page tables. Not that many parts but expensive very fast ram and address multiplexers. If I remember correctly two designs had this the original plug in CPU card and the version with video on board The video did have hardware acceleration but cannot remember how it worked. It was a custom chip. Memories... designed a similar system back then based on that idea for video processing.


----------



## Madmac (Mar 14, 2008)

> I'm sure you are aware that every EV has a fuse between the battery and the rest of the circuit...so runaway condition, however unlikely it is within the controller, will still only last few milliseconds.


The fuse is rated to withstand full motor power. An allowance is made for reliable operation by over rating by 25% to 50%. The only difference between normal acceleration at full from stationary and a fault is the controller will slew (or should) the current over a few seconds. To try and reliably detect these two conditions by a battery fuse is unreliable at best.




> Well, we better make sure it doesn't fail that way or, even better, that it doesn't fail at all...


That is unrealistic, design it so that it can fail and a system will protect from full power to the motor. As the number of home built / small shop conversion cars with DC motors on the road increases the chance of an accident rises. A fatality will occur the question is when and who's system. At that point one idiot could result in all DC motor cars being banned ( large manufacturers will waste no time in pressing for that). In many European states it is impossible to modify cars because manufacturers have pressured for regulations to prevent it.





> That the Amiga "only" had preemptive multitasking but no memory protection was because they decided to not include an MMU in the construction. Sun has made several 68k-based machines that came with an MMU and working memory protection. After all, they ran UNIX. The first one had the same CPU as Amiga, a 68000, and a home brewed MMU since Motorola didn't have one themselves back then and somehow they pulled that off 3 years before Amiga hit the market, however it was probably a lot more expensive than the Amiga and it didn't have a cool blitter or even graphics. So the reasons for Commodores choises were rather based on economy than technology.


The original Sun MMU was very clever as the same memory worked for segmenting the memory and as the page tables. Not that many parts but expensive very fast ram and address multiplexers. If I remember correctly two designs had this the original plug in CPU card and the version with video on board The video did have hardware acceleration but cannot remember how it worked. It was a custom chip. Memories... designed a similar system back then based on that idea for video processing.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Madmac said:


> That is unrealistic, design it so that it can fail and a system will protect from full power to the motor.


Considering you don't know how our system is designed and what kind of precautions we've taken it's a little bit harsh of you to judge us like that. Especially since we HAVE put a lot of effort in making the controller safe and reliable while still giving it good performance.



Madmac said:


> At that point one idiot could result in all DC motor cars being banned ( large manufacturers will waste no time in pressing for that).


Now you're just speculating.



Madmac said:


> In many European states it is impossible to modify cars because manufacturers have pressured for regulations to prevent it.


At least in Sweden there's a few loop holes you can use. I wouldn't be surprised if similar loop holes exist in other European countries since the regulation's "harmonized", as they call it. I know of a few happy DIY'ers that has managed to register their EV's despite the regulation, so it's far from impossible here at least.


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

> The fuse is rated to withstand full motor power


Yes, but a shorted controller event would mean that all battery current will flow into the motor, and there is much more battery current than motor or fuse is rated for, which will result in something blowing, hopefully the fuse, but not result in car moving uncontrollably. Also, you can always hit the brakes and that would surely result in overcurrent and blown fuse.

I just can't see any possibility whatsoever that the car would run in full power as if I connected battery directly to the motor, I don't believe its physically possible. 

That arc you speak of, cannot be sustained when materials around it vaporize, making the gap larger and larger.

I'm sorry, I just don't follow your reasons to scare people off, what's your beef with DC controllers or this one in particular? What constructive suggestions do you have to make design improvements in this project?


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

dimitri said:


> Yes, but a shorted controller event would mean that all battery current will flow into the motor, and there is much more battery current than motor or fuse is rated for, which will result in something blowing, hopefully the fuse, but not result in car moving uncontrollably. Also, you can always hit the brakes and that would surely result in overcurrent and blown fuse.


Also, before you even notice there's a short the following events must have happened:


The IGBT must break during travel despite constant current and temperature monitoring. If the IGBT is flaky already when power is applied, the AVR won't engage the main contactor.
The AVR must break, also during travel. Ie the software must crash AND the watchdog must be broken otherwise it would've reacted when the current ran past the limit. If the current sensor breaks, the AVR will shut down the IGBT and contactor.
The hardware over current protection (which uses a different sensor than the current sensor the AVR uses) must be broken OR the contactor must have welded stuck in on position.
I expect there will be a broken controller sooner or later because it's never possible to guarantee 100% success rate (but we aim for 99.9...% with lots of 9's ), but I do not expect a runaway situation as long as the end user follows the instructions.


----------



## Madmac (Mar 14, 2008)

> Designing and manufacturing of a product is only 50% of the work these days, the legal and regulatory requirements (EMC, ROHS recycling etc) are as much work.


I should have added to that checking for patent infringement.



> ours has the main contactor built into it, with an externally accessible normally closed (NC) loop





> The AVR must break, also during travel. Ie the software must crash AND the watchdog must be broken otherwise it would've reacted when the current ran past the limit. If the current sensor breaks, the AVR will shut down the IGBT and contactor.



You might want to do a patent search for built in contactor protecting high power PWM supplies with over current, hardware faults and safety interlock by disconnecting source power.
Licensing a patent is another of those things needed to bring a product to market, assuming that the patent holder is prepared to do so.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Madmac said:


> You might want to do a patent search for built in contactor protecting high power PWM supplies with over current, hardware faults and safety interlock by disconnecting source power.
> Licensing a patent is another of those things needed to bring a product to market, assuming that the patent holder is prepared to do so.


Dude. Don't you have a life to live, a car to convert or something else that's probably a little bit more constructive than trying to help us?


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Madmac said:


> I should have added to that checking for patent infringement.....


Yep, definitely need to make sure using a contactor as a power switch isn't covered by a patent...   

Come on, man, this is really a stretch. Surely you realize that making absurd comments like this only undermines your reputation. I've read quite a few of your posts and usually you had something worthwhile to say but whenever the subject of a controller came up you launched into the now familiar tirade about insurance, mowing children down in the streets (same verbiage, even!).

So, madmac, are you a troll or what?

And just an FYI... if you insist on making an ass out of yourself I will ask a mod to delete your posts from this thread. Frankly, the only point to this thread is to give the DIY community here a rare glimpse into the development of one of the key components of an EV. There's no reference to the company that will make it, I'm not taking "pre-orders" or "deposits". 

Now, if you have pertinent questions/challenges/criticisms about the design, flame away. But this crap about gunning down babies in the street, EU citizens getting sued, and patents on using a contactor for what it was designed for in the first place are really, really tiresome.


----------



## Madmac (Mar 14, 2008)

It is a common theme in postings on this forum about the amount of testing and regulations that auto manufacturers have to do. This is a direct result of manufacturers in the past selling products that resulted in injury or death, usually in an effort to save money. Politicians are always keen to use any opportunity to forward regulation if it puts them in a good light

It is an engineers job to design reliable products that meet specification and are safe to use at the specified budget. He should also point out where he sees potential problems in products before any injury is caused. Looking at many conversions the level of regard for safety is very poor.

A cavalier attitude will result in a minority spoiling the pleasure of the majority if an accident occurs. You should be always stressing safety in a conversion and ensuring that everybody in the EV community does so. There are many interests that will seek to restrict or ban conversions in that event. Ensuring safety does not need to add great cost it just needs the concern to spend time to do it.
You may have read of the politician attempting to get support for banning electric cars in city centres as the lack of noise may cause accidents with pedestrians ( IIRC it was also posted on this forum) and that was without any.


A contactor itself may be subject to a patent based on uniqueness of its design. The use of a contactor as part of a wider system can be the subject of a patent. The use of a contactor to just control power is not, obviously .

FYI 30 minutes patent searching turned up two US patents ( no European) that, from the information you have posted, you will infringe at least one claim on each. That is far from an exhaustive search.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Madmac said:


> FYI 30 minutes patent searching turned up two US patents ( no European) that, from the information you have posted, you will infringe at least one claim on each. That is far from an exhaustive search.



Ah, well... I was hoping it wouldn't come to this, but since you are going to the trouble of cross-referencing patents based on the details I have posted about the controller thus far it seems very prudent for me to not post any more details...

Everyone else, if you are displeased that Madmac has convinced me to not share any more information then perhaps you should express how you feel to him in a PM or post.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

That is unfortunate. Even though he was belaboring the point his and other's questions and your's and Qer's answers gave a positive impression that you know what you're doing and are building a quality product. I suppose by posting information it was inevitable that someone might do a patent search eventually.


----------



## TheSGC (Nov 15, 2007)

From my experience if you do a patent search for anything you will find something. I bet someone has patented brushing your teeth and the procedure for putting on a shirt. 

I seriously doubt this controller is infringing on anything because there are only so many ways to build a functioning PWM controller, and so what if it has contactors built into it. It's no different than every other controller and their wiring charts for adding safety contactors.

I just can't wait to see this thing in action.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> Even though he was belaboring the point his and other's questions and your's and Qer's answers gave a positive impression that you know what you're doing and are building a quality product.


Thank you.

These kinds of endless discussions (debates?) do, however, use up a lot of time that can be spent more wisely, like actually work on the controller instead of defending it, so the conclusion is that it's not worth the time for us to keep a public running update when it means that we constantly have to spend time defending ourselves. Unfortunate, definitely, because I am, after all, an open source/community guy and believe in the so called information society, but these last days I haven't got much done on the controller software because I've had to defend, for example, the decision to use Ethernet or including a web server.

I guess there's always a limit and in the end I'm not more of an idealist than that the pragmatic side always win if I have to choose. So if this is what it takes for Dimitri to ever getting the controller he has ordered, so be it. After all, he IS a paying customer while most of the members in this forum aren't. Yet at least.


----------



## Harold in CR (Sep 8, 2008)

I think, if the guy is so smart, and educated, why is HE not building something, instead of running down you guys ??? I say go for it, and deal directly with those that DO want to buy your controller. Everyone can not build these, so, you guys will have a market. 

If all else fails, stick a "Made in China" label on it. They don't give a damn about Patents. ??? ???


----------



## DIYguy (Sep 18, 2008)

I've just been watching... listening....and learning.

From an "outside" perspective, those who "do", will be challenged. If it is not this fellow... it will be someone else. As hard as it may be to put up with, when emotional ties are present...it is often a very valuable experience. His comments may be a blessing in disguise, at the end of the day. I do not think these debates are a waste of time. I'm sure some of the comments have forced you to re-think or at least justify your choices/decision and designs. I do know that when I have to verbalize a design, it often brings to light certain criteria that I may wish to re-visit, modify, improve.... sometimes even to a one more factor level of safety (3 to a 4 as an example). 

I would suggest that you try your best to deal with the technical comments by addressing them in a technical way. Let go of the comments that touch on emotion...as hard as it may be. Ensure that YOU benefit from the efforts put into the debate. Some good points have been raised, others are way over my head...but it doesn't matter. The points related to legalities and patents may be daunting.... but in today's world, they are real. You will only have a stronger product and position, as a result of this debate I believe, not a weaker one. 

Finally, congratulations on a most impressive accomplishment so far, and all the best of luck with your continued aspirations with respect to this project. It's great work you are both doing, and thank you for sharing that.

PS, my definition of luck... "When preparation meets opportunity".


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

I think we have all fallen yet again for another troll, shame on us! When someone keeps ignoring simple direct questions, brings no constructive feedback, feeds on emotional responses, there is only one explanation - he's a typical troll http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Internet)

It only takes a few direct questions to bring the Troll out out of the water, I think we've done it by now...

Tesseract, c'mon man, few stupid troll remarks and you are giving up on sharing details with your fans? Don't be that easily silenced, that is what the Troll is after, don't you see? 

Let's just all ignore the Troll and he will go away, and if not, the Admin will kill him


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

DIYguy said:


> I'm sure some of the comments have forced you to re-think or at least justify your choices/decision and designs.


Actually, not so much. Most of the redesign has come from long debates between me and Tesseract (mainly over Skype) and between Tesseract and a third guy that's involved in this project (but not present here, I think). We've also got some good feedback from Dimitri (also outside this forum) but even when we (or rather Tesseract) directly asked for feedback in the forum we got very little substance back.



DIYguy said:


> Finally, congratulations on a most impressive accomplishment so far, and all the best of luck with your continued aspirations with respect to this project. It's great work you are both doing, and thank you for sharing that.


Thank you.



dimitri said:


> Let's just all ignore the Troll and he will go away, and if not, the Admin will kill him


I thought it was the sun that killed trolls? Or maybe the admin is the sun? Is he called Ra?


----------



## dogstar74 (Dec 6, 2008)

dimitri said:


> What constructive suggestions do you have to make design improvements in this project?


Ummm.... (Raises his hand timidly) I'd like a red one.


----------



## Anaerin (Feb 4, 2009)

dogstar74 said:


> Ummm.... (Raises his hand timidly) I'd like a red one.


And I'd love a deep blue one.  Though I think (hope) when I (Eventually) get the money together, I'll be (trying) to go AC.

So, I'm holding out for a lottery win, then...


----------



## Technologic (Jul 20, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Sorry, I'm not a lawyer (wait... should one every apologize for _not_ being a lawyer?!?) but this doesn't make a lot of sense as written. That said, the whole point to incorporating is to shift liability from the individual members to the group as a whole.
> 
> Perhaps someone who is a lawyer, or at least plays one on TV, can clarify this, but regardless we will ask our legal counsel, not rely on info posted to a forum, for the obvious reasons.


Liability is only legal insofar as "expected possibility of failures" outside of just raw warranties (if any) you offer. Since the product would be "expected" to not explode this would be a liability of sorts(and likely even if it was expected as a possibility would probably still not be legal). Likewise if it's clear it's user error (such as a customer removing the contactor and fuses etc), you're not liable for what happens generally.

There are of course a lot of issues with even taking a small business to court over these things. If a business just closed up its doors you'd have hard time receiving any compensation at all, unless the assets (if any) were deemed to be sold as a means to compensation.

There are instances where the physical owners of a business can not be protected by bankruptcy (or incorporation for that matter), but these are rare and generally involve the product actually physically harming something.



> In short, pardon the pun, we have tried to anticipate everything bad that can happen. There are some things that cannot be protected against, of course - if you connect the battery pack backwards to the motor terminals you will immediately vaporize the anti-parallel diodes inside the IGBT module(s) - but you have to draw the line at some point between providing protection against a particular mistake and the cost of that protection.


This is a warranty issue not a legal liability issue (at least if your lawyer in such a case had any head on his shoulders). You could just chuck it up to misuse of the product and the consumer is responsible for its misuse... one of the major reasons it's so absurd when people claim ACP isn't selling their motors to end consumers because of the "liability". ACP might claim so, but there's clearly something else they're hoping for (big payday probably)



> Now, with all that said could we still be sued? Of course, we can. As fellow user Evan put it so succinctly in another thread, "this is the land of the million dollar coffee burn." But will Qer be held personally liable because he developed the firmware for the controller in the capacity as a technical consultant while the controller itself is manufactured by an American corporation? Good question. I doubt it, but we'll find the answer to it.
> 
> However, if Qer can not be protected against a lawsuit, and he decides he'd rather not take the risk then congratulate yourself for killing this project.


The million dollar coffee burn was lowered significantly on appeals... and it was also clear there was no way for the woman to know that the coffee was abnormally hot (I believe in that case they proved the coffee was being distributed at near boiling... which is clearly negligence in my opinion). I mean obviously distributing a DRINK at ridiculously high temps (ie. 3rd degree burns in your mouth) is negligence.

Negligence is why they paid... proving negligence in THIS case would be... well...silly
I certainly would place bets on the motor controller company being defended than the consumer that decided he wanted to hook a 300v pack to a 144v controller or whatever they did to kill it.

You might have a suit "filed" in theory, but you can probably kick it in general during primary hearings.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

[Offtopic] I hate to drag us more off topic but I must agree with Tech that though on the surface the million dollar coffee suite seems ridiculous and is often quoted as an example of what is wrong with our legal system, if you actually read the specifics of the case you realize that McD's was wrong and the amount needed to be high to be punitive. A million bucks is almost nothing to a company like McD's.[/Offtopic]Sorry, back to controller talk, I hope.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

TheSGC said:


> From my experience if you do a patent search for anything you will find something. I bet someone has patented brushing your teeth and the procedure for putting on a shirt.
> 
> I seriously doubt this controller is infringing on anything because there are only so many ways to build a functioning PWM controller, and so what if it has contactors built into it. It's no different than every other controller and their wiring charts for adding safety contactors.
> 
> I just can't wait to see this thing in action.



Yep - I've found quite a few patents less than 17 years old that are tangentially relevant to my controller, but none that are "substantially similar" in premise or detail. Circuits are especially easy to patent - whether they work or not is a whole other story  - so anytime you string together more than two resistors there's probably a patent on it already.

Unfortunately, merely being sued, even if you are sure to prevail, costs time, money and anguish _up front_. I don't have the time or energy to argue with self-serving jerks, especially ones that are clearly motivated to see my effort fail. 

Furthermore, I design the hardware and that's it. I don't run the business, deal with insurance or the legal details, etc. Someone else handles those issues. When someone like madmac insists on arguing those sorts of details with someone me that's a lot like going to the dentist to get your income taxes done...

One last thing - Qer and I are just the two people that are visible here working on this controller design. It will be a serious product made by a real, capitalized business. That a glimpse into its development was met with insinuations of patent violations does not exactly encourage me to spend more time posting about it. Thus, once again, the controller returns to being a "black box".


----------



## albano (Jan 12, 2009)

Tesseract said:


> Yep - I've found quite a few patents less than 17 years old that are tangentially relevant to my controller, but none that are "substantially similar" in premise or detail. Circuits are especially easy to patent - whether they work or not is a whole other story  - so anytime you string together more than two resistors there's probably a patent on it already.
> 
> Unfortunately, merely being sued, even if you are sure to prevail, costs time, money and anguish _up front_. I don't have the time or energy to argue with self-serving jerks, especially ones that are clearly motivated to see my effort fail.
> 
> ...


 

When do you think it will be ready? I can`t wait to test on my drag bike with twin motors. By the way i need that controller here in South Africa.


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

> Thus, once again, the controller returns to being a "black box".


Ahh, so you decided on the black color? Some people wanted Red or Blue...

Seriously, I don't blame you, why should you waste your time, its business and you need to feed the family first, afterall, you never promised an open source development, so you do what you gotta do...

We don't care if its a black box, as long as its available for sale soon...


----------



## Greenflight (Sep 13, 2007)

I'm definitely sorry to hear that we won't be seeing any more "guts," but you do what you have to. Keep up the good work, I'll be looking forward to seeing the finished product!


----------



## piotrsko (Dec 9, 2007)

Tesseract said:


> Yep - Thus, once again, the controller returns to being a "black box".



does this mean you are going to pot it internally, or am I being way too literal? there are some mean heat conducting compounds out there now-a-days.


----------



## aeroscott (Jan 5, 2008)

patents are put out with little or no checking of past patents . So if a patent is granted we cannot assume that it is valid with out searching expired patents that covered the same thing (this was done by the patent office in the good old days). I was looking at a Tesla Motors patent on the motor . a old motor guy looked it over and said Fairbanks was doing this 40 years ago . Great news for the uninformed investors " but they have a patent ". means nothing without extensive patent search . Patents would be the least of my worries , as they used to say " a patent is a licence to steal" . great work keep it up


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Jeez enough with the boring patent talk...

Tess/Qer: Updates on the controller release date?


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Bowser330 said:


> Jeez enough with the boring patent talk...
> 
> Tess/Qer: Updates on the controller release date?



I just finished laying out the hardest of the two pc boards about 5 minutes ago. It took me two weeks from start to finish. That's two weeks of working from 5:00am to 8:30pm, Saturdays and Sundays included, by the way... 

The second - with the digital stuff on it - should proceed much more rapidly because I'll have a lot more space to play with and I can actually let the autorouter do most of the work. Indeed, laying out that one will almost be like going on a vacation compared to this one.

So hang in there Dimitri.. pretty soon we can both blame Qer for the controller not being done....


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> So hang in there Dimitri.. pretty soon we can both blame Qer for the controller not being done....


Oh, yay. F-ng splendid to hear...


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Bowser330 said:


> Tess/Qer: Updates on the controller release date?


Not from me, there won't be. I'm going on an undecided hiatus, 'cause I've had it with the bickering.


----------



## HDS (Aug 11, 2008)

To Qer & Tess:

I am an electrician and Wiring Inspector. I was once sued by an electrician who took an old couple to the cleaners. He used untrained unlicensed people doing horribly uncode-worthy work without permits or inspections until he got caught. I filed complaints against him with the State. His lawsuit was based on his claim that, by filing a complaint with the State, I "caused him so much stress that he could not have sex with his wife". They sued me for a $1/2 million. It took 4 years to resolve and never made it to court.

My advice to you is to not let anything like this deter you from doing what you are doing. You recognized that there was a need for a "better mousetrap" in the controller world. What you have accomplished looks awesome. 

Re: "not getting much feedback from this forum"; I think that I can speak for maybe the majority of those who read these pages when I say that you guys are brilliant and there is nothing that I can tell you that you do not already know. In fact, my inputs would probably sound primitive, uninformed, and uneducated. But we are the ones who treasure your postings the most in that we learn so much every time we come on. When I first started entertaining the thought of an EV, I stumbled on this site. I try to go on and read it a little every day and there is not a day that I don't learn something that I did not know before that reshapes my thinking and designs.

It's kind of like when I joined an "old guys & girls" soccer league (having never played before). We lost the first game like 20 to nothing. My teammates were dejected as we left the field but I was all smiles. I said, "Look. You always learn more when you play against those who are better than you. So look at the bright side. Those guys didn't learn ANYTHING from us!! In fact, they are leaving this field worse than they were when they got here!! NAH, NAH, NAAAAAAH, NAH, NAH, NAAAAAAAAAH!!

Only you can decide whether to continue posting info or not. After all, it is time consuming for you and free for us. I for one hope that you do.

Congratulations on a great product and all the best for the future,
HDS


----------



## grayballs (Aug 27, 2008)

HDS said:


> To Qer & Tess:
> 
> I am an electrician and Wiring Inspector. I was once sued by an electrician who took an old couple to the cleaners. He used untrained unlicensed people doing horribly uncode-worthy work without permits or inspections until he got caught. I filed complaints against him with the State. His lawsuit was based on his claim that, by filing a complaint with the State, I "caused him so much stress that he could not have sex with his wife". They sued me for a $1/2 million. It took 4 years to resolve and never made it to court.
> 
> ...


Well said!! And thanks from one who has enjoyed this thread, from the beginning,,, except for the childish crap


----------



## BurqueEv (Feb 11, 2009)

I'm sorry to hear that because of one person we will not be getting any more updates on your controller. At least let us know when its done


----------



## Wirecutter (Jul 26, 2007)

> Originally Posted by Madmac
> It is a great shame that some use these free forums to solicit business to save costs and give nothing in return.


I thought this was an obvious attempt at irony at first. _Give nothing in return?_ IMHO, Tesseract and Qer have given *plenty*, resulting in informative technical discussions about controller design and safety. Ok, technically, when they go fully commercial, someone can think about kicking them off the forum.   Really, though - all forums have their trolls. That's life. 

I backtracked the thread, but didn't find the right post to quote. I, too, will happily sign a waver agreeing not to sue anyone if I can use the new controller. It would also seem silly to assume that, after all the technical discussion here by T & Q that they'd clam up with their customers and not provide tech or warranty support. Call me gullible and foolish, but I've been reading these guys in this forum for at least a year. Seems to me that they're putting more than just "reasonable" (in the legal sense) effort into safety and reliability. When they're ready to sell, I'll definitely consider buying.

Veering closer to on-topic, however...

Tesseract/Qer - have you considered potting the insides of the controller like everyone else seems to do? This would mean, of course, that you'd have to have really good thermal conductivity between power semiconductors and the heat removal means, be it water, fins on the case, etc.

I say this not because I'm a big fan of potting - actually I'd love to open one of your controllers up and marvel at the design. Not to steal, but to appreciate. But after all your efforts, it would be a real bummer to have the design reversed and your business undermined.

 I've really enjoyed seeing and hearing about this controller design. The talk of legal, patent, and even business issues makes my eyes glaze over, but the technical stuff is interesting to me. Like many engineers here, I've been taking apart and otherwise figuring out how stuff works all my life. For my part, I say keep those updates coming. Sure, things can go wrong, but things can go right, too.

So, do you have a test vehicle lined up for your prototypes?

-Mark


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

Wirecutter said:


> So, do you have a test vehicle lined up for your prototypes?


Yes, they do, thank you very much!


----------



## Technologic (Jul 20, 2008)

Wirecutter said:


> I say this not because I'm a big fan of potting - actually I'd love to open one of your controllers up and marvel at the design. Not to steal, but to appreciate. But after all your efforts, it would be a real bummer to have the design reversed and your business undermined.
> 
> I've really enjoyed seeing and hearing about this controller design. The talk of legal, patent, and even business issues makes my eyes glaze over, but the technical stuff is interesting to me.


I'm a fan of the patent and legal side . Namely without those two things there wouldn't be any way for businesses to actually compete.

At any rate if they don't want to preserve a reverse engineering possibility all they need to do is encase the entire controller section (besides the output stage) in thermally conductive epoxy...


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Potting also makes it impossible to repair doesn't it? Not to mention potting wouldn't stop someone from chipping it apart to see how it was built if they really wanted to.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

First off, thanks for the kind words, folks. I know it probably seems silly for us to stop discussing the controller because of a "troll", but when even a troll starts using what I've written to conduct patent searches, well, that implies a level of commitment to seeing our effort fail that goes above and beyond the usual disgruntled forum member. But here's the deal: this forum is largely unmoderated and that is largely a good thing. People can say what they want without much fear of being censored. I actually prefer this sort of "lawlessness" over forums where the moderators are more heavy-handed, but I have also come to realize that if the forum members don't police themselves then soon there aren't any members left BUT the trolls.




Wirecutter said:


> ... have you considered potting the insides of the controller like everyone else seems to do? This would mean, of course, that you'd have to have really good thermal conductivity between power semiconductors and the heat removal means, be it water, fins on the case, etc.


Potting is one of the best ways to turn a perfectly reliable design into a perfectly awful one. Poor heat removal and stress cracking from the compound shrinking/curing are the two big killers. Besides, the x-ray inspection systems that are used to ensure BGAs have soldered properly, etc., have pretty much rendered potting moot, anyway, if the goal is to stop a professional from reverse-engineering the thing. 

Conformal coatings on the other hand can be very beneficial, especially the urethane and epoxy based compounds, but since the enclosure itself is sealed to IP55 there is little compelling reason to use them for protecting the boards from the environmental. In the end, we will mainly rely on the time-honored practice of burnishing off the part numbers on the chips, encrypting the firmware and setting the fuse bits to prevent read-back. Atmel claims this is moderately secure and that's good enough for us. As long as we don't send it off to China to get manufactured we will likely maintain a reasonable grasp on our IP rights.

Oh, and since the parts costs is right around $800 - yes, just the parts - I somehow don't see the "low price leaders" duplicating our design anyway


----------



## Technologic (Jul 20, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Oh, and since the parts costs is right around $800 - yes, just the parts -


*wink wink nudge nudge* mhmm


----------



## piotrsko (Dec 9, 2007)

Ok no potting, Only mean twisted sicko's or NASA uses potting.

800 times rule of three= 2500 Out the door?

any chance of deposits or delivery positions yet?

Is it DONE yet?

BTW glad to have you back


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Technologic said:


> *wink wink nudge nudge* mhmm


And this means, what? I know you think that DC motor controllers shouldn't cost more than $400 - you've said as much in that DIY BLDC thead - but isn't that like saying no lawyer should charge more than, oh, I don't know, $25 an hour?

The film capacitor alone costs $147 straight from the manufacturer if we buy them 100 at a time ($195 in single quantities). Those bulkhead connectors that can actually withstand a serious amount of current AND are IP67 rated? They are $25 ea straight from the manufacturer. That's $247 right there and I haven't even dived into the guts of the thing... 

Oh, the EV200 contactor that's built in costs $86. The IGBT modules are north of $300 if you buy them one at a time from a distributor; if you are willing to pony up the cash, though, you can buy them for about $100 straight from the manufacturer. We're up to $433 now. Copper plates for the "bus bars"? Only $20 worth of Cu, but having them cut by waterjet added $80 on to that. We expect to significantly reduce that cost in the future, though. The 80lb block of aluminum that the case is milled from? $100, but we do recover some of that cost when we recycle the chips. So, $633.

Sure there are resistors that cost 3 cents and diodes that cost 6 cents but there's ~220 parts on the two boards as of now and I haven't even finished the layout on one of them. Then there's that brass and stainless steel hardware, the terminals strips and Ethernet jack (that stupid thing costs $19 all on its own, but it is made for industrial applications and sealed for full immersion), the fans - well, they're pretty cheap, actually. PC boards? Yeah, they'll end up being about $7-10 each, but the first order of 20 of the first board set us back $1100 ($55ea.). Getting awfully close to my off-the-cuff estimate of $800 and I haven't even tallied up all of the actually components.

But don't take my word for it. You've apparently got your own project cooking right now (not literally, one hopes) so you'll get to find out first hand just how much it costs to make a motor controller.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

piotrsko said:


> Ok no potting, Only mean twisted sicko's or NASA uses potting.
> 
> 800 times rule of three= 2500 Out the door?
> 
> ...


"We will sell no wine.... until you pay for it."

I think that was from the Blue Nun commercials in the '80s.

Anyway, no, no deposits or delivery positions. We don't subscribe to the, ah, "Aptera" business model.

That said, I can assure you that while the parts cost is rather high for this controller, I have been extremely successful - surprisingly so, actually - at keeping the time to assemble one very low. My current estimate is that it will take 2 days to assemble one from scratch. Our goal is to fill the void in the market left by Zilla's exit, but without the wait time.

Oh, and the price will be under what you have estimated, even though its a pretty good estimate based on the 3x parts cost rule of thumb for electronics. We expect to be able to reduce costs by $100-$150 over time, which is probably realistic.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Tech always thinks everything can be made cheaper, lighter, faster, and put together with cardboard and string


----------



## Technologic (Jul 20, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> And this means, what? I know you think that DC motor controllers shouldn't cost more than $400 - you've said as much in that DIY BLDC thead - but isn't that like saying no lawyer should charge more than, oh, I don't know, $25 an hour?


It means quotation of parts should be taken with a grain of salt, and even if it was true it's not good business practice to actually say so.

Besides the fact that many attorneys make $25/hour (after yes 8 years of college)... I'll leave you to the rest. Though I personally wouldn't accept that salary, at least 30% of the 1,000,000 attorneys in the US make less than or equal to that amount.



> The film capacitor alone costs $147 straight from the manufacturer if we buy them 100 at a time ($195 in single quantities). Those bulkhead connectors that can actually withstand a serious amount of current AND are IP67 rated? They are $25 ea straight from the manufacturer. That's $247 right there and I haven't even dived into the guts of the thing...


What on earth is that film cap for? the DC filter? if so... 



> Oh, the EV200 contactor that's built in costs $86. The IGBT modules are north of $300 if you buy them one at a time from a distributor; if you are willing to pony up the cash, though, you can buy them for about $100 straight from the manufacturer. We're up to $433 now. Copper plates for the "bus bars"? Only $20 worth of Cu, but having them cut by waterjet added $80 on to that. We expect to significantly reduce that cost in the future, though. The 80lb block of aluminum that the case is milled from? $100, but we do recover some of that cost when we recycle the chips. So, $633.


Hey it's your funeral if you're honestly buying 1ftx1ft blocks of pure aluminum... after making 2 controllers you would have paid for the mold of it being made.. and $2/case after that... if so might want to take this class in your spare time: 
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee364a/courseinfo.html



> Sure there are resistors that cost 3 cents and diodes that cost 6 cents but there's ~220 parts on the two boards as of now and I haven't even finished the layout on one of them. Then there's that brass and stainless steel hardware, the terminals strips and Ethernet jack (that stupid thing costs $19 all on its own, but it is made for industrial applications and sealed for full immersion), the fans - well, they're pretty cheap, actually. PC boards? Yeah, they'll end up being about $7-10 each, but the first order of 20 of the first board set us back $1100 ($55ea.). Getting awfully close to my off-the-cuff estimate of $800 and I haven't even tallied up all of the actually components.


www.alibaba.com is your friend



> But don't take my word for it. You've apparently got your own project cooking right now (not literally, one hopes) so you'll get to find out first hand just how much it costs to make a motor controller.


Actually I will have only a general basis for it since AC motor controllers (especially SVM ones) use something like 6-10 times the cost in parts as your run of the mill DC controller of the same voltage/current.

Good luck though honestly... I just get very annoyed when people market "parts costs" in general. Believe it or not I don't begrudge you your work/time into this project and being paid back for it. On the contrary...

Though this post might appear hostile (though that's just a personality fault of mine not actually how I feel about you), I actually thank you for the description of some parts here.


----------



## Technologic (Jul 20, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> Tech always thinks everything can be made cheaper, lighter, faster


There's no reason in physics that it can't be is there? It's not like there isn't layers upon layers of material science that haven't even been touched yet. Hell just the ceramic section of materials is completely untouched all the way up to the potential of fullrenes 


> and put together with cardboard and string


If by cardboard you mean honeycomb aluminum and string you mean glass reinforced elastomers then yeah... I do 
Don't blame me for having impossible standards and cheap tastes... the world is built (and advances) on such attitudes.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Technologic said:


> There's no reason in physics that it can't be is there? It's not like there isn't layers upon layers of material science that haven't even been touched yet. Hell just the ceramic section of materials is completely untouched all the way up to the potential of fullrenes


Sure, but they are trying to make something that might actually be brought to market right now.


> If by cardboard you mean honeycomb aluminum and string you mean glass reinforced elastomers then yeah... I do
> Don't blame me for having impossible standards and cheap tastes... the world is built (and advances) on such attitudes.


As you said, impossible standards. I'm all for cheaper and better, but I also live in the real world, where the two don't often meet.


----------



## Technologic (Jul 20, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> I'm all for cheaper and better, but I also live in the real world, where the two don't often meet.


You can force them to meet... people just don't want to 
Doing so thins margins and floods industries

Last thing we need is for a $400 200v 800a DC motor controller to come out... it just might make people realize how crappy/overpriced ICEs are


----------



## Technologic (Jul 20, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Anyway, no, no deposits or delivery positions. We don't subscribe to the, ah, "Aptera" business model.


Aptera, GM, Tesla and probably some others... gotta love increasing revenues for a quarter without expenditures


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Technologic said:


> You can force them to meet... people just don't want to
> Doing so thins margins and floods industries
> 
> Last thing we need is for a $400 200v 800a DC motor controller to come out... it just might make people realize how crappy/overpriced ICEs are


You'd still need to pair it with a cheap motor and cheap batteries that last 10 years and give 300 mile range, and it better be an AC controller, not a series controller with no regen capability, since one of the big marketing items the public likes about EV's is the idea of regen braking. Then the general public might realize how crappy/overpriced ICE's are.


----------



## piotrsko (Dec 9, 2007)

Ok, perhaps I am just being anal about a delivery position, but I was around watching the 'zilla (fiasco{?}), still don't have a 'zilla, may never get one, too dumb/lazy to build my own.

so: 2500 less 150= 2350?? whatever. I see this as a two fold opportunity to acquire a device/position, either of which may or may not be eminently salable in the near term. I also see this as an opportunity for you to gage your marketability.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Tesseract told me I should check the forum since the thread has taken a more healthy turn again. I must agree that it had, well, at least for a while. Now:



Technologic said:


> Last thing we need is for a $400 200v 800a DC motor controller to come out... it just might make people realize how crappy/overpriced ICEs are


You don't think that if it was possible to do an 800 Amp controller for $400 that someone would already be doing it? Kelly is known to be comparatively cheap, still they take $800 for their cheapest controller that can do 800 Amps, and that one only handles 72 Volts.

Now, it's rather simple. If you think our controller is too expensive there's two constructive reactions that's available to you:


Buy a different controller.
Build your own controller.
The second option also has the possible option for you to start mass production and compete us out of the market fair and square. With a price difference of up to about five times it'll be a breeze to beat us, Curtis, Kelly etc out of the market for good.

The least constructive option is what you're doing right now; bickering. Stop it. If you don't like our controller, don't buy it. It's a free countr... capitalism. But please, stop polluting this thread for the ones that has genuine interest in this controller.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

You gotta learn not to take Tech seriously when he talks costs. I enjoy most of his posts but I think even he knows deep down things aren't the way he pretends. You'd have to believe that all the disparate controller builders have teamed up to overcharge and under deliver in some grand scheme to defraud the millions, um, tens of thousands, uh, ok few thousand maybe potential customers


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> You gotta learn not to take Tech seriously when he talks costs....


Oh, I don't take him seriously at all... not anymore, anyway. But the problem Qer has - and I don't blame him, obviously - is that people less clued-in to Tech's "style" might mistake him for someone that actually knows what he's talking about.


----------



## fugdabug (Jul 14, 2008)

The controller looks (shall we say...) INNERESTIN'!~ What I REALLY WANT, it the mill that it is SITTING ON!

Really nice work. CNC no doubt?


----------



## Wirecutter (Jul 26, 2007)

JRP3 said:


> Tech always thinks everything can be made cheaper, lighter, faster, and put together with cardboard and string


I always like to remind people of an old engineering adage regarding how quickly a design can be completed, how cheaply it can be implemented, and its overall quality:

1. fast
2. cheap
3. good

...Now pick two, because that's all you get.

-M


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Technologic said:


> I'm just not sure what most people are supposed to get out of this thread.


Other than more information on the construction of a controller than most manufacturers provide and the opportunity to make an informed decision to purchase or not? If it works as promised and people think it's worth it then it will sell, much like the Zilla. If not it won't.


----------



## Guest (Apr 15, 2009)

Just because someone can charge more for a product does not mean they should. It could actually be a business killer by doing that. Today many companies try to up the price of products but end up going belly up. However if they had not been so money hungry at the outset of the business and kept the profit margin lower and gave a fair and honest deal then the business may still be actually building something useful and needed.

Pete : )


----------



## Guest (Apr 15, 2009)

For some the Zilla is worth paying but I bet many just buy it because it was really the best on the market and there were not alternatives, really. However when faced with alternatives the Zilla won't sell as well. The market is now getting a share of decent controllers that can do what many want that are better than the Kelly and Curtis but still much better priced than a Zilla. It may not fully kill the Zilla but it will hurt the product. 

I like the Zilla but would prefer a controller that is very good but not 3k worth of controller. 

Pete : )


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

If they've worked out their problems then Logisystems should fit the bill for you nicely. However I'd bet a number of people who've had to send their controllers back, some more than once, would have been glad to pay extra not to do so.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

gottdi said:


> Just because someone can charge more for a product does not mean they should. It could actually be a business killer by doing that. Today many companies try to up the price of products but end up going belly up. However if they had not been so money hungry at the outset of the business and kept the profit margin lower and gave a fair and honest deal then the business may still be actually building something useful and needed.
> 
> Pete : )


Are you referring to this controller in some oblique fashion, Pete? If so, please note that I have not stated what the exact cost will be, just that it will likely end up somewhere around $2000. We will determine the price based on the parts costs (known, and at least triple, if not quadruple, that of a Curtis 1231C or a Kelly KDH14500B) AND the assembly cost.

Once again, our goal all along was to fill the void left by Zilla exiting the market, not to make another Curtis or Kelly. Furthermore, there is no way we could survive a pricing war with a Chinese OEM like Kelly - when it comes to cutting your labor cost, it's awfully hard to beat migrant labor working for cents per hour.

Simply put, we realize that in order to succeed in this arena we need to deliver a better overall value. People didn't pay out the nose for a Zilla, Pete, because they wanted the best at any cost, they paid because it was the best bang for the buck. No contest, actually: a Curtis 1231C costs about $1500 and is rated for 144V/500A and is about as customizable as a rock collection. The Zilla Z1KHV cost a $1000 more but it is rated for more than twice the voltage at twice the current and has a lot more features! Relatively speaking, the Zilla Z1KHV is the real bargain here.

If you shop on price alone you tend to get the worst value. That seems to apply whether you are aiming for the cheapest or the most expensive product in a given market.

Just my opinion, worth price paid.


----------



## Guest (Apr 16, 2009)

Tesseract said:


> Are you referring to this controller in some oblique fashion, Pete? If so, please note that I have not stated what the exact cost will be, just that it will likely end up somewhere around $2000. We will determine the price based on the parts costs (known, and at least triple, if not quadruple, that of a Curtis 1231C or a Kelly KDH14500B) AND the assembly cost.
> 
> Once again, our goal all along was to fill the void left by Zilla exiting the market, not to make another Curtis or Kelly. Furthermore, there is no way we could survive a pricing war with a Chinese OEM like Kelly - when it comes to cutting your labor cost, it's awfully hard to beat migrant labor working for cents per hour.
> 
> ...



Nope, mostly referring to controllers in general. I fully understand what is and what has been on the market and what is coming. I will still stand by my statement that just because you can jack the price does not mean you should. The Zilla had no competition and therefore you can not compare it to any other on the market. The Zilla is unique and one of a kind and because it has lot of goodies and has proven reliable it can sell for a premium but that does not mean it should. I still think profit is required but to build a business that could take a market by storm the price needs to be reasonable. 3K is pretty steep but so again is the Warp Motors in the 5k range. That would equate to about 8K and I would not even pay that for an ICE. If I were building a totally custom race machine then the price is not so bad because it is a business expense but for a hobby it is not and therefor very pricy. There are controllers coming to market. I will play with what I have until my new controller arrives. Even my old 72 volt 550 amp controller is a good one. 

I think that a good controller could wake up a sleeping giant and become a big commodity for the mass market for others to convert within reason. Reasonable control, Reasonable Power, Reasonable Price, Reasonable Programability, and excellent reliability and excellent customer service and warranties. With in reason. 2K is more what I'd expect to pay for a top of the line controller and under 1k for the lower power and less programmable types. 

That is not too much to ask for. I think there are enough of you here that could pull it off. 

Pete : )


----------



## gv2ev (Jan 27, 2009)

i believe 2k is more than fair to thhe consumer for a reliable, highpower controller.


----------



## mattW (Sep 14, 2007)

A note from a moderator...
Tesseract and Qer are doing us a big favour in giving us this much insight into the process of building their controller. They certainly don't have to, and we are glad that they have. While DIYElectricCar generally has a pretty open moderating strategy, in the interest of seeing this thread continue and their product come to market I will be taking a more active role in this thread. More competition in the controller market can only be a good thing, and while you may not agree with all of them, the design choices that they make are up to them and they will bear the consequences when their product goes to market. I'm sure they are still open to constructive feedback and genuine questions from the curious but non-constructive attempts to criticise what they are trying to do will be deleted. Lets keep these forums a positive place that rewards innovation rather than chopping down the tall poppies.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

gottdi said:


> Nope, mostly referring to controllers in general. I fully understand what is and what has been on the market and what is coming. I will still stand by my statement that just because you can jack the price does not mean you should.


As someone who has been self-employed doing custom electronics design (as well as making a couple of gadgets for retail sale on the side) for 6 years, I think I have a pretty good idea of what the market will bear for this sort of stuff. After all, if I didn't have at least a clue then I would have been forced out of business a long time ago. 




gottdi said:


> ...2K is more what I'd expect to pay for a top of the line controller and under 1k for the lower power and less programmable types.


Okay, that's certainly reasonable to me. However, we took a slightly different tack here in order to make it easier for people to upgrade down the road (bad pun, I know). Thus, it may appear that $2000 for a 750A peak controller is not such a good deal (disregarding any perceived or claimed superiority of design, etc...), but what if at a later date you could double that controller's amperage rating to 1500A peak for, say, $1000 more? 

In other words, is it worth paying more up-front for a controller you could upgrade at a later date? We think so, but, honestly, this is just our personal feelings on the matter and some rather shaky market "research" which has mainly consisted of polling fellow EV parts supplies/makers (like Grassroots, D&D, NetGain, etc.) and observing what people like/don't like about existing controllers on sites like this one, ecomodder, etc.

Our conclusion is that the world does not need another "Kelly" rather, that it needs another "Zilla". Maybe we will be proven wrong in the market place, in which case we will either have to scramble to cheapen the parts costs of the controller greatly or else exit the market entirely. That's the beauty of capitalism, though: just build what you think is a better mousetrap and the market itself will vote with its dollars whether it is or isn't.


----------



## Guest (Apr 23, 2009)

Upgradability is a great idea but unless you actually build one at 750 amps then build one at 1200 amps you can not guarantee it will actually be upgradable for those who want the upgrade later down the road. I have seen promises like this before. What is needed is a controller that is fully programmable like the Zilla but in between the lower end and higher end. Upgradable or not. Good, strong fully programmable and have features like the zilla but maybe a few less because it is not considered the top of the line. Or maybe the same or more features and be considered the cream of the crop for all. The zilla being the top of the line for the super hot dog and the kelly for the bottom who can't yet afford but it will do just fine for a long time. I don't really need 1000 or 1200 amps for my street driven machine but It would be nice. That would be like me putting a hopped up V8 into my Ghia vs a hopped up Flat 4. 750 amps is plenty for many light weight vehicles. Mine does pretty darn good at 72 volts and 550 amps. Dump in 120 volts and 750 amps and I can peel the rubber off the wheels. Plenty more than you need for a daily driver commuter. 

Pete : )


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

gottdi said:


> Mine does pretty darn good at 72 volts and 550 amps. Dump in 120 volts and 750 amps and I can peel the rubber off the wheels. Plenty more than you need for a daily driver commuter.


Unless you have a heavier vehicle, which many do.


----------



## Guest (Apr 23, 2009)

120-156 volts and 750 amps should do very well for most street commuter vehicles including those who build Mid sized trucks which are heavy. I drove in one that had 500 amps and it did fine. Not a hot rod by any means but a very capable vehicle. Like I said, 1000 is nice and I agree that for the heavier vehicles that would be a bit better to have but not a requirement. 1200 is for those who must be able to say I can but almost never use or need unless they happen the track often. Bragging rights I guess. Guys are that way : ) I know I am : )

Buy your bragging rights and go right ahead. When I feel I can afford it I will. 

Pete : )


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Oh sweet criminy! Not the how many amps is enough debate again?!

Gottdi - question the controller all you want, but let's refrain from questioning my credibility, okay? I understand your skepticism about modular controllers - I've read the same threads where DIYers have tried to hack one out with cute little banks of MOSFETs and such. My design needs only to parallel second gate driver and IGBT module to double its amperage, and I can assure you that I am well and truly capable of designing the appropriate load-balancing, desat and gate drive circuits to ensure the two modules share current evenly (the fact that they are special IGBTs with a positive temp coefficient for Vce[sat] goes a long ways towards making this possible, too).

Anyway, at around 1:00pm today I just finished successfully testing the prototype controller. It needs a little tweaking, and there are a couple of minor errors on the main pc board (minor = fixable by hand) so, I can officially say....

IT WORKS!


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Anyway, at around 1:00pm today I just finished successfully testing the prototype controller. It needs a little tweaking, and there are a couple of minor errors on the main pc board (minor = fixable by hand) so, I can officially say....
> 
> IT WORKS!


woo hoo


----------



## Guest (Apr 23, 2009)

I am not questioning the controller or the very hard work that has been involved in building it. I only question the validity of doing an upgradable platform. Not your work at all. I only make the statements because until it actually happens it is not so. Whether or not it is you or someone else. If you offer two versions then I have no question. I commend all of you that are involved with this controller project and a big kudos to your hard work and that IT WORKS. Sweet! Can't wait to see the video results when you power your vehicle with the new controller on the street for all to see! Goodie. More options. There are other controllers to follow. I watch them all. Glad to see Zilla is no longer the only big dog. : )


Pete : )


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Well, if Tesseract's gonna brag I'm going too! So there!











Impressive, eh? If you're really nice I might even tell you what it all means.


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

Qer said:


> Impressive, eh? If you're really nice I might even tell you what it all means.


Looks like someone floored the throttle for half a second and rubber peeled off the tires  , but only at 500Amps. 

Where is our promised 750Amp, dammit ?


----------



## Technologic (Jul 20, 2008)

dimitri said:


> Looks like someone floored the throttle for half a second and rubber peeled off the tires  , but only at 500Amps.
> 
> Where is our promised 750Amp, dammit ?


I'd say it's pretty high efficiency as well... but it's somewhat hard to know what they're measuring. Based upon the area under the two curves though it seems to be in the high 90s.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

dimitri said:


> Looks like someone floored the throttle for half a second and rubber peeled off the tires  , but only at 500Amps.
> 
> Where is our promised 750Amp, dammit ?


I had Qer purposely limit the maximum current to 500A because I haven't yet calibrated the internal motor current sensor!  The IGBT is rated for 600A continuous all the way up to 3000A for 5uS and I didn't want to take any chances with the first run when the main goal was just to simply ensure I didn't screw anything up in the hardware. I did, but it was only the hole size for the two-pin header connectors and the wiring of the crystal for the real time clock chip... As I mentioned before, hand-correctable errors, but ones which will be addressed in the next board revision, of course. Amazingly, the board that sits on top of the IGBT and handles driving it along with all of the parameter sensing chores (battery voltage, motor current, heat sink temp, etc...) came out right the first rev. Honestly, it usually takes me two or three tries to get everything just right (and that certainly is the case with the main control board) so I guess I'm finally learning after all those years of botching boards the first go around... 

Anyway, to really put the controller through its paces I am waiting on the other people involved (i.e., the principal partner and the mechanical engineer) to finish machining an adapter to couple a WarP 9 motor to an outboard engine dyno. The testing we did today was with a motor installed in a vehicle so we were relying on the brake pads - which soon starting smoking - to load the motor down. 

We did record the initial test on my digital camera but I deleted the video file because without any test equipment present you can't really tell what's going on... other than my big goofy grin as I crank the throttle pot up and the brakes start smoking


----------



## Dalardan (Jul 4, 2008)

Congratulations! 

That's really nice work. Why is the CPU working harder when limiting the motor current? Also, the refresh rate of the CPU load (50ms) may lead to think the CPU doesn't work harder when ramping up the current and work hard when ramping down. It's just a digital lag caused by the refresh rate?

Just to know, what will you be using as an engine dyno? Will you use a water brake like this one from Land and Sea : http://www.land-and-sea.com/dyno/dyno.htm ? I'm planning to buy a dynometer to do lots of stuff (Formula SAE motor tuning and electric motor loading to test a homemade controller, the one we spoke about some months ago).

Continue your great work, can't wait to see a BMF 750 torturing a Warp 9 on video!

Dalardan


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Dalardan said:


> That's really nice work. Why is the CPU working harder when limiting the motor current?


Simply because the code has a bypass that when throttle is 0 it doesn't bother doing calculations about increasing/decreasing PWM but simply sets it to 0, thus skipping the lion part of the PWM-code.

This is actually not to save CPU time but for safety. When the throttle is released the controller should immediately shut off the IGBT. If you simply decrease the throttle it will adjust the PWM slowly to make a smooth change without over- or undershots, but if you let go of the throttle it might mean that next you're gonna slam the brakes. Thus no nice adjustments but an instant shutdown. Of course, in real life there will be a slight delay anyway since the inductance in the motor will keep the current flowing for some us or possibly a few ms more, but that's something we can't do anything about. Physics, you know... 



Dalardan said:


> Also, the refresh rate of the CPU load (50ms) may lead to think the CPU doesn't work harder when ramping up the current and work hard when ramping down. It's just a digital lag caused by the refresh rate?


Mostly, yes. I'm gonna rewrite that algorithm to trade the coarse granularity for filtering instead which won't be quite as accurate but will be better at showing quick trends (which will be more useful for me).

Anyway, what this test shows is mainly the softwares ability to track a signal and the quickness of the feedback loop. My "motor" is a simple RC-filter which of course has no resemblance of the real world (that's what Tesseract will have to test) and the ramp up is slower than the ramp down because then the biggest lag is the digital algorithm while in the ramp down the PWM is entirely shut down and what you see is 1/RC.

But what this test REALLY shows is the microcontrollers ability to give run time data in real time over Ethernet. That's pretty cool.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Dalardan said:


> Congratulations!


Thanks, Dalardan. I thought for sure, though, you'd finish your alternator/brushless motor project before I finished this one!  

(I'm actually very curious to see how well an alternator works as a brushless motor, btw, so if you don't get cracking I might beat you to it!)




Dalardan said:


> Just to know, what will you be using as an engine dyno? Will you use a water brake like this one from Land and Sea : http://www.land-and-sea.com/dyno/dyno.htm ? I'm planning to buy a dynometer to do lots of stuff (Formula SAE motor tuning and electric motor loading to test a homemade controller, the one we spoke about some months ago).


We gave that dyno some serious consideration but in the end we decided the water brake/load cell setup was less "trustworthy" than a hydraulic or electric type. A local marine repair shop that went out of business was selling a hydraulic type for a pretty good price so we went that route (otherwise we were giving serious consideraton to rigging up the same setup that the Belktronix guy uses - his dyno is pure genius IMO). Anyway, the hydraulic type is essentially a gear pump with a valve on the output. Close down the value to raise the output pressure, and since gear pumps are positive displacement you can reliably calculate the hp from the input RPM and pressure (RPM translates directly into volume, that is).

For your alternator-as-brushless motor project you probably want something a little smaller scale. A simple dyno at this power level would probably be a shunt wound motor with an adjustable field control (could be a rheostat with inline ammeter - the current level here is in the sub 1A range) with a big honking fixed resistor across the armature for a load. A treadmill motor - which are usually PM motors - could also be used but then you will need the rheostat to be big as it will have to be adjusted to vary the load. But I digress in my own thread... 




Dalardan said:


> Continue your great work, can't wait to see a BMF 750 torturing a Warp 9 on video!


Video coming soon. We'll be doing much more exhaustive testing today, hopefully with the aforementioned dyno. The hold-up is not that an adapter to the WarP motor needs to be made, rather, that NetGain has not shipped out our latest motor order for some reason. Not really sure what is going on with that... I just built the hardware, you know


----------



## Harold in CR (Sep 8, 2008)

Great job, guys. Glad to see the bickering didn't shut down the process, and, the controller is doing it's thing, with no major flaws. 

Amazing project from input from different countries, all working together.


----------



## dogstar74 (Dec 6, 2008)

SWEET!


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Harold in CR said:


> Great job, guys. Glad to see the bickering didn't shut down the process, and, the controller is doing it's thing, with no major flaws.
> 
> Amazing project from input from different countries, all working together.


Nah, the bickering didn't stop us from working, it just stopped us from posting updates to this forum. Since a moderator finally stepped in and cleaned up the thread, both Qer and I decided to resume posting. Yes, this is a commercial venture but we were still very dismayed at the vitriol several people here were giving us. Of course, one of those people is developing a motor controller as well... 

Anyway, the testing that was supposed to be done today is being done tomorrow as a result of a faulty pot I was using as the throttle. It caused us no end of grief because we couldn't figure out why a controller that worked perfectly fine yesterday suddenly max out on amps until it hit desat every time I turned the pot just the tiniest bit... Turns out the resistive wire broke open near the bottom contact. As soon as I turned the wiper the microcontroller was essentially told to go full blast.

Murphy's Law strikes again... the chances of a mil-spec wirewound pot going bad like that are asrtronomical... but that would be just my luck


----------



## TheSGC (Nov 15, 2007)

Have you tried using a standard Curtis PB5 or PB6 yet? They seem to have different resistive properties than a standard 5K pot and I have found that my PB5 only goes from 0-4.8k ohms with the setup box it comes installed in. It also isn't quite as linear as I would like, but it works.

Here's a technical question for you guys- What's the EMI like for this sucker? I'm thinking about EV motor hums, radio interference funky wines, etc.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

TheSGC said:


> Have you tried using a standard Curtis PB5 or PB6 yet? They seem to have different resistive properties than a standard 5K pot and I have found that my PB5 only goes from 0-4.8k ohms with the setup box it comes installed in. It also isn't quite as linear as I would like, but it works.


We discussed whether to go with the Curtis style potbox for the throttle (i.e. - a 5k rheostat) but in the end we decided not to for a number of reasons. The three biggest ones, though, are that the pot is used as a rheostat and pots have lousy tolerance on their resistance which makes calibrating them a pain; we didn't want to be beholden to a competitor's product for our controller to work; and, finally, but perhaps most importantly, when we asked several other conversion shops whether it was important for our controller to be "backwards compatible" with the PB6 they all said no. Really, there is absolutely no advantage I can see to wiring a pot as a rheostat for this application but plenty of disadvantages. Besides, our throttlet input is basically a 0-5V input, so other types of throttle pedal assemblies can be used like Hall Effect, linear variable displacement transformer, etc. 




TheSGC said:


> Here's a technical question for you guys- What's the EMI like for this sucker? I'm thinking about EV motor hums, radio interference funky wines, etc.


Excellent question, and thanks for reminding me about this! I'll take a portable AM radio with me today to do an informal EMI test.

I expect that the controller will be extremely quiet because the enclosure is, essentially, a solid block of aluminum. There are some slots/holes that will be permeable to frequencies starting around 10-20Mhz, though (I haven't gotten around to doing those calculations, but will eventually...). That said, the motor brushes are the primary source of EMI in a DC EV and there isn't much one can do in the controller to prevent or minimize that source of noise.


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

Curtis PB box is a piece of junk, especially considering that people charge $170 for it. I will never ever buy one again.

I have been measuring resistance on mine and also added a wire to the other side of the pot, so I could use it to provide 0-5V signal. Turns out that even at wide open there is still 1.5K of resistance left, which means it would never reach 5V.

I actually like the fact that it has logarithmic pot, so its very smooth on the takeoff, but I wish it used its entire operating angle.

Anyway, if your controller has similar throttle range and speed software adjustments as in Kelly, then we have nothing to worry about, we can come up with thousand ways to get 0-5V into the controller. I already have few ideas for throttle design I'd like to test next time 

Thanks for detailed progress reports, its fun to read


----------



## TheSGC (Nov 15, 2007)

dimitri said:


> Curtis PB box is a piece of junk, especially considering that people charge $170 for it. I will never ever buy one again.
> 
> I have been measuring resistance on mine and also added a wire to the other side of the pot, so I could use it to provide 0-5V signal. Turns out that even at wide open there is still 1.5K of resistance left, which means it would never reach 5V.
> 
> ...


I added the third wire to mine too, but I only paid $50 new for the PB5 soo...

I too wished it went all the way to 5K, but like you said, that's what the software is for.

Tesseract- I know that a EV motor is the EMI king, (It is essentially a massive loud speaker...) I just wonder how the EMI is since the controller is usually closer to the car's radio/antenna than the motor. I have noticed on my Kelly that I can get my radio to "sing" just like the motor when cruising at 40 MPH (3800 RPM, probably 75% PWM duty cycle) And I am using FM signals 102.5 and 104.5 both sing away.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

dimitri said:


> Curtis PB box is a piece of junk, especially considering that people charge $170 for it. I will never ever buy one again.


Well, I was trying to be more diplomatic about it, but that is pretty much what every other conversion shop said about them, too. Pure junk. 




dimitri said:


> I actually like the fact that it has logarithmic pot, so its very smooth on the takeoff, but I wish it used its entire operating angle.


That's an interesting bit of feedback, dimitri. We've also discussed whether a linear or log taper would feel more natural. 

That said, most log pots are made by fusing together two tracks with different resistance values, so the resulting graph of resistance over rotation is only remotely logarithmic looking. A much better way to get closer to a log transfer function is the really old-school trick of connecting a resistor of approximately 1/6th of the pot's value between the wiper and bottom leg. E.g., 10k pot and a 1.5k resistor. The overall value of the pot is then less than that of the shunt resistor, of course.




dimitri said:


> Anyway, if your controller has similar throttle range and speed software adjustments as in Kelly, then we have nothing to worry about, we can come up with thousand ways to get 0-5V into the controller. I already have few ideas for throttle design I'd like to test next time


The hardware is very flexible and the software is, of course, almost infinitely so. Right now the throttle ramp rate (how fast current is allowed to change for a given change in the throttle) is hard-coded, as well as the allowable range, but that stuff will all be user-programmable via the web page interface. 

Also, Qer has written a cool little program that talks directly to the microcontroller through the ethernet port to gather operating data in real time. It is totally bad-ass! I can plug my laptop in to the controller and see throttle position, motor current, pwm duty cycle, heat sink temp, pack voltage... etc. It also generates a text file of the recorded data which you can make pretty little graphs with. No doubt he'll be posting one soon.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

TheSGC said:


> ...
> Tesseract- I know that a EV motor is the EMI king, (It is essentially a massive loud speaker...) I just wonder how the EMI is since the controller is usually closer to the car's radio/antenna than the motor. I have noticed on my Kelly that I can get my radio to "sing" just like the motor when cruising at 40 MPH (3800 RPM, probably 75% PWM duty cycle) And I am using FM signals 102.5 and 104.5 both sing away.


Wow... if you are getting interference all the way up into the FM bands then that controller would not have a prayer of a chance of passing FCC Class A EMC testing. It takes some seriously noise energy for a device operating at ~15kHz to generate RFI all the way up to 100+MHz AND in such a way that FM is susceptible.

I bet that's more from the motor brushes than anything. Try wrapping the brush vent area with aluminum foil temporarily and see if the FM noise, at least, goes away. Stopping interference down in the AM band is pretty much hopeless, though - even the FCC realizes that


----------



## TheSGC (Nov 15, 2007)

Tesseract said:


> Wow... if you are getting interference all the way up into the FM bands then that controller would not have a prayer of a chance of passing FCC Class A EMC testing. It takes some seriously noise energy for a device operating at ~15kHz to generate RFI all the way up to 100+MHz AND in such a way that FM is susceptible.
> 
> I bet that's more from the motor brushes than anything. Try wrapping the brush vent area with aluminum foil temporarily and see if the FM noise, at least, goes away. Stopping interference down in the AM band is pretty much hopeless, though - even the FCC realizes that


I'll try a band- It could also be I just have a crappy setup (New Sony radio, 14 year old cabling/speakers) I never listen to AM so I don't have any experience in the car but at home EVERYTHING screws with it. 

I really don't know if it even has an FCC rating. It supposedly passed Europes EMC testings, and if I remember my Cisco classes, Europe's ratings are more strict than US ratings. HMM now I wonder... THOUGH the Kelly's 12 volt logic power is coming from the same 12 volt battery that powers all the car's electronics so maybe that's doing it?


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

dimitri said:


> Anyway, if your controller has similar throttle range and speed software adjustments as in Kelly, then we have nothing to worry about, we can come up with thousand ways to get 0-5V into the controller. I already have few ideas for throttle design I'd like to test next time


The plan is that the controller will be possible to calibrate for max and min throttle and then there will also be some way to tweak the linearity too, but I haven't quite figured that part out yet. One idea I have is to make it possible to set the mid throttle to 10, 20 .... 90%. For example, if mid throttle is set to 30%, the first 0-50% power is on 0-30% throttle and 50-100% power is on 30-100% throttle.

I haven't tested this, there's tons of other things to finish first, but it's some kind of hunch how it could be made. I can't use heavy math to calculate the curve since it's a micro controller so there's not CPU-time for fancy trigonometric functions or so, but would that be enough for your ideas?

Anyway, I didn't get any log files from yesterdays near disaster and it doesn't seem possible to convince him to do a new "Bang on!"-test today since:



> My nerves may need a few days to recover for that one.


Damn. To make me happy he did, however, torture a block of graphite. This is what that looks like:










So what you see here is a full test run that lasted about 44 seconds. At 0 the controller got powered up, then it takes a while before Ethernet gets link (and can start transmit data), then, at 3 second time stamp, precharge is started (it's delayed to be able to log, in the future that 3 second delay will go away) and about a second later the main contactor is activated because the capacitor is fully charged.

At 14 seconds run time Tesseract starts to heat up the graphite as you can see, and since he's doing it slowly the controller has to improvise to be able to correctly follow the requested current and it does so by lowering the frequency. This is NOT a Curtis squeal! To begin with the controller tries to keep the frequency as high as possible (up to 14 kHz, then it runs as any other controller) which means that it's rarely even close to 1.5 kHz and since it's dynamically changing the frequency the motor will probably hum rather than squeal. Here's a closeup of what I mean:










(Btw, would it be possible to allow a little bit bigger images as attachments in this forum? Please?)

Here you can also see that the motor current follows the throttle settings pretty close, except for when the current starts to creep down to 20 Amperes and below, that's also where the controller gets a tough time running the PWM smoothly and starts to shut PWM entirely off for brief periods (you can see it by that the frequency shoots up to 14 kHz again). But then, at these low current many cars won't barely move anyway, so no biggie. 

Anyway, Tesseract will be over to the shop today so as soon as he produces some real life log files (and I have time to convert them to graphs, over here it's garden work on the agenda) there will be an update with graphs over a real motor and all! Stay tuned!


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

> The plan is that the controller will be possible to calibrate for max and min throttle and then there will also be some way to tweak the linearity too, but I haven't quite figured that part out yet. One idea I have is to make it possible to set the mid throttle to 10, 20 .... 90%. For example, if mid throttle is set to 30%, the first 0-50% power is on 0-30% throttle and 50-100% power is on 30-100% throttle.
> 
> I haven't tested this, there's tons of other things to finish first, but it's some kind of hunch how it could be made. I can't use heavy math to calculate the curve since it's a micro controller so there's not CPU-time for fancy trigonometric functions or so, but would that be enough for your ideas?


That sounds fantastic! I would actually set mid throttle at say 70% of useable range, so most of the pedal travel is smooth, and only if I floor it past 70% then it would unleash the fury . Of course this is for a daily driver with max range being primary goal. For a racer EV one would set mid throttle at 20% or less 

I agree, no need for complex math, K.I.S.S principle always works best.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

As promised, live data from a dyno with a WarP 9"!










It's nice to see that it looks very much like all the simulations we've done. The main difference is that it's noisier, but that was kinda expected. I would be surprised if the WarP 9" was as quiet as a block of graphite considering all the arching that's going on in there. Well, so far, so good. We have a lot of more tests to do etc so this beauty won't exactly be on the shelf by monday, but it's still nice to see that the prototype actually does what we hoped for! 

And no, you probably won't see 750 Amps or even 500 Amps quite yet, we're gonna take this nice and slow. Today the controller never ran harder than 200 Amps, but that still provided us with a lot of useful data. Still, it handled a pack Voltage that varied between 133-158 Volts without problems, that's not too bad considering that most DC-controllers are max 120 or 144 Volts.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

I succeeded in destroying the controller for the first of several (expected) times. The cause of death is not unusual, except that I had taken steps that are typically effective in preventing this type of failure in the first place. The culprit? Miller capacitance. This is coupling pulses of current from the IGBT that turns on to the one that is supposed to stay off. The pulses are strong enough to overcome the negative bias applied to the gate when it is off to prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening. The good news is that this problem can be solved with an active clamp circuit; the bad news is that I will have to make a new pc board to include this circuit.... (sorry Dimitri!)

Essentially, the problem is that pulse of current coupled through the Miller capacitance induces a voltage across the total impedance of the gate driver. Right now, that impedance is a 0.68Ω resistor in series with the intrinsic distributed gate resistance of 0.5Ω and the Rds[on] (0.1Ω) of the p-ch. MOSFET that applies -5V to the gate when the IGBT is driven off. The gate threshold voltage of the IGBT is around 5.8V so it will take a spike of at least 10.8V to turn it on. 10.8V across 1.25Ω means the Miller current must be at least 8.64A.

Attached is a picture of impending doom... Only 80V is being applied to the controller and the motor current is a mere 30A, but look at the spike that coincides with the y-axis and just touches the 4V line. The magnitude of the current pulse is proportional to the applied voltage, the Miller capacitance and the dV/dt of the IGBT that is being turned on (when the IGBT turns on it induces a positive voltage across the gate of the IGBT that is supposed to be off, and vice versa).


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

And here's the software perspective of what happened:










This is typically not a good thing to see in the logs. The ADC in the microcontroller isn't fast enough to follow that kind of explosive current increase so the peak current was probably MUCH higher, but it's still interesting to see how it desperately tries to regulate the current even though it's doomed to fail. In 300 ms it's all over and the IGBT is history. Also note the rapid temperature change. More catastrophic than that it doesn't get.

It's dead, Jim...


----------



## TheSGC (Nov 15, 2007)

I have no idea how your current gate driving system works, but have you thought of a dual gate driver, + and - chips? I have a few MOSFET drivers, 9A UCC chips that have a + and - counterparts that work great in parallel for driving those massive CM600AH IGBT modules have the +15v and -15v forcing them on/off and keeping them there. (I bet there are MUCH better solutions)


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

What was the difference in test conditions that made such dramatic difference in the results? Was it diff PWM frequency? Why did this issue not appear during first tests?


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

@ TheSGC - The problem is not so much in the transitions - the gate driver circuit can switch the voltage delivered to the motor in under 200nS in each direction (actually, a little faster than I wanted, but eminently tweakable - rather, it's preventing spurious turn-on of the off IGBT in the half bridge when the other turns on. Two separate issues here: the impedance of the gate driver needs to be controlled to tailor the switching trajectory; the impedance needs to be as low as possible, though, when the IGBT is turned off (to ensure it stays off!).

@ dimitri - There were no differences in test conditions. It was simply a random failure, but one that was guaranteed to happen at some point. This is why I am so adamant about testing a new product myself, rather than hurrying it's development along and foisting it on an impatient customer 

Really, this is pretty much normal for new product development. There have been minor issues with every aspect of the controller that have only appeared during testing/assembly. Now that we have actually built one and accumulated some good hard data the design can be finalized. The gate driver doesn't need to be totally redesigned, it just needs a circuit added to clamp the IGBT to the negative rail when it is off (bypassing the 0.68Ω resistor, which doesn't seem like much but it is enough, apparently, to cause all sorts of trouble).

In the meantime, simply removing the regen IGBT's gate driver and directly shorting its gate/emitter terminals together will also solve the problem and allow us to test at much higher voltage and current levels, which is necessary for determining the thermal performance of the assembly.


----------



## jeromio (Oct 8, 2008)

This may be a dumb question, but is this controller only for brushed DC motors, or is it capable of controlling BLDC as well?


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

> In the meantime, simply removing the regen IGBT's gate driver and directly shorting its gate/emitter terminals together will also solve the problem and allow us to test at much higher voltage and current levels, which is necessary for determining the thermal performance of the assembly.


I know you wanted regen in your controller, but I had no idea that you have it in initial base product, I assumed it would be an upgrade option, since hardly anyone will use regen with advanced brush DC motors, IMHO.

If my controller has regen, I plan to disable it for good, which makes me wonder why would I be paying for those extra IGBT and parts and labor.

Have you considered making it optional at extra cost?


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

dimitri said:


> I know you wanted regen in your controller, but I had no idea that you have it in initial base product, I assumed it would be an upgrade option, since hardly anyone will use regen with advanced brush DC motors, IMHO.


That's our opinion as well, still, we relish the technical challenge of getting regen to work on a series DC motor.




dimitri said:


> If my controller has regen, I plan to disable it for good, which makes me wonder why would I be paying for those extra IGBT and parts and labor.


It will be disabled by default and there will be a very strong warning in the controller interface that if you have an Advanced DC or NetGain motor (or any other with advanced brush timing) that enabling regen will result in the motor's destruction.

That said, the extra IGBT needed for regen actually costs you *less*. Yes, less. The reason is because half bridge modules are sold in far higher volumes than IGBT/Diode modules. Now, there are some extra parts required to drive the second IGBT - about $20 worth - and a little extra labor to populate them, so we might consider simply not filling in that side of the board and shorting the regen IGBT out for those that really don't want it, ever, but then we would need two different software versions, and Qer has advised us that such inevitably leads to confusion and tech support nightmares down the road.

Still, we are considering it.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

jeromio said:


> This may be a dumb question, but is this controller only for brushed DC motors, or is it capable of controlling BLDC as well?


Brushless DC is really terrible name for a special type of AC motor so, no, this controller won't work on them.

Neither will a regular VFD that is meant to drive a plain old induction motor.


----------



## major (Apr 4, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Brushless DC is really terrible name for a special type of AC induction motor so, no, this controller won't work on them.
> 
> Neither will a regular VFD that is meant to drive a plain old induction motor.


Brushless DC (BLDC) motors are always synchronous motors, usually using PM fields. Induction motors are asynchronous motors. Most BLDC motors require a shaft position sensor, although some controls can do without it. There is some confusion between BLDC and PM synchronous motors (PMSM). Some say the PMSM is sine wave driven and the BLDC not so. Seems a bit picky to me. I think they are both AC motors and drives.

And, I have actually driven a BLDC with a regular old V/f inverter meant for an induction motor. It worked pretty well for a pump drive. Maybe not as well as the proper BLDC drive would have.

Regards,

major


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

any Updates?


----------



## Amberwolf (May 29, 2009)

Having just recently joined this forum, I'm just now catching up with some of the interesting big threads around here, including this one. So pardon any subject necromancy within the thread. 



bblocher said:


> That's not uncommon at all. The interface will be a webpage much like configuring a router for broadband. You'll have fields you can change the values of and then probably be able to save those settings. The other option being a serial interface with either a clunky text interface or the need to install software on the client machine which needs to be OS based. This allows you to connect a computer running any OS with a browser. Pretty cool, can't wait to hear and see more about it.


What might be another interesting bit about it is if you could hook up a short-range wifi xcvr to the ethernet port, with security, and then use your favorite wifi PDA or phone with browser to configure it. 
________
MEDICAL MARIJUANA CARD


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Bowser330 said:


> any Updates?


Dimitri is driving around with one of the beta units and the performance data the controller streams to the Ethernet port has been extremely valuable to our development effort. I am finishing the second revision of each pc board now so the controller is nearly ready to come to market.

Unfortunately, a few bad apples here did spoil the proverbial bunch, and that is why we have not updated this thread.


----------



## fugdabug (Jul 14, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Dimitri is driving around with one of the beta units and the performance data the controller streams to the Ethernet port has been extremely valuable to our development effort. I am finishing the second revision of each pc board now so the controller is nearly ready to come to market.
> 
> Unfortunately, a few bad apples here did spoil the proverbial bunch, and that is why we have not updated this thread.


hee heee! hey press on... I know you can do it!


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Dimitri is driving around with one of the beta units and the performance data the controller streams to the Ethernet port has been extremely valuable to our development effort. I am finishing the second revision of each pc board now so the controller is nearly ready to come to market.
> 
> Unfortunately, a few bad apples here did spoil the proverbial bunch, and that is why we have not updated this thread.


GREAT NEWS!

Im sure you are happy to be closer to reaping the rewards of your hardwork.

So Qer has been driving around a beta-tester has he? very cool? has he pushed the max performance out of it?


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Bowser330 said:


> So Qer has been driving around a beta-tester has he? very cool? has he pushed the max performance out of it?


No, Qer is the programmer and lives in Sweden, while another member here, Dimitri, happens to live in the same city as I do and was brave enough to be a beta tester. You can follow his build thread here: http://www.diyelectriccar.com/forums/showthread.php/mazda-e-protege5-conversion-26864p14.html


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Making a WarP 9" motor emit black smoke, sparks and ominous smells:


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Making a WarP 9" motor emit black smoke, sparks and ominous smells:


Thank you! 

Can you help a newb like me understand the data that you've provided?


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Hey Bowser330 - sorry, it is sort of hard to read the axes...

What this graph shows is the controller cramming 90-100kw into a WarP 9 over a 10 second period (dark blue line). Current is an average of 800A over that time (red line) and duty cycle (light blue line) hit a peak of 100% then hovered around 80-90%. Pack voltage (yellowish line) starts at 180V then declines to around 150V (pulling 600+ amps from a 105Ah lead-acid pack will do that, you know).

Previously in that test we hit 887A - batteries maxed out again - while later on I turned off the cooling fans and let the controller reach 70C before taking the throttle up to 700A.

Needless to say, we are *really* happy with the way it's working so far.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Making a WarP 9" motor emit black smoke, sparks and ominous smells:


What do you think caused the motor stress, amperage, temperature, or voltage, or a combination?


----------



## Amberwolf (May 29, 2009)

Ultimately, temperature is the cause of most smoke and damage in motors. 

Too high a current and not enough thermal transfer out of the motor in a timely manner, and temperature rises beyond smoke levels. 

Too high a voltage and insulation breaks down, eventually arcing and causing temperature to rise beyond smoke levels, and this will probably happen too fast for any kind of thermal transfer to be *able* to keep it cool enough. 

(there are other things that cause it too, but those are the two I have seen most often!)
________
Live Sex Webshows


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

I think high enough voltage can cause brush arcing and plasma events before over heating or insulation breakdown. However I wouldn't think 180 volts would be enough to do that in a Warp9.


----------



## Amberwolf (May 29, 2009)

True; I didn't put those in my post.  

I can't imagine a mere 180V would kill a warp9 either, based on what I've read about them so far (I've very very little experience with large motors. The largest I have direct experience with are the ones on my swamp cooler and my lathe, both of which have required minimal service a few times).
________
MEDICAL MARIJUANA DISPENSARIES IN LANCASTER CALIFORNIA


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Hey Bowser330 - sorry, it is sort of hard to read the axes...
> 
> What this graph shows is the controller cramming 90-100kw into a WarP 9 over a 10 second period (dark blue line). Current is an average of 800A over that time (red line) and duty cycle (light blue line) hit a peak of 100% then hovered around 80-90%. Pack voltage (yellowish line) starts at 180V then declines to around 150V (pulling 600+ amps from a 105Ah lead-acid pack will do that, you know).
> 
> ...


YESSSSS!!! congratulations...these sort of graphs are just what people are looking for too, concrete performance charts..


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> What do you think caused the motor stress, amperage, temperature, or voltage, or a combination?


Hmm, I thought it was obvious I was being a tad melodramatic...

A blast of black smoke shot out of the brush assembly area when I cranked the throttle up to 887A without first setting the dyno to a high enough load. So, the motor briefly oversped and flung some brush dust in the process.

The sparks were impressive - 800A at 150V on the motor will do that - but I don't think the motor was in any serious danger of getting zorched. Not yet, anyway.

The smell, of course, was from overheating the magnet wire. We tried not to violate any of the short-term motor power limits on this test; can't promise we'll be so kind to the motor after replacing the one bum battery in the pack to bring it back up to 192V and giving them all a good equalizing charge.


----------



## piotrsko (Dec 9, 2007)

I like the thought that the controller outfit is also testing motors. Talk about quality control


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

Yea, considering that I have a beta version ( half the power ) of the controller and I have a puny 128 Volts pack, I can still maintain 80mph on a freeway for as long as I care to try  , I think the final version will have to be pulled back via user settings to prevent battery and motor abuse 

Guys, the days of Zilla dominating DC controller market are numbered, mark my words


----------



## Wirecutter (Jul 26, 2007)

I haven't yet gone back and re-read all the updates here, but I've seen the latest, and all I can say is:

Tesseract and Qer, you are awesome. Thanks for teasing, uh, I mean keeping us up to date.

Dimitri - 
You just go to hell, you lucky bastich.   That's envy, in case you didn't know.

Seriously. This controller sounds pretty monsterous. I can't wait to see it in action.

-Mark


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

dimitri said:


> Yea, considering that I have a beta version ( half the power ) of the controller and I have a puny 128 Volts pack, I can still maintain 80mph on a freeway for as long as I care to try  , I think the final version will have to be pulled back via user settings to prevent battery and motor abuse
> 
> Guys, the days of Zilla dominating DC controller market are numbered, mark my words


bring it on!!!


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Here's some real life data from the dyno with a WarP 9":


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Qer said:


> Here's some real life data from the dyno with a WarP 9":


AMAZING RESULTS!

What type of batteries are powering the dyno run? I ask because it looks like the Voltage sagged from what was I assume 192V to 150V...If you tell me LA/AGM then it totally makes sense, and theoretically a Lifepo4 pack would sag less! PERFECT!

Also..900A... are you kidding me! 

WOT with 900A for 10 Seconds!! Which is just about all you need for a quarter mile...*cough*..I mean getting safely onto the freeway from an on-ramp...

I could have sworn Tesseract had mentioned the controller would be high voltage like 300V or something..is that still a planned production model?


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Bowser330 said:


> AMAZING RESULTS!


Yeah, we're pretty happy ourselves - right now our battery pack and 150hp dyno are the bottlenecks, not the controller 

We've made a lot of design changes during the development process, though, like totally abandoning the single module version and the whole peak vs. the continuous current rating sham. The rationale for both is that 500A just isn't enough to accelerate a modern 3000# vehicle quickly and peak current that is only available for a few seconds makes for an annoying driving experience.

Rather than all this goofy "boost" and "1 minute" crap we are simply rating the controller to deliver 1000A as long as the heatsink temp is 55C or less (linearly derated to zero at 95C) and the battery pack voltage is 200V or less. Yes, the controller can operate at a much higher voltage but switching losses go up with voltage so output current will need to be slightly derated; probably down to 800A at the projected (not yet tested!) limit of 320V. Of course, the estimated price has gone up as a result of these changes, but we are still aiming for a price comparable to the Z1KHV, even though we totally kick its ass in continuous current rating. Hell, we even kick the _Z2K's_ ass in continuous current rating (700-900A depending on voltage, duty cycle and heatsink temp). 




Bowser330 said:


> What type of batteries are powering the dyno run?


105Ah AGM batteries. Clearly these aren't powerful enough to fully exercise the controller. We started off with sixteen (192V nominal) but one battery went bad in a previous test run so now we are down to 180V. The rest of the pack ain't looking so hot, either. The duty cycle in that run was around 60%, so we were pulling ~540A from the pack. This is downright abusive for the lead-acids which is why our runs tend to only last 15 minutes  With LFP batteries you'd need at least 180Ah to sustain that level of current for more than a few seconds without reducing their cycle life.

At this power level you really need to be able to program the battery current limit. For example, with 200Ah LFP batteries you'd want to limit battery current to 600A. This will let you push 1000A through the motor up untl a duty cycle of 60%. Of course, if you don't care about cycle life you can set battery current to the same as motor current. Make sure the plexiglas shields are in place, though 

Then there is protecting the motor. According to NetGain the WarP motors can handle 1000A for 20 seconds, but George has privately admitted they'll take that for a little longer. How much longer, though? Say 40 seconds. Okay, well, our controller can cram 1000A through the motor for as long as you keep it cool (and the twin fans are enough to allow that for longer than 40 seconds - with at least 1.5gpm of liquid cooling it can deliver 1000A indefinitely). Remember, the consequence of exceeding the motor temp rating is usually catastrophic. 




Bowser330 said:


> Also..900A... are you kidding me!


Nope - unfortunately the throttle calibration routine wasn't working right so at max throttle the controller only saw "85%" (what it subsequently calibrated at, once that routine was fixed). I could have cheated and set the current limit above 1000A (my version of the code can do that) but since the current derating with temp wasn't working either, and the batteries were sagging so hard anyway, I decided not to push my luck when I needed to collect other data anyway.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Todays tests were about testing the current limit. It turned out to work pretty sweet if I might brag a bit. 










What's tested here is the battery current limit. We don't have a sensor for battery current so instead the motor current is multiplied with the pulse duration which gives the controller the battery current. This calculation is performed several times/second and the motor current is adjusted to keep the battery current correct. During the plateau the motor current varies between 898-918 Ampere, PWM between 53.1-56.1% and battery current between 479-513 Ampere.

Here's an extreme closeup.










Except for that the algorithm seems to overreact a bit, I think it looks pretty ok if I might say so. However, it seems like Tesseract has really tortured the motor a bit too much, it screamed with pain already at 80 kW despite it peaking 100 kW in earlier test runs. We might need a new motor...


----------



## major (Apr 4, 2008)

Qer said:


> I think it looks pretty ok if I might say so. However, it seems like Tesseract has really tortured the motor a bit too much, it screamed with pain already at 80 kW despite it peaking 100 kW in earlier test runs. We might need a new motor...


HI Qer,

Yeah, looks pretty ok to me also. Good job.

Does that dyno measure the mechanical output from the motor? I assume that the 80 and 100 kW figures are controller output. How about motor RPM at those loads? That was the Warp9, right? 

Just trying to build my knowledge base from your efforts.

Regards,

major


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

major said:


> ...Does that dyno measure the mechanical output from the motor? I assume that the 80 and 100 kW figures are controller output. How about motor RPM at those loads? That was the Warp9, right? ...


Hey major,

Yep - the dyno has a pressure gauge, a temp gauge and we just fitted an inductive pickup to it for a tachometer but haven't hooked it up yet (forgot to bring a pullup resistor with me today...). Right now we read the motor rpm with a hand-held optical tachometer to make sure it is below the 3500 rpm limit of the dyno and to calculate the mechanical hp delivered (and measure motor efficiency, which for the Warp9 seems to hover around 85%).

Question for you: the commutator is making some unhappy noises above 800A, and the sparks that trail from each brush assembly are coming awfully close to reaching the next one. My understanding is that when the spark from one brush reaches the next you zorch the motor... am I being overly cautious here? (oh, and the smell of toasted lacquer is quite potent after just a few seconds at 900A)... George Hamstra assures me the motor can take this abuse but intuitively something doesn't seem right....


----------



## major (Apr 4, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Hey major,
> 
> Question for you: the commutator is making some unhappy noises above 800A, and the sparks that trail from each brush assembly are coming awfully close to reaching the next one. My understanding is that when the spark from one brush reaches the next you zorch the motor... am I being overly cautious here? (oh, and the smell of toasted lacquer is quite potent after just a few seconds at 900A)... George Hamstra assures me the motor can take this abuse but intuitively something doesn't seem right....


You'll know when it zorches. And yeah, it sounds like you're getting close. You should probably do some long runs at a happier current, like 150/200 amps for a few hours inbetween torture sessions. And blow the brush dust out of there with oil free compressed air. Are the edges of the brushes glowing red hot? Once that happens, the binder is cooked out of the brush and the carbon becomes loose. Then the sparks carry that around the comm over to the opposite polarity brush box and you have a conductive path. If the voltage is high enough, it arcs straight over and takes on the appearance of an arc welder. That last run was for about 10 seconds at 900 amps and like what, 90 volts to the motor. Living on the edge there.

You think George puts his money where his mouth is? You're beating his motor up pretty good there. I've always been a fan of machine abuse, so I'm not telling you to stop. 

Regards,

major


----------



## MindMil (Jul 22, 2008)

Tesseract,

Curious - if it is not a secret what IGBT modules are you using?


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

major said:


> You'll know when it zorches. And yeah, it sounds like you're getting close. You should probably do some long runs at a happier current, like 150/200 amps for a few hours inbetween torture sessions.


Is this to somehow "condition" or resurface the brushes after abusing them?




major said:


> And blow the brush dust out of there with oil free compressed air. Are the edges of the brushes glowing red hot?


I haven't noticed, but it's hard to tell with all the sparking going on. For the obvious reasons, I don't want to get my face too close to the brush end of the motor while all this is going on 




major said:


> That last run was for about 10 seconds at 900 amps and like what, 90 volts to the motor. Living on the edge there.
> 
> You think George puts his money where his mouth is? You're beating his motor up pretty good there. I've always been a fan of machine abuse, so I'm not telling you to stop.


Oh boy... that's a loaded question for sure. He's certainly a slippery character, is about all I'll admit. But so are the folks over at D&D and Kostov (and, apparently, GE, Baldor, etc...)

Anyway, do the electrical characteristics of the motor change radically when it zorches? Specifically, does the inductance collapse because the armature is essentially shorted out at that point? If so, then I believe the desat circuit will protect the motor in such an event, but I'm not sure we can afford to find that out the hard way right now 


MindMil - sorry, but specifics about the hardware are commercially sensitive. Revealing that sort of thing not only would help potential competitors who may be lurking in this forum right now, it also gives the armchair lawyers/engineers here something else to criticize and argue with me about.


----------



## major (Apr 4, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Is this to somehow "condition" or resurface the brushes after abusing them?


Yes, and the comm surface also. The high current and sparking tends to remove the film on the copper surface and also deposit burned carbon. Running at, say 75% rated load for a few hours should help clean and condition the comm surface.



> I haven't noticed, but it's hard to tell with all the sparking going on. For the obvious reasons, I don't want to get my face too close to the brush end of the motor while all this is going on


Chicken 



> Anyway, do the electrical characteristics of the motor change radically when it zorches?


Boy, that would be hard to tell. I'm sure it does, but how? I guess you'd still have the field, but the armature would be essentially shorted. About 1 or 2 seconds into the zorch, things start to open up and parts start exiting the motor. I've never seen it happen on the dyno, just on the drag strip, from the spectator stands. It did not take out the Zilla, just the motor.

Yeah, try to avoid the zorch 

major


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> it also gives the armchair lawyers/engineers here something else to criticize and argue with me about.


Half the fun of these threads is watching you argue with them, why deprive us


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> Half the fun of these threads is watching you argue with them, why deprive us


Because we have customers that actually want their controller so we should focus our time and energy on actually finish it...? Hmm?


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Well yes, there is that. I'll let you get back to corralling all those "little rappers"


----------



## major (Apr 4, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> then I believe the desat circuit will protect the motor in such an event,


Hey Tesser,

How would that be different to the control than if the armature was suddenly stopped? The Eg would disappear and current would attempt to skyrocket. I would think it would just go into a current limit mode, reducing the duty cycle while maintaining the zorching current. The motor would see lower voltage, but I doubt that would extinguish the plasma. I don't think you'll be able to save a motor which has entered the zorch zone. If you're smart enough, you might be able to keep it from going there in the first place. It is just the right limits on current, voltage and RPM. And maybe some factors like humidity, temperature, motor condition and sun spot activity. 

Regards,

major

ps...I know a guy who is real good at zorching motors. Maybe he'd like to try your zorch proof controller.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

major said:


> ps...I know a guy who is real good at zorching motors. Maybe he'd like to try your zorch proof controller.


Sounds like an expensive hobby. What does he do to them?


----------



## major (Apr 4, 2008)

Qer said:


> Sounds like an expensive hobby. What does he do to them?


Hi Qer,

Actually, several guys. The idiots try to go faster than the other guy in the 1/4 mile.  You're right, expensive hobby.

major


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

1000 Amps!

Well, ok then, only 998. But still.










Still, pretty good. 1000 Ampere for 14 seconds. The temperature reached about 50C despite that it was only air cooled, no water cooling attached. 

Here's a fun graph, it shows the amount of samples per Ampere.










The majority of the samples were between 980 and 1000 Ampere. Sweet.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

major said:


> ...How would that be different to the control than if the armature was suddenly stopped? The Eg would disappear and current would attempt to skyrocket. I would think it would just go into a current limit mode, reducing the duty cycle while maintaining the zorching current. ....


The way you are describing it here it certainly seems like the controller would happily maintain the plasma. What I was thinking, though, is that the initiation of a plasma between adjacent brushes would be the equivalent of shorting turns in the magnetically active zone of the armature, causing a collapse in the motor's inductance. Thus the motor current will skyrocket up much faster than the throttle control loop can handle and once it hits around 1600A the desaturation detection circuit will kick in, shutting the controller down.

So, if the inductance just dips during zorching then the motor is a goner; if the inductance collapses then desat just might protect it.

BTW - the dyno tests are getting more and more terrifying, that's for sure. I just know this isn't going to end well for either the motor, dyno or batteries. The controller seems perfectly fine, though


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

Oh man, my poor Warp9, I gotta pull back the max current when my wife drives the EV, she has a lead foot and will zorch it for sure 

Hey major, can Warp9 be zorched at 128V ? How long you think it will take at 1000 amps?

I definitely don't want to find out myself


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

The voltage looks pretty strong...on the graph it looks to hold at 180V but my calculations line it up at about 160V...of course this is a LA test pack which is expected...

160V x 998 = 159.680kW x 60%(PWM) = 95.808kW = 123HP (before factoring in efficiency of motor)

Really nice numbers for a warp 9...

what RPM were you extracting nearly 1000A at? I remember reading that your other set of numbers was recorded at 3500RPM...maybe I am miss quoting...


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

major said:


> IIt is just the right limits on current, voltage and RPM. And maybe some factors like humidity, temperature, motor condition and sun spot activity.


I was thinking (Tesseract hates when that happens, the result is so unpredictable ) about zorching before falling asleep last night. The controller knows about the motor current (obviously) and motor voltage (calculated as pack voltage * duration, I haven't bothered to compensate for Vce (yet)) and since RPM is roughly proportional to voltage I thought that could be considered covered as well.

Do you think a power limit (ie a limit on how many kW the poor motor has to survive) woud be a good way to limit the risk for zorching, or are there so many other factors involved (like the dreaded sun spots) that it would be more or less pointless or even false security?


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

More graphs time! 

Sometimes the discussion about the efficiency of controllers pop up here in the forum and since I wanted to try out some 3D-plotting anyway (read: I was bored) I decided to find out how efficient our controller is. This is plotted from the specs of the IGBT and not on live data so it kinda relies on that the data sheet is somewhat accurate though. The graph is over motor voltage and motor current and calculates how much power that is lost in the controller.










Apparently the worst loss is at a motor voltage of 0 Volt. Makes sense, no loss in the (ideal) motor, all loss in the controller, but this makes it pretty impossible to see the loss at higher voltages so I excluded everything up to 20 Volt and plotted the rest.










So at 20 Volt the controller is already much more efficient than your average WarP, ADC, Kostov or other favourite brand. However, the scale is still a bit coarse to see the efficiency at more normal RPM's so I limited the voltage even more and cut away everything below 50 Volts.










This is more like it! So, conclusions:



Losses are worst at low voltages and thus low RPM's, so I'd say that if you drive much in city traffic but still want to reach highway speeds, keep the gear box. Don't go direct drive unless you're prepared to pay the range penalty.
The losses in the motor, batteries and wires will be much bigger than the losses in the controller (I'd be so daring to say this is true for all IGBT/MOSFET-based controllers) so the discussion about losses in MOSFET versus IGBT is just stupid, it doesn't matter in real life (except, possibly, for controller cooling).
All kinds of efficiency numbers for controllers are "music power", ie pure bullshit. At low RPM's all controllers will be rather inefficient and at high RPM's they'll all be in the high 90's. The best number I got for our controller was 99.7%, but that's at 200 Volts and barely any current so that's not a very meaningful number.
3D-graphs are cool! 
Never underestimate the creative power of boredom.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Quoting Tesseract: "Oh, your efficiency graphs *are* impressive... but you forgot about switching losses!"

Of course. I always do. That's why Tesseract does the hardware and I stick to software. When Tesseract ran some numbers it turns out that in general the switching losses are something like an additional 2-3% or so, so except for that really high efficiency corner of the graph (ie high motor voltage and low current) it doesn't affect the result that much.

In essence it means that those 99.7% only covers the Vce voltage drop, but calculating the switching loss seems to be real pain. In short, at low motor currents (ie rather low speeds) they will introduce a lot of losses, but in usable areas of the graph the loss will mostly "drown" in total power consumption.

Hm. I should really dive into this a bit more, 'cause this might mean for example that a high pack voltage is not always to be preferred. Stay tuned.


----------



## major (Apr 4, 2008)

dimitri said:


> Hey major, can Warp9 be zorched at 128V ? How long you think it will take at 1000 amps?


Hi dimitri,

I can't say for sure, but I suspect so. It really isn't a factor of how long, but rather exceeding some threshold, which can't be exactly defined. Like I said to T & Q, once you enter the zorch zone, your a$$ is cooked. Motor repair required. Now hitting 1000A on every accel and getting 3 inch streamers (sparks) off the brushes isn't really a zorch, but it sure isn't going to give you a long lived motor. I suspect you'll need frequent brush replacement and comm service.

I'd crank it back for the little lady and just use the max for the day at the races.

Regards,

major


----------



## major (Apr 4, 2008)

Qer said:


> IDo you think a power limit (ie a limit on how many kW the poor motor has to survive) woud be a good way to limit the risk for zorching, or are there so many other factors involved (like the dreaded sun spots) that it would be more or less pointless or even false security?


I think it would be worth a try. But it is likely different for different motors. And the racers don't like limits. They'll sacrifice a piece of equipment to set a record any day.

major


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

major said:


> ...And the racers don't like limits. They'll sacrifice a piece of equipment to set a record any day.
> ...


And we certainly won't stand in the way of letting them destroy stuff - but we would like to set the default operating parameters so that you don't zorch the motor the first time you floor the accelerator pedal... 

Anyway, I think what Qer is wondering is if there is a (moderately) safe way to let our customers enjoy really good acceleration - in other words, the full 1000A from the controller - without repeatedly approaching the zorch zone. I was thinking that one way this could be done is by making the motor voltage limit inversely proportional to motor current. E.g. - you can apply, say, a full 192V to a WarP motor at 500A (or whatever) but that decreases to, say, 96V at 1000A.


----------



## major (Apr 4, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> E.g. - you can apply, say, a full 192V to a WarP motor at 500A (or whatever) but that decreases to, say, 96V at 1000A.


Yes. Something like that. But finding the actual numbers is the trick. With the thing on the dyno, you might be able to. If you can your get face close enough, just take V and I data points for, say, 2 inch streamers


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

major said:


> Yes. Something like that. But finding the actual numbers is the trick. With the thing on the dyno, you might be able to. If you can your get face close enough, just take V and I data points for, say, 2 inch streamers


I suppose you'd like me to take off the screen over the brushes and see if I can get a measuring tape down there, too, huh?


----------



## Dalardan (Jul 4, 2008)

But what would be nice would be a picture of those screamers 

Just to show how impressive it is...


----------



## Camaro (Jul 29, 2008)

Sorry if you've already mentioned this (I can't find it), what is the estimated price for one of these bad boys?


----------



## Amberwolf (May 29, 2009)

Qer said:


> Hm. I should really dive into this a bit more, 'cause this might mean for example that a high pack voltage is not always to be preferred. Stay tuned.


Well, I don't know how practical it would be, but for low-speed driving couldn't something that essentially cuts some of the batteries out of the pack be setup, to be controlled by the motor controller?

It could get complicated, simply because you wouldn't want to be leaving those *same* batteries out every time, or they'd get less wear and less charge removed from them, complicating recharging the pack.
________
WASHINGTON MEDICAL MARIJUANA DISPENSARIES


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Dalardan: Good idea about videotaping the brush area... how about you come down here and do the taping while I crank the current up to 1000A. Make sure you get up real close to the brushes and use macro mode during the recording!

Camaro: we haven't set the price yet because we still have to formally tally up all of the parts and labor costs, but given the rough costs and assembly time, I''ll guess approx. $2500, maybe a little more. Obviously, we aren't trying to be the "low price leader" here.

Amberwolf: Let's just say that Qer has a new-found appreciation of just how messy and complicated it is to estimate the total losses in a controller... 

That said, switching losses approximately quadruple if pack voltage doubles, so there is some merit in principle with your idea, but from a practical standpoint its probably not worth the extra contactors needed, especially if you want to maintain pack balance (and let's not forget that you still need to precharge the capacitors at every step up in voltage).


----------



## Amberwolf (May 29, 2009)

Tesseract said:


> Amberwolf: Let's just say that Qer has a new-found appreciation of just how messy and complicated it is to estimate the total losses in a controller...


Even with my simple controllers for my ebike projects, I can't really figure it out.  




> That said, switching losses approximately quadruple if pack voltage doubles, so there is some merit in principle with your idea, but from a practical standpoint its probably not worth the extra contactors needed, especially if you want to maintain pack balance (and let's not forget that you still need to precharge the capacitors at every step up in voltage).


That's true, too, and I did forget that.  See, it *is* more complicated than I figured, but I assumed it would be.  

The pack balance could be maintained if the pack was setup such that it was divided into halves, or even fourths for a really big pack. For low speeds, lots of starts and stops, etc, it would have all four quarters in parallel. The next mode up, for general city driving, would be two halves in parallel. Freeway mode would be all of it back in series again. 

That wouldn't be quite as good as simply dropping out batteries in ones or twos as lower speed was needed, but it would give both better low-end current capability with a technically smaller pack (since you'd only need individual batteries capable of the freeway-speed currents--they wouldn't have to be able to individually put out current for startup torque), and keep the pack's sections balanced. 

Maybe it's still too impractical to physically wire it up that way, or too expensive to have those contactors for most EVs, but maybe it would be a good way to do things on a small EV that does not have enough room for all the batteries it needs for the voltage *and* current of a single-string pack to get both startup torque *and* freeway speeds....


FWIW, I've been considering this idea for my ebike trike version, once I actually have money for LiFePO4 (right now all I have is donated used wheelchair batteries), so that I could actually put them in series or parallel as needed for different situations. I don't have the precharge requirements that you guys in the heavy EVs do. 
________
NEXIUM SETTLEMENT


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Amberwolf said:


> That's true, too, and I did forget that.  See, it *is* more complicated than I figured, but I assumed it would be.


What's complicated is getting the data. Apparently, somewhere there's a model for good simulation of all the losses, but the only (official) way to reach it is by hand punching numbers on a web page. That's a bit impractical, to say the least, and since there's loads of javascript and shit it's not very easy to make something that automatically retracts all the sample points I want for a meaningful simulation of the controller.



Amberwolf said:


> Maybe it's still too impractical to physically wire it up that way, or too expensive to have those contactors for most EVs, but maybe it would be a good way to do things on a small EV that does not have enough room for all the batteries it needs for the voltage *and* current of a single-string pack to get both startup torque *and* freeway speeds....


Naw. The controller converts power to power according to Umotor*Imotor=Upack*Ipack, or simpler Pmotor=Ppack. So let's say we have a pack that can deliver 100 Volt, 500 Ampere (simple numbers, I know) then the motor can have 500 Ampere at 100 Volt, 1000 Ampere at 50 Volt or even 2000 Ampere at 25 Volt (if you're one of the lucky few that has a Zilla 2kA).

No contactors needed for that.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Dalardan: Good idea about videotaping the brush area... how about you come down here and do the taping while I crank the current up to 1000A. Make sure you get up real close to the brushes and use macro mode during the recording!


Tripod? Wire and duct tape?


----------



## Dalardan (Jul 4, 2008)

Even if I would maybe think of going the trip for northen Quebec (Canada) to you place, which would be quite a nice road trip, well I'd would certainly NOT hold the camera with my bare hands in macro mode 

In a previous job, I've used a camera and a tripod to take videos of 100kV arcs on ice in a laboratory. There were roughly 2m long and were quite bright. The camera was a high speed camera to see well the propagation of the arc, placed just at 10m of the arc. Videos were really beautiful. So, just if it happens that a video camera and a tripod (2"x4" and duck tape make pretty good tripods also ) get under your hand during a break time, have fun and show us what does it looks like 1000A of zorching power flowing through the air!


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Some more 1kA fun!










And here's a close-up of the 1kA plateau of the graph:










I'm very happy with the outcome to say the least. I'd hoped for the current to stay within a few percent, this is well beyond my expectations! Veeery nice!


----------



## Dalardan (Jul 4, 2008)

Really nice graph! 10 seconds at 1kA, that's great. 

If I do read well the graph, the controller temperature starts near 37 degrees and ends near 42 degrees. Is it with the air cooling or the water cooling setup? That's quite nice to see only a rise of about 5 degrees after 10 seconds of 1kA discharge.

Also, just to be curious, has the test been stopped because of over temperature of the motor? Over temperature of the batteries? Batteries too much drained? Possibility of damage to the brushes? Feeling that 10 seconds over 200hp is well enough to see everything needed? 

You two are doing great work. Good job and continue to have fun.

Dalardan


----------



## albano (Jan 12, 2009)

Qer said:


> Some more 1kA fun!
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Hey guys!

I can`t wait to see this controller on my drag bike, as i`m using 2x 7" motors. One thing I need is, I need series/parallel for my drag bike and 150v+ per motor. Come on man bring that monster we waiting for. And let me be the first in Africa.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Dalardan said:


> If I do read well the graph, the controller temperature starts near 37 degrees and ends near 42 degrees. Is it with the air cooling or the water cooling setup? That's quite nice to see only a rise of about 5 degrees after 10 seconds of 1kA discharge.


I THINK it's air cooled only, sure looks so in the log data. Remember, I'm in Sweden so it's Tesseract that runs the test, but this definitely looks air cooled (let's hope I'm right too ). Anyway, the temperature keeps rising after the run and the highest temperature I could read in the logs were 61C (well after the end of one of the runs) with an ambient temperature of 33C. There's a lot of thermal delay involved, so if you're planning on pushing the limits I suggest some serious water cooling.

Thermal current limit will start to kick in somewhere above 40C (exact temperature is still to be determined) and after that the max current will start to drop off to protect the IGBTs. There's no hard shut down, just less and less current the warmer the controller gets.



Dalardan said:


> Also, just to be curious, has the test been stopped because of over temperature of the motor?


The motor doesn't like the treatment one bit. After a bit more than 10 seconds it's a light show worthy of a Jean-Michel Jarre concert in there so even if the controller could keep it up if it was cooled more efficiently, the motor would be completely toasted eventually.

The pack isn't too happy as well after a few runs. I got logs for two runs today of a total of a little less than 25 seconds 1kA data (not sure if Tesseract ran more than that) and in the second run it's quite visible that the pack can't keep up any longer and the current starts to drop off. Of course, these batteries have taken a lot of beating in our tests and aren't exactly in mint condition anymore...



Dalardan said:


> You two are doing great work. Good job and continue to have fun.


Thank you. 



albano said:


> One thing I need is, I need series/parallel for my drag bike and 150v+ per motor. Come on man bring that monster we waiting for. And let me be the first in Africa.


Well, we won't stop you. 

The serial/parallel switch isn't implemented yet, but it's pretty high up on my to do list. The controller runs fine at a pack voltage of ~200 (192 nominal) Volt (that drops to about 150 Volt at full load, poor batteries) so that part should be ok for you. We're aiming for a higher pack voltage, but we need more batteries to really test it before we promise anything in text...


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Dalardan said:


> Really nice graph! 10 seconds at 1kA, that's great.


Thanks! Now, wouldn't it be nice if EVERY controller manufacturer provided the same basic performance data? 




Dalardan said:


> If I do read well the graph, the controller temperature starts near 37 degrees and ends near 42 degrees. Is it with the air cooling or the water cooling setup? That's quite nice to see only a rise of about 5 degrees after 10 seconds of 1kA discharge.


These runs are with air cooling only because my test enclosure wasn't drilled out for liquid cooling  - just two 38cfm fans are keeping it cool. 

The temp does continue rising after the 1000A run, but that is partially because I am still running the motor afterwards at 150A and 3000 rpm (dialing down the dyno load) to let the motor's internal fan cool everything down. 




Dalardan said:


> Also, just to be curious, has the test been stopped because of over temperature of the motor? ...


Yes. I've done a bunch of runs at 1000A now and every time I seem to back off the throttle at around the 12-15 second mark because the sparking and noise gets to be so bad. Everyone who has been near the motor has responded in the same way: that can't be good for the poor thing. And, we can't really afford to blow up motors at $1800 a pop while testing controllers (that's NetGain's responsibility  ).

But yeah, it's a blast. Hopefully not literally  !


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

I think we'd all enjoy some videos, why keep all the fun to yourself? Even a cell phone video or something, unless there are proprietary secrets you have to keep hidden  And if the motor does happen to blow up......


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> I think we'd all enjoy some videos, why keep all the fun to yourself? Even a cell phone video or something, unless there are proprietary secrets you have to keep hidden  And if the motor does happen to blow up......


yeah, yeah... 

http://www.diyelectriccar.com/forum...oltage-192vdci-33747.html?p=129193#post129193

See post 5 

We are NOT trying to blow the motor up. Unfortunately, the controller appears to be capable of delivering much more power than the motor can handle at this point so we can't fully test the controller's operating envelope until we add a second motor... We'll eventually do just that - gotta test series/parallel testing at some point, right? - but we can't afford it right now. Developing an ass-kicking controller is expensive, you know, despite what "some people" might think...


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Thanks! Now, wouldn't it be nice if EVERY controller manufacturer provided the same basic performance data?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Really wonderful results. Thank you!

What rpm were you running the motor at (for 10sec) when you were able to draw 1000A??


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Bowser330 said:


> What rpm were you running the motor at (for 10sec) when you were able to draw 1000A??


Someone else was monitoring the dyno and motor rpm. The net hp (minus motor losses) was 118hp on the last run but I don't recall what the RPM was. I *think* it was around 3000rpm. I'll double-check tomorrow.

I do know we had a good laugh when we flipped back in the notebook to the very best we could coax from a Kelly 120V "600A" controller: a whopping 13hp.

EDIT: nope, the speed as recorded by an optical tach was ~2000rpm.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> yeah, yeah...
> 
> http://www.diyelectriccar.com/forum...oltage-192vdci-33747.html?p=129193#post129193
> 
> See post 5


Damn, you are taping!  And you, or someone, is hand holding by the look, which seems scary even sitting here watching it. Cool stuff


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> Damn, you are taping!


Yep. For the poor SPD that can't be there in person.  *sniff* *honk*


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Someone else was monitoring the dyno and motor rpm. The net hp (minus motor losses) was 118hp on the last run but I don't recall what the RPM was. I *think* it was around 3000rpm. I'll double-check tomorrow.
> 
> I do know we had a good laugh when we flipped back in the notebook to the very best we could coax from a Kelly 120V "600A" controller: a whopping 13hp.


Wow...3000rpm and still able to pull 1000A

Warp-11's can make 300ftlbs at 1000A!!

300ftlbs available from 0rpm/mph nice....


----------



## albano (Jan 12, 2009)

Any update on that monster controller?


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

albano said:


> Any update on that monster controller?


Not really. There's tons of details to address and nothing really ground breaking has happened lately. We're working on it and even though it's getting close to ready, keep in mind that we started this in September. However, we'll be done this year, that much is certain, and odds are that it'll even be before the first snow in Sweden...


----------



## albano (Jan 12, 2009)

Qer said:


> Not really. There's tons of details to address and nothing really ground breaking has happened lately. We're working on it and even though it's getting close to ready, keep in mind that we started this in September. However, we'll be done this year, that much is certain, and odds are that it'll even be before the first snow in Sweden...



Hey Qer!

At what highest volts will that monster operate? I need POWER to run twin motor for drag bike. Hope to have it by this year.

Albano


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

albano said:


> At what highest volts will that monster operate? I need POWER to run twin motor for drag bike. Hope to have it by this year.


At least 200 Volt. That is, we've verified that it handles 200 Volt but we're aiming higher. How high, well, we'll find out eventually.


----------



## Jokerzwild (Jun 11, 2009)

I have 2 liquid cooled motors comming in 2 months so please have it done by then

320v 374max v 3200rpm 4000max rpm 99lbs of torque 198.1 lbs of max torque 60hp 120mhp

Do you think it would work well with these?


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Jokerzwild said:


> I have 2 liquid cooled motors comming in 2 months so please have it done by then
> 
> 320v 374max v 3200rpm 4000max rpm 99lbs of torque 198.1 lbs of max torque 60hp 120mhp
> 
> Do you think it would work well with these?


Are they Series DC motors? Those voltage ratings imply they are BLDC/AC motors.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Yeah he's talking about BLDC motors, the controllers won't work.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> Yeah he's talking about BLDC motors, the controllers won't work.


Dammit, you just had to go and answer that didn't you...

I really wanted to see Joker's response!!!


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Oops, my bad. Carry on, nothing to see here...


----------



## Jokerzwild (Jun 11, 2009)

What he said

Im not a retard (well) it says on the form brushless DC Motors.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Jokerzwild said:


> What he said
> 
> Im not a retard (well) it says on the form brushless DC Motors.


Perhaps, but it is certainly obvious that you don't bother to do any research before asking questions.

No, you cannot use a dc motor controller to drive a BLDC motor. I really hate that term brushless DC because it leads to this question being asked over and over again.

BLDC = AC motor. You need an inverter (aka VFD) to drive BLDC motors.


----------



## Jimdear2 (Oct 12, 2008)

Tesseract and Qer,

This is a question asked out of ignorance, (I'm a mechanical type person). But it seems to me that a lot of the internal components and functions of a quality controller are that same as those of a quality charger.

Would it be possible to combine these functions using a bigger processor programed to each function. 

I.E. Manipulating voltage and current. Ignition OFF and system plugged into mains, Controller becomes charger. Ignition ON and mains unplugged charger becomes controller.

It seems that a controller could be sold with a generic battery charge protocol programmed in then a download could be used to update to needed protocol.

I hope I have made myself clear.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Interesting thought. I know ACP's AC inverter and motor allow this.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Jimdear2 said:


> ...it seems to me that a lot of the internal components and functions of a quality controller are that same as those of a quality charger.
> 
> Would it be possible to combine these functions using a bigger processor programed to each function.


For a series dc motor controller, it is possible, but not easy. The main power components - switch, freewheeling diode, capacitor and inductor (motor) - either aren't arranged in the right order and/or the necessary circuit nodes aren't accessible to change their configuration. Also, you would need to take the armature out of the charger circuit lest you cause the motor to spin!

It really is better to have the two functions separate, IMO, but in the AC inverter it is quite easy to do combine them because passing current through any one of the motor's windings does not cause the motor to turn (it actually induces some braking torque in the rotor) and the rest of the circuit is naturally capable of bidirectional power transfer.

Anyway, having done some work on the infamous Dolphin 50kW combination inverter/charger, I really don't like having both functions rolled into one device because when one fails it inevitable takes the other with it...


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

It's also worth noting that Tesla did away with this feature when they redesigned their motor and controller.


----------



## Jimdear2 (Oct 12, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> For a series dc motor controller, it is possible, but not easy.


Nice to know that I am starting to see some of this stuff in a proper light and relationships. 
I thought it was too simple to not have had someone think of it before. But sometimes simple minds see simple things.




Tesseract said:


> Anyway, having done some work on the infamous Dolphin 50kW combination inverter/charger, I really don't like having both functions rolled into one device because when one fails it inevitable takes the other with it...


But as I understand it you and Qer dont make stuff that will fail. 

I should know better about combined functions, but I was thinking about the high cost of quality components and from what I read ,a lot of the same stuff goes into both.

I'll definatly defer to your opinion.

You both have a good one.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Jimdear2 said:


> ...
> But as I understand it you and Qer dont make stuff that will fail.


Heh... well, if you connect the battery pack up to the motor output terminals you will most definitely destroy it... not a whole lot we could do about that one except cram even more contactors inside the beast, and, well, it really is big enough already.

Theoretically, the controller can withstand a short circuit on the output terminals (by shutting down within 5us at roughly 1800A peak current), but no one at the shop is brave enough (or stupid enough) to try it... We tried to trick some of the guys that work next door into dropping a wrench across the motor terminals but not a one went for it...  *



* - Just kidding! OSHA'd be all over us like white on rice if we tried something like that!


----------



## major (Apr 4, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> It's also worth noting that Tesla did away with this feature when they redesigned their motor and controller.


I suspect that isolation was the main reason.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

I think they claimed greater efficiency and higher charge rates as well as eliminating the nylon (?) spacer for the motor.


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

Tesseract and Qer,

I think I found the motor that can match your controller. Try to burn this baby on the dyno, see who wins ... 

I don't know if these are DC or AC, I can't imagine there is a controller on a locomotive, they are probably directly connected to a genset and controlled by generator's diesel engine's throttle.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

dimitri said:


> Tesseract and Qer,
> 
> I think I found the motor that can match your controller. Try to burn this baby on the dyno, see who wins ...
> 
> I don't know if these are DC or AC, I can't imagine there is a controller on a locomotive, they are probably directly connected to a genset and controlled by generator's diesel engine's throttle.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traction_motor

It seems that historically so called traction motors can be DC but nowadays they're AC so these babies are probably AC. However, even though if they'd be DC I shamefully and regretfully must confess that our controller is probably a bit on the weak side to power these.


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Dimitri, hows the beta testing going, any range updates?


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Well, whatever his range is now, I suspect it's about to plummet because he's going to get the hardware/software upgrades to bring him up to 1000A very soon.

We have one controller installed in a 3500# direct drive vehicle (transwarp 11) with 168V/105Ah lead-acid batts (don't blame us for these design decisions!) and they have reported two things (not a single data file, which is technically in breach of their beta program agreement...  ): wow, it sure is peppy; ummm, why are we only getting 16 miles of range?!


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Well, whatever his range is now, I suspect it's about to plummet because he's going to get the hardware/software upgrades to bring him up to 1000A very soon.
> 
> We have one controller installed in a 3500# direct drive vehicle (transwarp 11) with 168V/105Ah lead-acid batts (don't blame us for these design decisions!) and they have reported two things (not a single data file, which is technically in breach of their beta program agreement...  ): wow, it sure is peppy; ummm, why are we only getting 16 miles of range?!




Warp-11 with 168V & 1000A...


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

Bowser330 said:


> Dimitri, hows the beta testing going, any range updates?


I updated my Mazda Protege build thread, stating that I have been too lazy to do more range testing. Once my controller gets its 1000Amp facelift I will definitely post my results 

I have passed 1000 miles mark with beta unit, works absolutely pefectly for its current specs.


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

dimitri said:


> I updated my Mazda Protege build thread, stating that I have been too lazy to do more range testing. Once my controller gets its 1000Amp facelift I will definitely post my results
> 
> I have passed 1000 miles mark with beta unit, works absolutely pefectly for its current specs.


Thank you.. and thats great to hear...


----------



## toddshotrods (Feb 10, 2009)

Tesseract said:


> ...a 3500# direct drive vehicle (transwarp 11) ...it sure is peppy...


I am going to have so much fun when my plan comes together. Imagine what "peppy" would feel like minus a couple thousand pounds! I'm going to make my passengers sign waivers. "Due the the unpredictable nature of my right foot when connected to a BMF, passenger assumes all responsibility for... and will not hold driver liable for injuries to neck, back..."


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

toddshotrods said:


> I am going to have so much fun when my plan comes together. Imagine what "peppy" would feel like minus a couple thousand pounds! I'm going to make my passengers sign waivers. "Due the the unpredictable nature of my right foot when connected to a BMF, passenger assumes all responsibility for... and will not hold driver liable for injuries to neck, back..."


Right on...my future conversion wont be a lightweight dragster, Im going to try to keep her down to 2500 though...and I still do want the performance of the S10 Smokescreen....I would really like to see some data logging of Volts Amps and Rpm from that S10....but I know thats not going to happen anytime soon...


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

toddshotrods said:


> I am going to have so much fun when my plan comes together. Imagine what "peppy" would feel like minus a couple thousand pounds!...


Indeed. The "hot rod" one of our beta controllers is in was built with an aluminum frame/chassis but then it was saddled with 14 x 70# of lead-acid batts and a 1/4" thick fiberglass body!

At first they had the earlier 500A beta version (like Dimitri) but with a 2.83:1 rear end the thing was SLOW from 0-30. It zipped down the interstate at better than 70mph just fine, though (no speedometer, but we were keeping up with traffic... at least until the batteries started to die and the low pack voltage current limiter kicked in).

We advised them to use a higher ratio (strongly advised them to use a PowerGlide or similar two-speed tranny) so they switched out the rear end for a 3.83:1, I think, and were much happier with 500A. Then they got their 1000A upgrade and apparently have the EV grin plastered on their faces more or less permanently... until their batteries go flat after 15 or so miles. 

One subtle difference between the existing controllers our there and this one is that I decided to not even bother with a "peak" current rating. That was not the plan, initially, but after just one test drive with Dimitri I saw that having a burst of peak current that rapidly fades away only makes the driving experience annoying (and he agreed... loudly...  ). Whatever boost in acceleration you get the first time you floor it only serves to starkly remind you what you could have if only the thermal management/derating of the components was a little more conservative. Thus, the 500A/750A peak version (with one module - hence why the first betas only do 500A) was totally scrapped. 

We haven't actually tested a Zilla, but from the data that is publicly available it appears the Z1K has a continuous rating of 300A while the Z2K can deliver 600-700A. Apparently, the Zilla's can deliver their maximum current for at least 15-20 seconds with liquid cooling, though, and since that is about all the existing motors can handle it's not really a negative in, for example, drag racing.

Our controller behaves similarly as temp rises, but the crucial difference is that the heatsink/liquid cooling loop is capable of removing enough waste heat to allow 1000A more or less indefinitely. Granted, this is only at the pack voltages and switching frequencies tested so far, and there will need to be some derating if either/both are raised, but eventually the code will give the customer the option of making the switching frequency trade-off if they feel it necessary (that is to say, most motors don't emit any audible noise at the lowest switching frequency we've tested (8khz) except when the controller is "dithering", or randomly skipping pulses to maintain currents below 50A at very low rpms, but if the noise is objectionable you will be able to choose a different frequency with the caveat that higher f = lower I).


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> .... while the Z2K can deliver 600-700A. Apparently, the Zilla's can deliver their maximum current for at least 15-20 seconds with liquid cooling, though, and since that is about all the existing motors can handle it's not really a negative in, for example, drag racing....


...When looking at the motor graphs, Amps decrease with RPM, so with a locked ratio this means, the faster you go (mph) the less Amps you can pull from the pack...So can you please help me understand how the dragsters like S10-smokescreen and the White Zombie can extract max amps for 11 seconds?

I guess i was under the impression that they could only extract max amps up to a certain rpm...

If it is because those two example dragsters have high voltage setups which push up the overall rpm curve, then I guess i understand...

Also i am assuming that the motors still have a structural maximum rpm of about 6000 before they break apart...Is there a way to increase that?


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Bowser330 said:


> ...When looking at the motor graphs, Amps decrease with RPM
> ...
> So can you please help me understand how the dragsters like S10-smokescreen and the White Zombie can extract max amps for 11 seconds?


No, Back EMF increases with RPM so if your pack voltage still exceeds the motor's BEMF at a given RPM by enough margin to overcome both it and the internal resistance then the controller can still deliver max amps. It's when the controller hits 100% duty cycle that you know you have run out of battery pack volts for the rpm/torque you are demanding.

For example, the WarP 9 on our dyno requires 100-105V across it at 2000 rpm when drawing 1000A. 4000 rpm, then, would require approx. twice the voltage while 6,000 rpm would need 3x, etc. Of course, this presupposes the commutator will still function at the higher RPM/current levels (as either/both go higher the time the commutator can withstand such gets shorter - you may only have a split second before zorching at 6,000 rpm and 1kA).




Bowser330 said:


> Also i am assuming that the motors still have a structural maximum rpm of about 6000 before they break apart...Is there a way to increase that?


I'm not really a motor expert, but there are many mechanical ways to make a rotating object capable of sustaining higher rpms... electrically speaking, you probably need interpoles to "undistort" the field's magnetic field from armature reaction. Perhaps more of a gap between commutator segments? Forced air cooling to blow carbon dust shed from the brushes away from the inter-brush area? Dunno the specifics, but you know who around here does


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> No, Back EMF increases with RPM so if your pack voltage still exceeds the motor's BEMF at a given RPM by enough margin to overcome both it and the internal resistance then the controller can still deliver max amps. It's when the controller hits 100% duty cycle that you know you have run out of battery pack volts for the rpm/torque you are demanding.
> 
> For example, the WarP 9 on our dyno requires 100-105V across it at 2000 rpm when drawing 1000A. 4000 rpm, then, would require approx. twice the voltage while 6,000 rpm would need 3x, etc. Of course, this presupposes the commutator will still function at the higher RPM/current levels (as either/both go higher the time the commutator can withstand such gets shorter - you may only have a split second before zorching at 6,000 rpm and 1kA).
> 
> ...


Thank you.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

We are still working out some minor bugs (mainly with the tachometer/speed limiting function) and Qer still has to write the boot loader routine (so the code can be updated through the ethernet port), but we are within spitting distance of releasing the controller for sale, probably by the end of August.

We all finally agreed on a name for the 1000A controller: *Soliton1*.

Since some of you really seem to love controller pr0n (aka "porn"), here's a beta version Soliton1 that the conversion shop we work closely with installed in a VW bug  :

http://www.rebirthev.com/performancevwkit.html

Let's just say, that bug's poor clutch is not long for this world... 

Driving around on surface streets with the motor current limit set to 1000A, the battery current limit set to 400A and the motor current ramp rate set to 300A per second allows for _excellent_ acceleration without smoking the clutch too badly or having to shift out of 3rd gear. We'll try to remember to get some actual 0-60 times, though.

The owner of Rebirth Auto learned first-hand just how useful the "minimum pack voltage limit" function is. He set the minimum to 90V (for the 120V pack in this bug) and whether this voltage is approached because of sag (from drawing so much current) or because the pack is nearing 0% SOC, the controller starts limiting the motor current to whatever it takes to keep the pack voltage at the voltage programmed. During one test drive he was about 5 miles away from the shop when it became clear the pack was on its last legs, but he still made it all the way back, even though the car was really limping along for the last few blocks because the allowable motor current was something like 150-200A. Still, it sure beats sitting on the side of the road waiting for the tow truck to come get you, and since the battery pack voltage is the controlling variable, it is possible to set the voltage so that the maximum amount of energy can be extracted without risking over-discharge.


----------



## piotrsko (Dec 9, 2007)

Tesseract said:


> The owner of Rebirth Auto learned first-hand just how useful the "minimum pack voltage limit" function is. He set the minimum to 90V (for the 120V pack in this bug) and whether this voltage is approached because of sag (from drawing so much current) or because the pack is nearing 0% SOC, the controller starts limiting the motor current to whatever it takes to keep the pack voltage at the voltage programmed. During one test drive he was about 5 miles away from the shop when it became clear the pack was on its last legs, but he still made it all the way back, even though the car was really limping along for the last few blocks because the allowable motor current was something like 150-200A. Still, it sure beats sitting on the side of the road waiting for the tow truck to come get you, and since the battery pack voltage is the controlling variable, it is possible to set the voltage so that the maximum amount of energy can be extracted without risking over-discharge.



I know You and Qer are busy, but how about an output idiot light for this low battery condition? however really nice touch. hope you can make a ton of these really fast.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

piotrsko said:


> ..how about an output idiot light for this low battery condition?...


Already implemented...  But, thanks for asking because I guess not a whole lot has been said about what the controller does _besides_ control the current in the motor.

There are four outputs that are protected against shorts, overloading, inductive kickback and up to 60V of otherwise erroneously applied voltage, and of those four, three are "general purpose" (their function is programmable) while one is for driving the in-dash idiot light (or some other load that can accept +12V for the purpose of indicating an error condition). We haven't really decided on an error "protocol", but my gut feeling is that trying to indicate the precise nature of the error by blinking the idiot light in a specific pattern is more likely to piss people off than be useful (especially since detailed error information is available through the web interface). Right now we blink the idiot light for "minor" error conditions and turn it on continuously for "major" faults such as:

1. desaturation detected (bad news, this one)
2. Pack voltage below 10V at startup (precharge failure)
3. Throttle not at zero at startup
4. 12V supply below 10V


Right now there are also three general purpose inputs and two that are dedicated (besides throttle, of course): 1) Brake, which immediately returns motor output to zero, regardless of the throttle position and MAY be used to trigger regenerative braking (IF we can get that to work AND can figure out a way to protect ourselves from people blowing up their advanced motors with it) and 2) Tach, which will reduce motor current if the user-programmed RPM limit is reached. Once it is working, that is... right now it reduces motor current in a random fashion; maybe because of noise picked up by the inductive proximity sensor we are using or because the code is twitchy...

Anyway, the general purpose inputs only have two programmable functions so far: Reverse (cuts the maximum motor amperage and voltage so the throttle is less jumpy and you don't zorch an advanced timing motor) and Motor Temp (reads a snap switch and reduces motor current if triggered; we may expand this to be able to read a thermistor in the future). More input functions are planned, like a performance mode switch (between "Economy/Valet" and "Full"), etc., and those will be added on later through a code update (once the boot loader is done, you will be able to update the code by simply uploading a file through the web browser interface).


----------



## Amberwolf (May 29, 2009)

Tesseract said:


> Right now we blink the idiot light for "minor" error conditions and turn it on continuously for "major" faults such as:


To me, a solid light is less likely to get my attention than a blinking one, so I would reverse that behavior. 

Kind of like someone raising their hand in class, vs waving it. Which one would you notice first?
________
The View Condo Prathumnak


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Amberwolf said:


> To me, a solid light is less likely to get my attention than a blinking one, so I would reverse that behavior.
> ...


Major faults result in the controller either not starting up, or suddenly turning off its main contactors, and we figured that would be interpreted as a most helpful clue by the driver that something has gone awry 

We blink the idiot light for minor faults (like motor overspeed, heatisnk above 55C, 12V battery voltage dropping below 11V, etc...) for the same reason you gave: to have a better chance of getting your attention.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> We all finally agreed on a name for the 1000A controller: *Soliton1*.


Interesting:


> a *soliton* is a self-reinforcing solitary wave (a wave packet or pulse) that maintains its shape while it travels at constant speed


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soliton
Still, it will always be the BMF to me


----------



## toddshotrods (Feb 10, 2009)

JRP3 said:


> ...it will always be the BMF to me


Me too


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Congratulations on the pending release...


----------



## Dalardan (Jul 4, 2008)

Good job, Tesseract and Qer.

It's great to see this big project comming to a production phase. The unit is impressive, will there be a color choice for the user? I like the anodized red the Rebirth Auto unit has. It's the final color?

Just for the fun, how do you plan to sell your products? Will you sell your controllers on your website or you'll sell them via other compagnies?

Again, congratulations. This is a great project that deserves the most respect.

Dalardan


----------



## Renny_D (Apr 21, 2009)

Dalardan said:


> Good job, Tesseract and Qer.
> 
> It's great to see this big project comming to a production phase. The unit is impressive, will there be a color choice for the user? I like the anodized red the Rebirth Auto unit has. It's the final color?
> 
> ...


ditto and price???? Love the look and performance and the fact that you know who to bug with ideas and questions ;-)

Thanks
Renny


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Dalardan said:


> ... will there be a color choice for the user? I like the anodized red the Rebirth Auto unit has. It's the final color?


The default finish will be clear anodizing but other colors, as available from the local anodizing shop, will be available as special order (read: more expensive and longer lead time). Frankly, we wrestled quite a bit over whether to even offer different colors because of the logistical headache it will create for us. I mean, how do we build the controllers ahead of time if everyone orders different colors?

All of us personally agree that the clear anodized looks surprisingly good (much better than raw aluminum) while the other colors result in more polarized opinions.




Dalardan said:


> J...Will you sell your controllers on your website or you'll sell them via other compagnies?


Yes 

At least my understanding is they will be available both directly from evnetics.com (that site is pretty much just a placeholder as of now, though) and from other conversion/EV parts shops.



> Again, congratulations. This is a great project that deserves the most respect.


Thanks! It has been a lot more work than any of us anticipated, but EXTREMELY rewarding.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Thanks! It has been a lot more work than any of us anticipated, but EXTREMELY rewarding.


You mean it wasn't as quick and easy as *some* people thought it should be


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> You mean it wasn't as quick and easy as *some* people thought it should be


Not that we would "Name Any Names" or anything... 

That said, it seems that the software for the controller is particularly difficult (seeing as it isn't done yet)*... ahem 

We MIGHT have found a local company that will cast the enclosures for about the same price as we have been paying for the raw aluminum billets. We still need to run a finishing pass in the CNC over every surface of the enclosure but that, obviously, will take a lot less time than machining the whole thing from scratch. The initial cost for the mold is a bit steep, and we need to verify that the thermal performance is acceptable, but it looks promising (and no need to outsource to China  )

The conversion shop we work with, Rebirth Auto, got one of the Soliton1 beta controllers and has been beating the crap out of their demo VW bug. Here's a quick video of the owner, Sebastien, accelerating away from the shop:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz069B67gAo

Hope it's not too shameless of a plug, especially since I am one of the first people to report spam...

* - just teasing Qer here. He has a real job while the rest of us spend most of our days goofing off and playing practical jokes on each other, like "mislabel the battery cables" and "for the love of God, where'd that #%$%&^ wrench go?"


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

Poor Bug with Soliton1 up its ass, literally... looks like its ready to take off and fly over that freeway overpass 

Hey, not fair, I was supposed to be the first customer, where is my damn 1000Amps upgrade  , I wanna be on YouTube too 

Congrats on latest progress!!! Keep up the good work!!!


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Not that we would "Name Any Names" or anything...
> 
> That said, it seems that the software for the controller is particularly difficult (seeing as it isn't done yet)... ahem
> 
> ...


who gives a crap if its shameless or not...It is about time a company started proving their stuff works instead of putting it out there and creating headaches for several people...

Edit: That video is awesome, the acceleration looks phenomenal!

I can't wait to see what you guys can do with future models!


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Hope it's not too shameless of a plug, especially since I am one of the first people to report spam...


A legitimate EV related product is never spam, plug away.


----------



## Guest (Aug 13, 2009)

Nice vid of the bug. 120 volts and 1000 amps is real nice. I thought you'd peel a bit of rubber but maybe soon. 


Pete


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> That said, it seems that the software for the controller is particularly difficult (seeing as it isn't done yet)... ahem


Not that I want to diminish my own feat (which probably would be somewhat contra productive or plain out stupid) but it might also be because I have a full time job and am trying to squeeze this project in on spare time...


----------



## albano (Jan 12, 2009)

Hey! Nice vid, Hope to own one soon


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

gottdi said:


> I thought you'd peel a bit of rubber but maybe soon.


Rather "not any longer", because when Tesseract ran a WarP 9" on the dyno with a faulty potentiometer the controller went from 0 to 1000 Amps in a fraction of a second, almost ripping the dyno apart. After that I hurriedly implemented slew rate control, so you can set the maximum A/s the controller is allowed to do.

Default is 500 A/s but if you want to burn rubber, just set the controller to a absurd value (max is 25000 A/s) and the controller will gladly burn your rubber, turn your clutch to Jell-o or snap your shaft, no problem. A more boring, but practical, approach is to set the A/s to a level where the tires can handle the torque.

I believe that vid shows a more practical than manly approach. It would sure be cooler if it created loads of smoke at take off, but considering it's a Beetle the big question would be if it'd be the tires or the clutch creating the smoke screen...


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Qer said:


> I believe that vid shows a more practical than manly approach.


That's no way to market a product


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> That's no way to market a product


True, but that car is not expendable. It's used for commuting and should preferably stay roughly in the same shape as it once had when it left the factory. Considering a WarP 9" delivers a LOT more torque @ 1000 Amps than the original ICE ever did that's a quite relevant consideration...


----------



## rebirthauto (Nov 3, 2008)

gottdi said:


> Nice vid of the bug. 120 volts and 1000 amps is real nice. I thought you'd peel a bit of rubber but maybe soon.
> 
> 
> Pete


Pete,
If you listen closely, you'll hear the chatter of the clutch trying to jump out of the car. Without tire spin, it is a very aggressive launch. If we start in 3rd gear, we simply smoke the poor 200mm clutch.

As QER points out, you can effectively dial-in the slew rate to match the car's grip in launch gear, and that is something racers should be interested in.

In the meantime, we're trying to find a good racing clutch (and we might freshen up the battered battery pack as well!), so that we can provide you guys with the blue-smoke-fest you've all been waiting for.

Sebastien
rebirthauto


----------



## albano (Jan 12, 2009)

rebirthauto said:


> Pete,
> If you listen closely, you'll hear the chatter of the clutch trying to jump out of the car. Without tire spin, it is a very aggressive launch. If we start in 3rd gear, we simply smoke the poor 200mm clutch.
> 
> As QER points out, you can effectively dial-in the slew rate to match the car's grip in launch gear, and that is something racers should be interested in.
> ...


Hi Sebastien,

Do you rev and drop the clutch or you just put into gear and rev it
I really would love to see the smoke on that tires, by the way for only 120volts this is power .


----------



## rebirthauto (Nov 3, 2008)

albano said:


> Hi Sebastien,
> 
> Do you rev and drop the clutch or you just put into gear and rev it
> I really would love to see the smoke on that tires, by the way for only 120volts this is power .


Albano,
We DO NOT drop the clutch, for launches, but we do use it to shift afterward.

We select a gear and press the go-pedal.

It is indeed pretty impressive as it is (the radio flew out of the dash on the first outing!)

Sebastien
rebirthauto


----------



## rebirthauto (Nov 3, 2008)

We pushed it a little bit past the design intent today (set the slew rate 25000 A/sec).

For those of you keeping score:

Soliton 1 vs Transaxle 0

I think QER gets at point as well.

We expected a failure, but not this one!

Sebastien


----------



## Guest (Aug 13, 2009)

Urathane mounts are in order all the way around. Sweet,ya busted something!


----------



## Guest (Aug 13, 2009)

Strong bolts too!


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

rebirthauto said:


> I think QER gets at point as well.


WOHO!


----------



## Guest (Aug 13, 2009)

Watch out for the axels as well. They can bust under high torque and high traction situations. Slip that clutch a bit and then let her rip!


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

gottdi said:


> Watch out for the axels as well. They can bust under high torque and high traction situations. Slip that clutch a bit and then let her rip!


Why not simply dial down the slew rate and let the controller do the job for you...?


----------



## Guest (Aug 13, 2009)

Yes but it still can't think, some times a good slip o the clutch is all it needs then launch.


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

rebirthauto said:


> Pete,
> If you listen closely, you'll hear the chatter of the clutch trying to jump out of the car. Without tire spin, it is a very aggressive launch. If we start in 3rd gear, we simply smoke the poor 200mm clutch.
> 
> *As QER points out, you can effectively dial-in the slew rate to match the car's grip in launch gear, and that is something racers should be interested in.*
> ...


Correction: thats something everyone should be interested in! 

I look forward to the blue smoke test, however i think the peoples here would also be interested in the performance times...0-60 and 1/4mile...one of those Gtech timer suction cup things will do! 

How much does the beetle weigh?


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

gottdi said:


> Yes but it still can't think, some times a good slip o the clutch is all it needs then launch.


That's ok. My experience from the roads is that most drivers can't think as well so then the controller will be on an even footing with the driver.


----------



## Guest (Aug 14, 2009)

> That's ok. My experience from the roads is that most drivers can't think as well so then the controller will be on an even footing with the driver.


OK, you got me there and I agree. 
I think your implementation of the programming is excellent. I'd use it. It has been great watching the progress of this controller. 

Pete


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Bowser330 said:


> ... i think the peoples here would also be interested in the performance times...0-60 and 1/4mile...one of those Gtech timer suction cup things will do!
> 
> How much does the beetle weigh?


The bug weighs in around 2500lbs. You could say its just a little bit overloaded.

We were thinking about getting one of those accelerometer based timers, but weren't sure their accuracy - are they simply more convenient/consistent than a stopwatch or what?

I guess, though, that the transaxle needs to be replaced first...


----------



## Jozzer (Mar 29, 2009)

The G-Meter type devices measure g-force and calculate speed against time as well as some other functions. Accuracy on a motorbike is a little suspect, due to the front end lifting, they are very sensitive to tilt, but will be a little better on a car. 
Even then, the accuracy is probably greater than the difference between 2 drivers driving the same car/bike.
Is it not possible to log the controllers data though, and add an RPM sensor to get speed, then analyze the data to find the relevant times. It should be fairly clear when and where the foot was put down
Failing that, a camcorder mounted on the dash will do a fair job, its fairly easy to slow the film down and get valid 0-60 times..

Steve


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Jozzer said:


> Is it not possible to log the controllers data though, and add an RPM sensor to get speed, then analyze the data to find the relevant times. It should be fairly clear when and where the foot was put down


In theory, yes. In reality the RPM-algorithm has proven to be a bit, err, nervous and rather unreliable. It's tracked down to a software error but it hasn't yet been fixed (I'm waiting for a new, fancy pulse generator to be able to provide my setup with an adequate simulation).

However, the logging logs throttle position so a pretty easy way to measure the time would to release the throttle when 60 mph is reached and measure the time. Now, there's a slight obstacle that renders that approach impossible as well, but that's not the controllers fault...


----------



## Dalardan (Jul 4, 2008)

According to their web site, the G-Tech measures 1/4 mile E.T. and speed as well as 0-60mph time, RPM, torque and horsepower as well as other stuff.

Their 200$ unit does it but without logging.

Their 300$ unit adds the possibility to dump data into a PC.

You can find their accuracy here.

I hope it may help someone, for 2-300$, it's a great toy.

Dalardan


----------



## Drew (Jul 26, 2009)

Qer said:


> Rather "not any longer", because when Tesseract ran a WarP 9" on the dyno with a faulty potentiometer the controller went from 0 to 1000 Amps in a fraction of a second, almost ripping the dyno apart. After that I hurriedly implemented slew rate control, so you can set the maximum A/s the controller is allowed to do.
> 
> Default is 500 A/s but if you want to burn rubber, just set the controller to a absurd value (max is 25000 A/s) and the controller will gladly burn your rubber, turn your clutch to Jell-o or snap your shaft, no problem. A more boring, but practical, approach is to set the A/s to a level where the tires can handle the torque.
> 
> I believe that vid shows a more practical than manly approach. It would sure be cooler if it created loads of smoke at take off, but considering it's a Beetle the big question would be if it'd be the tires or the clutch creating the smoke screen...



Rather than depending on tuning a motor characteristic for launch why not include a crude traction control device? Entering a target slip rate for the rear tyres, then comparing rate of engine RPM rise vs acceleration of the vehicle via an accelerometer would be a very easy way to limit current to necessary levels even when drag racing and has the additional benefit of protecting the motor from overspeed if you end up with wheelspin during normal operation.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Drew said:


> Rather than depending on tuning a motor characteristic for launch why not include a crude traction control device?





Drew said:


> ...would be a very easy way...


I think our views on "very easy" differs slightly. 

Yes, we've been pondering some kind of mechanism to detect slip, although we haven't considered an accelerometer for it. However, even if I see some merit to the idea I doubt that it will be a common addition since most drivers probably won't have a need for it.

But then, you never know...


----------



## Drew (Jul 26, 2009)

Actually, now that I think about it you don't even need an accelerometer, you can just calculate rate vs motor load to do the same thing. Older ABS systems worked by "Hunting the peak" which allowed for changes in tyre etc without seriously compromising the effectiveness of the system. Because you need to generate a slip rate to develop traction with tyres this would allow you to compare the torque that the motor is generating to the rate of acceleration of the motor its self, this would work irrespective of gear and allow you to simply back the motor off if the motors rate of acceleration climbed but the torque developed dropped.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Drew said:


> Older ABS systems worked by "Hunting the peak" which allowed for changes in tyre etc without seriously compromising the effectiveness of the system.


Actually, first generation ABS sucked. I usually turned them off because I could stop the car faster without it than with it, especially on dry roads. 

That said, no matter approach making a system like this efficient and reliable will take not only some serious coding, it will also take a lot of tests, redesigns, recodings, more testing, etc etc etc. It's never as easy as it seems and most of the code in the controller is already rewritten once or twice simply because you (almost) never get it right the first time.

But yeah, some kind of traction control would be cool. Just don't hold your breath...


----------



## fugdabug (Jul 14, 2008)

I just hope you get it to market pronto... I may need a back-up. KTA hasn't gotten back to me with an RMA#... yet!
Well... drag racing may be fine for some, show may be fine for others... what I want as an EV modder, and expect as the holder of the money that is given for the product is a controller that will work dependably, is easy to adjust, provides a practical range of Amps and voltage adaptations... From say 96 on up to 156VDC.
I am just SO tired of controllers that are 'recommended' or that 'have a long history'... *&%^ that... I want a controller that I do not have to WORRY about turning into a ball of flame and smoke or that is just DEAD when you hook it up because Q&A was too worried about a date or what the lotto number was the day it was built!.. And that will allow me to go down the road NOT dependant on BP or Texaco or any fossil fuel for propulsion. That is all.
It has been over a year now, and I am on a third controller, and two were dead in the water before even having a chance to make the motor run...
Tessaract, just do your best. keep us apprised, and... AND when you get production going... just for the sake of everyday folks like me... try to keep the final cost within a reasonable range... if the product works the way it says it does, the proof will be in the performance, and I think if anyone of use at this time can do it you and your folks in your shop can! Just go with what you have and do your best.
it is always the people that are behind the product that make the real difference.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

fugdabug said:


> try to keep the final cost within a reasonable range...


You know what they say, "price, performance and durability, pick two".

Personally I think the price is reasonable but that is compared to Zilla, not, for example, Kelly or Curtis. If that is within "reasonable range" will probably be a controversial question...


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

fugdabug said:


> what I want as an EV modder, and expect as the holder of the money that is given for the product is a controller that will work dependably, is easy to adjust, provides a practical range of Amps and voltage adaptations... From say 96 on up to 156VDC.
> I am just SO tired of controllers that are 'recommended' or that 'have a long history'... *&%^ that... I want a controller that I do not have to WORRY about turning into a ball of flame and smoke or that is just DEAD when you hook it up because Q&A was too worried about a date or what the lotto number was the day it was built!.. And that will allow me to go down the road NOT dependant on BP or Texaco or any fossil fuel for propulsion. That is all.
> It has been over a year now, and I am on a third controller, and two were dead in the water before even having a chance to make the motor run...


Looking back, what would you have paid to avoid all those problems? As Qer points out, reliability has it's price.


----------



## albano (Jan 12, 2009)

rebirthauto said:


> Albano,
> We DO NOT drop the clutch, for launches, but we do use it to shift afterward.
> 
> We select a gear and press the go-pedal.
> ...



Is there any print out of dyno graph from the rebirthauto VW


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

albano said:


> Is there any print out of dyno graph from the rebirthauto VW


Ah, what you are really asking is, "do you have independent proof of the performance?" The answer is no, we don't. Our dyno doesn't have a built-in printer and even if it did, that still wouldn't provide adequate _proof_ that it was our controller that was being tested, now would it?

The whole point to _independent testing_ is that someone besides the manufacturer verifies (or refutes) the manufacturer's claims...


----------



## albano (Jan 12, 2009)

Tesseract said:


> Ah, what you are really asking is, "do you have independent proof of the performance?" The answer is no, we don't. Our dyno doesn't have a built-in printer and even if it did, that still wouldn't provide adequate _proof_ that it was our controller that was being tested, now would it?
> 
> The whole point to _independent testing_ is that someone besides the manufacturer verifies (or refutes) the manufacturer's claims...



Not at all, i do believe the power this controller has as we saw on youtube.
The VW pulls like a bomb. 

The reason i ask is i want to see how does the graph compare with the gasses. Here you can see my brother`s lexus is 200 with 2j supra motor and he does 1000+Hp 811Kw on the wheel. 

http://my.is/forums/f114/1000whp-395541/


----------



## CroDriver (Jan 8, 2009)

albano said:


> Not at all, i do believe the power this controller has as we saw on youtube.
> The VW pulls like a bomb.


Do you have a link? Can't find it...


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

CroDriver said:


> Do you have a link? Can't find it...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz069B67gAo

It's somewhere in this thread + some pics of the snapped mount for the gear box...


----------



## CroDriver (Jan 8, 2009)

Qer said:


> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz069B67gAo
> 
> It's somewhere in this thread + some pics of the snapped mount for the gear box...


Wow. Really quick 

The controller looks great (and quite big too )


----------



## fugdabug (Jul 14, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> Looking back, what would you have paid to avoid all those problems? As Qer points out, reliability has it's price.


couple $K..
 and had I not gone through the first source I did... (hindsight is 20/20)!


----------



## Drew (Jul 26, 2009)

Qer said:


> Actually, first generation ABS sucked. I usually turned them off because I could stop the car faster without it than with it, especially on dry roads.
> 
> That said, no matter approach making a system like this efficient and reliable will take not only some serious coding, it will also take a lot of tests, redesigns, recodings, more testing, etc etc etc. It's never as easy as it seems and most of the code in the controller is already rewritten once or twice simply because you (almost) never get it right the first time.
> 
> But yeah, some kind of traction control would be cool. Just don't hold your breath...


Sorry, I made a poor choice of words  what I meant by first generation ABS is that ABS from the original bosch series to the system 5 systems used a ratcheting type system, which would simply look for a point at which you started loosing grip. The newer system 8 systems are a lot more complex and is now capable of beating any human under any circumstance, but the prior generation of ABS was still able to make about 99.99% of all people look like idiots even in ideal conditions. 

The advantage of a system that simply looks for a reduction in torque is that it could be included in your current software as an additional module at a later date without too much complexity. All it would need to do is modify the throttle input reading based on the differential of the motor speed relative to the current supplied power, amps times volts  I'm sure it would be a lot harder to implement, but for a basic implementation it wouldn't have to be something which took over your life or anything.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Drew said:


> ...but the prior generation of ABS was still able to make about 99.99% of all people look like idiots even in ideal conditions.


I'll drink to that, but then it doesn't take an ABS to make the majority of the people of the roads look like idiots, they can manage that quite well without automatic help. 



Drew said:


> All it would need to do is modify the throttle input reading based on the differential of the motor speed relative to the current supplied power,...


My, quite cludgy. There must be better ways.


----------



## gdirwin (Apr 7, 2009)

A more robust system would be require wheel position/speed sensors on the drive wheels (2 or 4) compared directly to the motor rpm speed - this would detect wheel spinning as well as clutch slippage (both of which would back off the throttle).

You would also need an input to tell you which gear you were in (not sure how this would be done for a 5 spd gearbox) - the motor speed would have to be divided by an overall mechanical gear ratio (programmed for each manual gear setting).

Thinking out loud, the average of the 2 front wheel speeds should be taken (to account for cornering where inside speed is lower than outside speed, but the average should be constant) - for 4x4 applications it would be the average of all 4 wheel sensors.

Some "slop" in the gearbox, diferrential etc... is inevitable, so a deadband and/or delay would have to be added in the controls. As a bonus, this would also be an over-speed detector/limiter if someone happened to hit the gas and clutch at the same time...

Some random thoughts... Wheel sensors and a gear selection sensor - just what we need - more sensors and controller inputs!


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Okay... I'm going to summarize the requests and questions, implicit and explicit, from the last few pages and lets see how crazy it sounds when they are all together:

_albano: my brother's Lexus does 1000hp - how does your controller compare?_

Ummm... okay. We'll just take our toys and go home, then. Our controller doesn't come anywhere close to 1000hp. Now, if you want to spend $20k for the controller then we'll make you one that can do 400V and 2000A continuous.... then you can buy $50k worth of batteries to feed it and gang _four_ WarP motors together to handle all that power... actually, you might need _eight_ WarP motors... in other words, let's please try to be a little bit realistic, okay?


_Bowser330/CroDriver/toddshotrodds/etc.: we want 2000A and 350V or more!_ _Oh, and SepEx (todd)_

This is definitely in the pipeline, but first we need to sell a few controllers that _sane_ people will find plenty powerful for their daily driver. I really don't want to disparage other controllers any more than I already have (ok, I do, but I've learned my lesson... sorta), but I think that once people try a controller that delivers an _honest_ continuous current rating (not, say, 1000A for the first acceleration then 300A thereafter), the desire for 2000A will confine itself to Siamese motored drag racers (where it belongs).


_fugdabug: please make a controller as good as the Zilla but as cheap as the Kelly's I've bought 3 of so far..._

Ahem... Next question!


_Drew/gdirwin: How about adding traction control - and here's an insanely complicated way to do it!_

Guys... the ability to adjust throttle ramp rate, in conjunction with the (hopefully soon to be working) RPM limiting function, will make a relatively good traction control system as is. Perhaps a network of wheel and tranny sensors will allow _finer_ control of traction, but will it be worth the extra headache to design it and the the cost to implement it? I'm guessing not. To paraphrase Einstein, make things as simple as possible, and no more. Sorry, but this is not even remotely in consideration.


----------



## CroDriver (Jan 8, 2009)

Tesseract said:


> _Bowser330/CroDriver/toddshotrodds/etc.: we want 2000A and 350V or more!_ _Oh, and SepEx (todd)_
> 
> This is definitely in the pipeline, but first we need to sell a few controllers that _sane_ people will find plenty powerful for their daily driver. I really don't want to disparage other controllers any more than I already have (ok, I do, but I've learned my lesson... sorta), but I think that once people try a controller that delivers an _honest_ continuous current rating (not, say, 1000A for the first acceleration then 300A thereafter), the desire for 2000A will confine itself to Siamese motored drag racers (where it belongs).


I don't want you to feel that I'm pushing you to make such a controller. I'm just saying that I would be willing to spend, I don't know, $8.000-12.000 for a 350V/2000Amp controller and I would probably purchase some more in the next few years. I agree that 99% of population doesn't need 2000 Amps. There are some Zilla 2K controllers in cars that run on 144V and LA batteries. Trust me, a 700kW controller wouldn't be just for show&shine in my car (or dragster) 

I think that you are doing a great job so far and I like you business motto: "Always give a little more than you promise" 



Tesseract said:


> _Drew/gdirwin: How about adding traction control - and here's an insanely complicated way to do it!_
> 
> Guys... the ability to adjust throttle ramp rate, in conjunction with the (hopefully soon to be working) RPM limiting function, will make a relatively good traction control system as is. Perhaps a network of wheel and tranny sensors will allow _finer_ control of traction, but will it be worth the extra headache to design it and the the cost to implement it? I'm guessing not. To paraphrase Einstein, make things as simple as possible, and no more. Sorry, but this is not even remotely in consideration.


I really don't see a need for a traction control for DIY-ers. 



Tesseract said:


> _fugdabug: please make a controller as good as the Zilla but as cheap as the Kelly's I've bought 3 of so far..._
> 
> Ahem... Next question!


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

CroDriver said:


> I'm just saying that I would be willing to spend, I don't know, $8.000-12.000 for a 350V/2000Amp controller and I would probably purchase some more in the next few years.


Tesseract, forget the average EV converter, there's your target market!  It's the Tesla business model, sell the high end, high profit margin product first.


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Okay... I'm going to summarize the requests and questions, implicit and explicit, from the last few pages and lets see how crazy it sounds when they are all together:
> 
> _Bowser330/CroDriver/toddshotrodds/etc.: we want 2000A and 350V or more!_ _Oh, and SepEx (todd)_
> 
> This is definitely in the pipeline, but first we need to sell a few controllers that _sane_ people will find plenty powerful for their daily driver. I really don't want to disparage other controllers any more than I already have (ok, I do, but I've learned my lesson... sorta), but I think that once people try a controller that delivers an _honest_ continuous current rating (not, say, 1000A for the first acceleration then 300A thereafter), the desire for 2000A will confine itself to Siamese motored drag racers (where it belongs).


I think you have a great point about the honest and continuous current delivery....I think having 100kw available from 0-4000rpm (in a 200V/1000A setup) would still make for a potentially _insane_ setup..

Do you have any estimated timeline for this pipeline performance product?
Any preliminary target specs? 300V+? 1000A+?

And as Cro mentioned, no rush, just excited for you, your partner in crime, and the rest of the community..


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

CroDriver said:


> I don't want you to feel that I'm pushing you to make such a controller.


I doubt you could push us even remotely as much as we're pushing ourselves. 



CroDriver said:


> There are some Zilla 2K controllers in cars that run on 144V and LA batteries.


Now, that's just sad. Poor Zilla. It's like having a Ferrari for commuting in city traffic speeds. 



CroDriver said:


> I really don't see a need for a traction control for DIY-ers.


Personally I'm not even sure a 2kA-setup would need it since slew rate control seems to work very well to keep the grip at 1kA. Before I even start consider such a thing I want to see logs of the problem so I can guesstimate how the problem has to be solved. Who knows? It might even be pretty simple (one could hope at least...?).



Bowser330 said:


> Do you have any estimated timeline for this pipeline performance product?


We're gonna get this bugger out on the market first, then we'll see. There's some other things we want to develope as well and we haven't really decided the order. Since some things will be trickier in software than hardware and others the opposite it's not a completely linear problem as well.


----------



## Drew (Jul 26, 2009)

Tesseract said:


> Okay... I'm going to summarize the requests and questions, implicit and explicit, from the last few pages and lets see how crazy it sounds when they are all together:
> 
> _albano: my brother's Lexus does 1000hp - how does your controller compare?_
> 
> ...


Actually I wasn't really asking could you please add traction control, I was suggesting it as a neater way to deal with a problem somebody else had already asked about traction and also the fact that the motors are sensitive to overspeed, which you guys had mentioned before, I wasn't meaning to be critical at all.

In addition to that, I'm pretty sure I came up with just about the simplest implementation of the system, requiring no external inputs and only rewriting the throttle signal control.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Drew said:


> ...
> In addition to that, I'm pretty sure I came up with just about the simplest implementation of the system, requiring no external inputs and only rewriting the throttle signal control.


Oh, I didn't take either your or gdirwin's suggestions as criticism, rather, more like what Qer calls "feeping creaturism", and one which would be difficult to implement despite its apparent simplicity.

The problem here is that your idea, essentially, is to reduce motor current in proportion to the derivative of motor RPM. Simple and elegant traction control, I agree, but microcontrollers suck at doing calculus.


----------



## fugdabug (Jul 14, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Oh, I didn't take either your or gdirwin's suggestions as criticism, rather, more like what Qer calls "feeping creaturism", and one which would be difficult to implement despite its apparent simplicity.
> 
> The problem here is that your idea, essentially, is to reduce motor current in proportion to the derivative of motor RPM. Simple and elegant traction control, I agree, but microcontrollers suck at doing calculus.


HEY! don't knock computers... I SUCK AT CALCULUS!!!...


----------



## Drew (Jul 26, 2009)

Tesseract said:


> Oh, I didn't take either your or gdirwin's suggestions as criticism, rather, more like what Qer calls "feeping creaturism", and one which would be difficult to implement despite its apparent simplicity.
> 
> The problem here is that your idea, essentially, is to reduce motor current in proportion to the derivative of motor RPM. Simple and elegant traction control, I agree, but microcontrollers suck at doing calculus.


You just subtract your last polled RPM from your current RPM and store a history, because its linear and within a discrete time period its not even proper calculus, just subtraction.


----------



## toddshotrods (Feb 10, 2009)

Tesseract said:


> ..._Bowser330/CroDriver/toddshotrodds/etc.: we want 2000A and 350V or more!_ _Oh, and SepEx (todd)_...


Well, like others have said, and I think I told you in the PM discussion we had, I'm in no hurry. I have an entire show quality, race-capable, vehicle to build; from mostly raw materials. I have my hands full just getting to the point of needing a moderate performance controller.



Tesseract said:


> ...the desire for 2000A will confine itself to Siamese motored drag racers (where it belongs)...


And single 11 and 13-inch motors that find their way into the hands and vehicles of the less sane.


----------



## OHM (Jun 30, 2008)

Can I ask if a very high voltage budget DC motor setup is possible for DIY but using halve the amps. eg. 800v with 180 amps or 1200v and 120 amps then it would be equivalent to a 144v 1000amp controller but more efficiency?


----------



## albano (Jan 12, 2009)

Tesseract said:


> Okay... I'm going to summarize the requests and questions, implicit and explicit, from the last few pages and lets see how crazy it sounds when they are all together:
> 
> _albano: my brother's Lexus does 1000hp - how does your controller compare?_
> 
> ...


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Oops... 

I stole some boards from my test controller to quickly assemble one for a BMW 2002 that Rebirth Auto is converting, but when I replaced them I inserted a ribbon cable wrong... hilarity ensued.

Seb also took the WarP 9 from the dyno (for the VW) so I bolted a Kostov 9" to the dyno and started testing it at 192V and 600A. There was no sparking at the commutator so I started increasing the motor current in 100A increments, but because the Kostov's are wound for higher voltage I didn't push the higher currents for as long (2-3 seconds, with several minutes in between to let heat from the motor windings even out).

Since the Kostov seemed to handle 1000A for 2-3 seconds okay I decided to kick up the voltage (in 24V increments). I reduced the maximum current to 700A and at 216V everything still looked good. At 800A, though, the controller kept faulting with a generic "Software Error".

Needless to say, this was quite worrisome for both Qer and me. Dropping the voltage back to 192V seemed to eliminate the problem so it appeared this was a noise issue. Lots of long faces last Friday as we contemplated the possibility of having to limit the first controllers to 192V nominal. On Saturday I went back to the shop to try to figure out what might be causing the controller to fault and after tripping it several times I did one more run at 192V and 900A when the controller blew up.

Now things are looking REALLY bad... I haven't blown up a controller since fixing the gate drive circuit months ago! I went home on Saturday in a really foul mood to replace the IGBTs and was perplexed that only the master IGBT was blown, which strongly implied that the IGBTs weren't sharing current evenly.

And they sure weren't... the incorrectly installed ribbon cable essentially took the slave IGBT out of the circuit so when I calibrated the current sensor (which I did notice was off much more than normal), a single module ended up carrying the full 800A to 1000A.

After installing the ribbon cable correctly the controller behaved perfectly fine again. No more faults at 216V and over 1200A (incorrect calibration let me go that high)... whew.

So we ordered a couple of refurbished transwarp 9's from NetGain to install on the dyno permanently because it's pretty obvious at this point a single motor just ain't enough to really test the controller.


----------



## Amberwolf (May 29, 2009)

So all the production units will have keyways, right? ;P
________
LIVE SEX


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Amberwolf said:


> So all the production units will have keyways, right? ;P



Unfortunately, no... the ribbon cable is actually FFC which can't be keyed (these are the sorts of details one tends to gloss over so people's eyes don't glaze over) and there just isn't enough room to use a traditional ribbon cable with header style plugs and jacks.

In retrospect, there were a couple of things I should have paid more attention to, not the least of which was how the controller behaved when I calibrated the current sensor, but also that the temp seemed to be rising a lot faster than before (2-3 seconds at 1000A seemed to bring on thermal limiting whereas it normally takes 20-30 seconds).


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

As long as you hire someone other than yourself to do final QC of production units, we should be OK


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

dimitri said:


> As long as you hire someone other than yourself to do final QC of production units, we should be OK


Not to worry! I'll just add some Tesseract proof code...


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

OHM said:


> Can I ask if a very high voltage budget DC motor setup is possible for DIY but using halve the amps. eg. 800v with 180 amps or 1200v and 120 amps then it would be equivalent to a 144v 1000amp controller but more efficiency?


Not sure what you are asking here so I'll preemptively answer the few that aren't total landmines:

_Can you make a controller with the same power but with higher voltage at a lower amperage_? 

Sure. 

_Can you make it for the same price as the lower voltage/higher amperage one?_ 

Probably a little less.

_Would the higher voltage controller have higher efficiency?_ 

Depends - some losses go up with the square of voltage just like some other losses go up with the square of current. Might not be any difference in efficiency whatsoever.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Peak pack voltage (with zero throttle): 309 Volt
Peak motor current: 903 Ampere
Pack voltage at peak current: 255 Volt (talk about sag...)
Peak power: 112 kW










Poor Kostov.


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Oops...
> 
> I stole some boards from my test controller to quickly assemble one for a BMW 2002 that Rebirth Auto is converting, but when I replaced them I inserted a ribbon cable wrong... hilarity ensued.
> 
> ...


So just to double check, you are testing limits of this controller, even though you will be selling it with a 200V and 1000A specs...

It would be interesting to know how high the voltage could go (300V??), even if you had to ramp the current down to 500A...


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Qer said:


> Peak pack voltage (with zero throttle): 309 Volt
> Peak motor current: 903 Ampere
> Pack voltage at peak current: 255 Volt (talk about sag...)
> Peak power: 112 kW
> ...


The chart looks amazing, thank you!

What type of batteries are you using again??

Can I just clarify my understanding of PWM based on your graph...

So... the Pack voltage sagged to 255V, so when the PWM is at ~50% the voltage used to calculate kw of power would be 127.5V.

Also since the PWM is ~50%, the motor current of 903A is actually drawing only about 451.5A from the pack.

is this correct? Thanks again.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Bowser330 said:


> What type of batteries are you using again??


Lead-acid that seem to have passed their prime time...



Bowser330 said:


> So... the Pack voltage sagged to 255V, so when the PWM is at ~50% the voltage used to calculate kw of power would be 127.5V.
> 
> Also since the PWM is ~50%, the motor current of 903A is actually drawing only about 451.5A from the pack.


Ayep. You've done your home work. 

You can calculate the power with pack voltage times pack current or motor voltage times motor current, the result should be approximately the same. What will "ruin" it a bit is the loss in the controller, but in most practical cases you can ignore that.


----------



## Amberwolf (May 29, 2009)

Tesseract said:


> Unfortunately, no... the ribbon cable is actually FFC which can't be keyed (these are the sorts of details one tends to gloss over so people's eyes don't glaze over) and there just isn't enough room to use a traditional ribbon cable with header style plugs and jacks.


You can actually key an FFC cable and connector, but it would require either a custom order of the connectors with the keyblock installed, or manual modification of each one (which again invites human error). 

There was a laptop (possibly Toshiba, but I can't recall at the moment, it's been since the early pentium days I think) that had an inter-board cable for power to/from the battery connector that used FFC, and the connector they used had the keyway glued in by what looked like cyanoacrylate. It was simply a very tiny sliver of thin plastic, almost like a toothpick splinter, placed a few "pins" down from one end, between conductors. Just large enough so that if the cable was inserted wrong, the little clasp would not close and latch, because it was just far enough from the end that in combination with the thickness of the FFC cable itself it provided enough height to prevent latching at that end, making it obvious it was in wrong.

Another way I've seen it done in some networking rack equipment was similar, but with the non-latching style of connector, where it just is plugged vertically down into it and held by friction. That one was flat out impossible to even insert wrong, because it physically blocked the cable from insertion if the keyway was not lined up with the cable right. 

In both cases, a simple snip of some of the plastic between conductors created the keyway itself. They probably had them custom-made that way, die-cut at the factory, but it could also be done by hand (again inviting error, though). 




dimitri said:


> As long as you hire someone other than yourself to do final QC of production units, we should be OK


Someone like Plasmaboy?  You know, "we blow stuff up so you don't have to". 
________
Ecig Forum


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Updates?


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Bowser330 said:


> Updates?


That's, in fact, the thing I'm working on right now. The ability to do, that is.


----------



## albano (Jan 12, 2009)

Qer said:


> That's, in fact, the thing I'm working on right now. The ability to do, that is.



Will we have the controller ready this year for my drag bike? 

Don`t forget the "launch" controls


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Bowser330 said:


> So just to double check, you are testing limits of this controller, even though you will be selling it with a 200V and 1000A specs...


Not so much... at this point we are more testing the limits of our motors. As a result, we ordered two transwarp 9's that will be siamesed to the dyno (at which point the 250hp dyno will be our limiting factor).




Bowser330 said:


> It would be interesting to know how high the voltage could go (300V??), even if you had to ramp the current down to 500A...


The thermal design spec is that it in "performance mode" the Soliton1 can deliver the full 1000A at 192 nominal volts at all duty cycles for as long as the heat sink temp is at 50C or less (indefinitely, with liquid cooling).

Above that voltage, and/or if the "quiet" (higher frequency switching) mode is enabled then the current will have to be ramped down to maintain the same safety margin for the IGBTs and FWDs. The absolute highest voltage that can be applied to the controller is 344V (higher than that and it will refuse to close the main contactors). The maximum nominal operating voltage is 312V, or 26 x 12V (at full charge that's ~332V)

And for those special people willing to sign away their warranty rights in the quest for performance (e.g. - drag racers), we will unlock the upper motor current limit to allow up to 1400A for 15 seconds. At this point, though, you have fewer than 200A of margin from the current level that can trigger a DESAT error (which I have proven from testing that if you trigger a DESAT enough times the IGBTs do blow).

So, how 'bout them apples? Ahem.


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Not so much... at this point we are more testing the limits of our motors. As a result, we ordered two transwarp 9's that will be siamesed to the dyno (at which point the 250hp dyno will be our limiting factor).
> 
> 
> 
> ...


The beauty is in the details! Thank you for providing them.


----------



## major (Apr 4, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> ......(which I have proven from testing that if you trigger a DESAT enough times the IGBTs do blow).


Hey Tesseract,

How many is enough? 5? 10? 50?

Not like I would ever do that  And who keeps count?

Regards,

major


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

major said:


> ...
> How many is enough? 5? 10? 50?
> 
> Not like I would ever do that  And who keeps count?


Uh-huh... sure you wouldn't... 

More than 5, less than 10?

I should clarify, though, that the failure didn't REALLY come about from DESAT, rather, it was from running at a current level just under where desaturation occurred for several _seconds_ (specifically, 900A through a single module). 

DESAT didn't trigger until I hit _1000A_ through a single module, and while I wasn't thrilled to blow up yet another one (even though damage was very limited by the main contactors opening so quickly) I am glad I got to test DESAT without having to - literally - drop a crowbar across the motor terminals. Really, I've had enough high adrenaline moments with this controller project already...


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> The thermal design spec is that it in "performance mode" the Soliton1 can deliver the full 1000A at 192 nominal volts at all duty cycles for as long as the heat sink temp is at 50C or less (indefinitely, with liquid cooling).
> .


wow..so...192kw...261hp...wow...

Can a single DC motor even handle that much? 11 or 13?


----------



## Grant_NZ (May 28, 2008)

Apologies in advance if this has been asked already; I understand this is air cooled but would it be possible to machine the casing to take water cooling or fixings on top to take a water cooled heat sink? Thanks


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Bowser330 said:


> wow..so...192kw...261hp...wow...
> 
> Can a single DC motor even handle that much? 11 or 13?


Nope and that's been the biggest obstacle to testing the Soliton 1 across it's entire operating range.

NetGain had two refurbished TransWarP 9's available for a price we couldn't refuse so we bought 'em both. Now we just need to figure out how to couple their splined shafts to each other and the dyno.


----------



## CroDriver (Jan 8, 2009)

Tesseract... I think that you have a new project... Develop a whole motor-controller system 

Liquid cooled, 50 kg, 200 kW, 90%+ efficiency motor please


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Grant_NZ said:


> Apologies in advance if this has been asked already; I understand this is air cooled but would it be possible to machine the casing to take water cooling or fixings on top to take a water cooled heat sink? Thanks


Oh boy, I can just imagine the fun and excitement that would result from letting people machine or drill cooling loops into the heatsink themselves...

So, yes, it will come equipped for liquid cooling (drilled and tapped for 1/8-NPT male fittings). 

The reason I have only conducted air-cooled tests at the 1000A level is because I got stuck with a defective enclosure (all of the good enclosures were used for beta testers) which couldn't be drilled out for liquid cooling. Previously, though, I ran a single module controller at 500A continuously with liquid cooling. It took just under 2 gpm to maintain the heatsink at 48C with an inlet water temperature of 28C.


----------



## Dalardan (Jul 4, 2008)

These are double ended shafts. Maybe you could put the two motors inline, the commutator side of each facing the other, so the coupler would be quite simple to make. (The commutator shaft has a keyway on NetGain's drawings).

The real game would be, like you said, the driving side. Maybe it would be easier to take a driveshaft end, cut it to keep the splines and weld an adapter to your dyno setting? I've already done it to pass from a taper lock to a keyway to hook a snowmobile engine to our dyno. It should be straight forward, a driveshaft end isn't hard to find and is nor expensive.

Dalardan


----------



## toddshotrods (Feb 10, 2009)

Tesseract said:


> Nope and that's been the biggest obstacle to testing the Soliton 1 across it's entire operating range.
> 
> NetGain had two refurbished TransWarP 9's available for a price we couldn't refuse so we bought 'em both. Now we just need to figure out how to couple their splined shafts to each other and the dyno.


Why not have a motor built, instead of using off the shelf pieces? You're going to have enough in busted factory motors to have had Jim build you a full-race motor.

You need a serious race-oriented motor partner in the testing phases who is willing to find the limits of his/her product as well. I know you're really aiming the Soliton1 at more normal consumers, but the "win on Sunday, sell on Monday" philosophy will work for it as well; even if the "win" is a dyno pull.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

toddshotrods said:


> Why not have a motor built, instead of using off the shelf pieces?


Probably cost. The two Warps should hold up pretty well, he hasn't really even broken the single warp9, yet.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Dalardan - the mechanical stuff is not really my area of expertise... I was more or less assured that coupling the two motors together won't be trivial, but it won't be a monumental problem either and that's good enough for me. If worst comes to worst we can make a custom splined coupler with our EDM machine. 

toddshotrods - why does everyone here seem to think we have an unlimited budget??? 

However, I don't disagree it probably would have been smarter to have Jim Husted build us a custom race motor from the get-go, but, well... let's just say there was a lack of faith by some of the team members in how much power the controller would really be able to dish out when all was said and done. Can't say I blame them, though, after some of the spectacular disasters during testing of the single module prototypes at just 400A and 150V (traced to a subtle, yet fatal, deficiency in gate drive at the extremes of the duty cycle range).

Anyway, the Siamese transwarp 9's ought to be manly enough to take a good beating (but will the battery pack??? sigh... or as Qer likes to write, Gnf.)


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> ... he hasn't really even broken the single warp9, yet.


True... but that's only because I haven't allowed more than 110V to be applied to the motor at 1000A and limited the testing times at such to 15 seconds max.


----------



## toddshotrods (Feb 10, 2009)

Tesseract said:


> ...toddshotrods - why does everyone here seem to think we have an unlimited budget??? ...


I hear ya, I thought I had one but can't seem to find it right now - slippery little %@[email protected]&#$ ... 



Tesseract said:


> ...However, I don't disagree it probably would have been smarter to have Jim Husted build us a custom race motor from the get-go, but, well... let's just say there was a lack of faith by some of the team members in how much power the controller would really be able to dish out...


That makes sense. One of the most difficult challenges in any from-scratch project is anticipating future needs. No matter how much you think you have covered in the plans, there is always something that demands more.

I just noticed that the two bottlenecks in really discovering the controller's ultimate potential seem to be the motor and dyno. Ideally they should be comfortably beyond the abilities of the test subject, but that's in an ideal world. Looks to me like you guys need to get one of these beasts on the ultimate dyno - the dragstrip! Sneak into Smokescreen's pit and swap it in place of the Zilla when they're not looking!  Don't forget to void the warranty and eliminate that pesky current limit first.


----------



## toddshotrods (Feb 10, 2009)

JRP3 said:


> ...he hasn't really even broken the single warp9, yet.


That Warp9 owes its life to Tesseract's patience and restraint. It would still be smoking if I was in charge of testing!


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Nope and that's been the biggest obstacle to testing the Soliton 1 across it's entire operating range.
> 
> NetGain had two refurbished TransWarP 9's available for a price we couldn't refuse so we bought 'em both. Now we just need to figure out how to couple their splined shafts to each other and the dyno.


Really?? I was under the impression the 11" and 13" motors would be more able to tolerate the power....damn...

My conversion plans don't have room for a dual/siamese setup...


----------



## toddshotrods (Feb 10, 2009)

Bowser330 said:


> Really?? I was under the impression the 11" and 13" motors would be more able to tolerate the power....damn...
> 
> My conversion plans don't have room for a dual/siamese setup...


I don't think any currently available off-the-shelf DC motor is going to be up to the task of high voltage/high current abuse. Look into having an 11 or 13-inch motor prepped for what you plan to do with it. That's my plan - to have my single 11-inch prepped for racing. Smokescreen is proof of concept - it will work.


----------



## 280z1975 (Oct 2, 2008)

toddshotrods said:


> I don't think any currently available off-the-shelf DC motor is going to be up to the task of high voltage/high current abuse. Look into having an 11 or 13-inch motor prepped for what you plan to do with it. That's my plan - to have my single 11-inch prepped for racing. Smokescreen is proof of concept - it will work.


About a year and half ago when I started looking into conversion and reading up it seemed that the two factors holding back a standard size EV was the controllers (failures, black smoke, underpowered, etc) and batteries (led-acid's). But now with the Soliton1 and Lithium batteries the motor seems the limiting factor. I heard rumblings of new Netgian motors, but there wasn't anything on the website when I checked today.


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

toddshotrods said:


> I don't think any currently available off-the-shelf DC motor is going to be up to the task of high voltage/high current abuse. Look into having an 11 or 13-inch motor prepped for what you plan to do with it. That's my plan - to have my single 11-inch prepped for racing. Smokescreen is proof of concept - it will work.


The Smokescreen 13" is my inspiration....


----------



## BradBowler (Mar 28, 2008)

FYI: Bill just posted on the Nedra list that he is putting the Warp 13 out of Smoke Screen up for sale.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Yup, though it's probably over the budget, and not technically a Warp
http://www.diyelectriccar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=35661


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> Yup, though it's probably over the budget, and not technically a Warp
> http://www.diyelectriccar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=35661


My plans do include a high performance motor, I am just not ready yet...


----------



## EVComponents (Apr 20, 2009)

Bowser330 said:


> My plans do include a high performance motor, I am just not ready yet...


I contacted Netgain to inquire about the new high voltage motors mentioned by Jack Rickard recently.

WarP 11 "HV". I went ahead and placed an order so we can play with it.


----------



## FarFromStock (Mar 16, 2009)

Tesseract said:


> Oops...
> 
> I stole some boards from my test controller to quickly assemble one for a BMW 2002 that Rebirth Auto is converting, but when I replaced them I inserted a ribbon cable wrong... hilarity ensued.
> 
> ...


OK, now you have me worried since it's my BMW being converted. So when you say that "hilarity ensued," what exactly does that mean? No wonder I haven't heard from Sebastien lately.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

FarFromStock said:


> OK, now you have me worried since it's my BMW being converted. So when you say that "hilarity ensued," what exactly does that mean? No wonder I haven't heard from Sebastien lately.


Don't worry - that was my test controller connected to a Kostov 9 on our dyno - your BMW wasn't involved at all. In fact, your BMW was taken on a quick test drive on Monday...


----------



## FarFromStock (Mar 16, 2009)

Tesseract said:


> Don't worry - that was my test controller connected to a Kostov 9 on our dyno - your BMW wasn't involved at all. In fact, your BMW was taken on a quick test drive on Monday...


Whew...I knew that! 

You guys are doing some great work on the controller, in both functionality and appearance. When Sebastien first showed me the prototype, he was like a proud father showing off his newborn child.


----------



## albano (Jan 12, 2009)

Zilla is back and *Soliton1 * on it way. 

I got to wait and see the result of Soliton1 for drag racing. Hope Soliton1 will be great for drag and for the price too.


----------



## EVComponents (Apr 20, 2009)

albano said:


> Zilla is back and *Soliton1 *on it way.


It has been famine for so long on the controllers. Now it is feast time.


----------



## rebirthauto (Nov 3, 2008)

EVComponents said:


> It has been famine for so long on the controllers. Now it is feast time.



You're absolutely right, it's feast time indeed!
The Soliton1 controller is available for immediate delivery.

Sebastien
www.rebirthauto.com


----------



## piotrsko (Dec 9, 2007)

Judging by what I see, the BMF solitron is for sale with delivery forthcomming?

nice touch, no @#$%^&* arbitration clause.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

piotrsko said:


> Judging by what I see, the BMF solitron is for sale with delivery forthcomming?


Yep, the encrypting bootloader was the last major obstacle to releasing the controller for sale. This makes it possible to provide code updates to customers later on without them having to send the controller back to us - you merely download new code from our website then upload it to the controller via its web interface. For Windows users the code update takes a few minutes (only 40 seconds if you run Linux, apparently) then you cycle the power on the controller and voilla, the new code is installed. 

Depending on initial volume, orders placed in the next week will likely take a few days to ship because we are still gearing up for production. Also, we are still working on some features that sort of got left till the end (tachometer/overspeed protection.idle) or we haven't yet been able to test because we don't have the hardware (series/parallel shifting). 

Of course, we would have preferred to hold off releasing the controller for sale until these last few features were implemented, but EV Components pulled a fast one on us: James sent me a PM asking when we were going to start selling the Soliton 1 and if we had a dealer program, we responded and the next day they announced they were taking over production of the Zillas and were taking deposits. 

Needless to say, we feel like we just got played, and hard, but that's okay because being underhanded only gets you so far in the marketplace - sooner or later, the superior product at a competitive price wins out. See you on the racetrack, Zilla. 



piotrsko said:


> nice touch, no @#$%^&* arbitration clause.


Huh-what?! Hey, I'm just the guy that designed the hardware, not a lawyer. I am pretty sure we are requiring people to hold us harmless if they zorch their motor, etc.


----------



## EVComponents (Apr 20, 2009)

Tesseract said:


> Of course, we would have preferred to hold off releasing the controller for sale until these last few features were implemented, but EV Components pulled a fast one on us: James sent me a PM asking when we were going to start selling the Soliton 1 and if we had a dealer program, we responded and the next day they announced they were taking over production of the Zillas and were taking deposits.


Tesseract, we do want to be dealers of your controller. My email to you was completely legitimate with my intentions. We are already carrying the Synkromotive controller, which is not produced by us. If Netgain comes out with a controller, we intend to carry that one also.
They all serve a purpose in this market. 

Our plans with the Zilla have been in the works for some time. This does not happen overnight.

If you will look at our website, we already carry and have sold many Synkromotive controllers. I suspect we are their largest distributor by far.

http://www.evcomponents.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=SYNKRO


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Version 1.0 of the software is officially released!

Dimitri, I believe it's time for you to check when you can get your controller properly upgraded.


----------



## Overlander23 (Jun 15, 2009)

Does the Solitron support regen with, say, a Kostov? Or switching control for reverse? If not, are these the kinds of things that could be upgraded in the future via firmware?

I know people think regen is overrated, but in the Rockies... you tend to find quite a few elevation changes. It would be nice to be able to go up a climb, and not have to worry so much about burning brakes coming down...


----------



## Guest (Aug 28, 2009)

From what I know they do not support regen. That is a whole other ball game. The Kostov should run fine with out it with one of these controllers. 

Pete


----------



## John (Sep 11, 2007)

From what I understand regen isn't really feasible with a series wound motor. It is however with a sep-ex motor. Sep-ex hasn't been popular though mainly due to a lack of a reasonably high powered controllers. I think you can only get them up to about 96v. I also suspect they need to be matched or programmed to each different motor they are mated up to. This would make them less of a plug and play solution than series motor and controller. There also seems to be a lack of large sepex motors although this would be less of a problem as I believe large series motors could be rewound or rewired to make them suitable without too much difficulty.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Actually I think the interpolled Kostov motor does not use advanced brushes so potentially it could do regen.


----------



## Guest (Aug 28, 2009)

JRP3 said:


> Actually I think the interpolled Kostov motor does not use advanced brushes so potentially it could do regen.



The Kostov does have an adjustable brush ring. With interpoles it will do regen if kept close to neutral. With out regen you could advance and really run some high voltage but I'd stick with like 156 or so at the top end for voltage. 

The largest problem with regen is the power put through the controller during regen. The other issues are arcing and buring things up and then the age old problem of underpowered controllers and few of those as well. It would be favorable if builders would build controllers. I agree that SepEx would be better but those should still have interpoles. 

Pete


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Overlander23 said:


> Does the Solitron support regen with, say, a Kostov? Or switching control for reverse? If not, are these the kinds of things that could be upgraded in the future via firmware?
> 
> I know people think regen is overrated, but in the Rockies... you tend to find quite a few elevation changes. It would be nice to be able to go up a climb, and not have to worry so much about burning brakes coming down...


The Soliton 1 uses half-bridge IGBT modules, and there is a gate driver for each leg, so the _hardware_ supports regen, but the _software_ doesn't yet.

First, though, I need to modify the dyno setup to be able to test regen, and Qer needs to write the code to actually implement it.

Next, we have to figure out a way to strongly discourage (read: legally protect ourselves) from people attempting to use regen on inappropriate motors (i.e. - any motors with advanced brush timing and/or without interpoles). 

This will likely be done by, A) having the customer sign a waiver; B) charging extra for the regen version of the code (all other code upgrades will be free - this one won't); C) doing a test of motor inductance at each startup (if I can figure out a way to do that safely... sigh) and comparing it to a stored value to make sure the motor hasn't changed.

Regen with the series motor not only is technically difficult (you have to switch from buck to boost operation before the magnetic field in the motor collapses), it also legally difficult. The worst situation for us would be if someone sold their regen-enabled Soliton 1 to a person with a WarP motor and the buyer just went and hooked the controller up without changing any of the programmable settings (not far-fetched - one of our beta "testers" has yet to connect a laptop to their controller...  ).


----------



## Amberwolf (May 29, 2009)

SOLITON1 REGEN ENABLE MENU:
"Destroy your inappropriate-for-regen motor now? Y/N"
"Are you sure? Y/N"
"Are you REALLY sure? Y/N"
"Click here to read the terms and conditions for destruction."
"Click here, here, here and here to agree to the terms and conditions for destruction."
"If you are still sure you want to destroy your advanced-timing and/or non-interpole motor, please take the mallet from the top of the compartment that has just opened, and beat yourself about the head and shoulders first, then click here."
"Now, doesn't that feel better than destroying your motor? Y/N"
"Click here to begin destruction."
"Countdown in 10...9...8..."


________
properties Pattaya


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Amberwolf said:


> SOLITON1 REGEN ENABLE MENU:


Or possibly:

LEGAL STUFF AND OTHER THINGIES ABOUT REGEN!
There will be a short quiz afterwards.

(long, boring text with small trivia put into it on odd places)

Quiz
1. Are you sure you want to risk using regen?
2. What is Tesseracts favourite band?
3. You do understand that the manufacturer can't be kept liable if you screw up?
4. What breed is Qers dogs?
5. Is your motor advanced?
...


----------



## Jozzer (Mar 29, 2009)

OOohhh, regen! Good work guys, with regen it will be perfect for my motorcycles I assume there will be no problem with it powering PM motors (Like the Agnimotor)?

I had a 'orrible feeling you wouldnt bother with regen..



Steve


www.jozzbikes.co.uk


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Jozzer said:


> I assume there will be no problem with it powering PM motors (Like the Agnimotor)?


Can't see how that would be a problem, really. Will the motor survive 1000 Amps?

Regen on PM-motors should even be easier, but I wonder if that won't demands a different algorithm. Damn...


----------



## Jozzer (Mar 29, 2009)

They will survive 1200 "Kelly" amps...so no! But thats what the current limiting software is for

I could always put another 2 motors on, and do series and parallel!

Many options with such a high voltage available, I could do 3 in series at 300v and 600A, or series parallel switching on a pair with current limited in series mode (via a throttle mod)..

I've had trouble getting more than 40KW accross a pair of motors with the Kelly, I think they will stand short bursts of 80KW+..

Now you've promised Qer you cant chicken out


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Jozzer said:


> Now you've promised Qer you cant chicken out


Hm. As far as I know I've only promised that PM-motors will work, nothing more.


----------



## toddshotrods (Feb 10, 2009)

John said:


> From what I understand regen isn't really feasible with a series wound motor. It is however with a sep-ex motor. Sep-ex hasn't been popular though mainly due to a lack of a reasonably high powered controllers. I think you can only get them up to about 96v. I also suspect they need to be matched or programmed to each different motor they are mated up to. This would make them less of a plug and play solution than series motor and controller. There also seems to be a lack of large sepex motors although this would be less of a problem as I believe large series motors could be rewound or rewired to make them suitable without too much difficulty.


Yes, you have to have the field map for the motor, and the controller has to be setup for the specific type of motor it is being mated to.

Large SepEx motors are out there - at least a couple of us (me for one) here on the forum have 11" GE SepEx motors. The problem is definitely finding a controller that will unleash the motor's potential. Jim Husted confirmed that the motor has the potential - if one can find a controller. I have discussed a version of the Solitron for SepEx motors with Tesseract. He is interested, but obviously has a lot of his plate right now, so it's more a matter of _when_ it could be done than if.

I'm tempted to pick up an 11-inch series motor, or have this one rewound to series configuration, to take advantage of what's currently available (controllers). I wanted regen, but have to decide whether it's worth the wait now.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Spectacular news, we just toasted the first motor and of course we have some fancy graphs from the event! 



















The motor still runs but according to Tesseract it smells bad and sounds worse. The controller is, however, just fine and still fit for another fight with the dyno.


----------



## TheSGC (Nov 15, 2007)

Wow. Now that would have been sweet to see on video.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

So what broke, brushes, comm segment?


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> So what broke, brushes, comm segment?


It zorched. Plasmaball galore, hence the short.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Was it being filmed? Tesseract really should have a camera hooked up that automatically turns on and starts filming when the motor starts  You could have a controllers gone wild video series


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Yeah, yeah... the whole camera thing again, I know... 

What actually happened when the Kostov 9 went up - literally - in flames was the very definition of irony. I had just finished calibrating the motor current sensor on one of two controllers being shipped out today when Seb wandered in saying he wanted to see "a thousand amps", and then when I only did 900A very briefly he couldn't resist jibing me for being a, um, wimp. I told him I wasn't worried about the controller, rather, that I didn't think the Kostov could take that much current for more than a few seconds. Seb took the "throttle" from me (a pot with a knob) and cranked it up to 1000A (really only 900A because I don't bother calibrating the controller for my test "throttle") and then he let it sit there while I measured the RPM. After about 5 seconds I decided I really didn't want to be anywhere close to the motor.... after another 5 seconds later, that decision proved prescient because a muffled boom followed by lots of flame erupted from the front of the motor (the fan blows air in that direction). 

Interesting observations: when the motor zorches the current briefly spikes up to 1053A at 481.5 seconds but Seb doesn't cut the throttle until over a half second later. Motor current is not what I would call controlled at this point, but because of this Qer thinks it might be possible to detect zorching... too bad it costs so much money to test this feature out!

Anyone know any good motor rebuilders in the Tampa/St. Pete area? Not sure a Kostov 9 is worth shipping to a real pro to have it repaired, but its not out of the question...


----------



## TheSGC (Nov 15, 2007)

Maybe you could give some After pictures of the damage?

The only motor rebuilder I know of is Jim Husted, but you should check for forklift motor rebuilders nearby, maybe even put a wanted add in Craigslist and see if anyone will bite for a little motor repair. 

When I was looking for EV parts on Craigslist, I put a few adds up and many Forklift repair companies contacted me, so they do browes looking for possible business.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Motor current is not what I would call controlled at this point, but because of this Qer thinks it might be possible to detect zorching...


Well, the poor microcontroller obviously tries very hard, but as in the case of the log when the IGBT blew it's also obvious that the feedback algorithm isn't good enough to handle catastrophic situations. 

And about zorching, I'm definitely pondering ways to detect when in data goes berserk (not just motor current and/or in case of zorching) but it should be pointed out that at the time the controller can detect the current rush the motor might already have taken damage, possibly severe. No matter what, I still think it'd be interesting to try.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

I'm working on the manual for the Soliton1 today and just took a bunch of screen captures of the web interface. Thought it might be of interest to post one of the screens here.


----------



## CroDriver (Jan 8, 2009)

Stupid question: What's zorching? 



Tesseract said:


> I'm working on the manual for the Soliton1 today and just took a bunch of screen captures of the web interface. Thought it might be of interest to post one of the screens here.


Looks good and easy to use...


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

CroDriver said:


> Stupid question: What's zorching?
> 
> Looks good and easy to use...


Zorching is the "technical term" for when sparks wrap around the entire commutator, from brush to brush, resulting in a big plasma fireball. Usually fatal for the motor.

It's caused by running the motor at too high a speed and too high a current at the same time (in other words, cramming too much power into it).

I got as high as 1200A and 145V on the Kostov 9, but just for a split second. That's a pretty brutal overloading of that motor....


----------



## major (Apr 4, 2008)

CroDriver said:


> Stupid question: What's zorching?


Hi Cro,

See this post of mine http://www.diyelectriccar.com/forums/showpost.php?p=123723&postcount=4 

Hope that helps.

And Tesser,

I thought you were publically going to blame me. Anyway, was it like I described? I've never been up close and personal for a zorch.

Now we're getting somewhere 

major


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

major said:


> ...
> And Tesser,
> 
> I thought you were publically going to blame me. Anyway, was it like I described? I've never been up close and personal for a zorch.
> ...


Well, I was going to blame you if the WarP 9 zorched while _I_ was running the dyno; but this was the Kostov 9 and once Seb took control of the throttle pot any failures, no matter how remotely associated, automatically became his fault. Like there was bird crap on the windshield of my truck _after_ the zorching - that was his fault, of course.

Anyway, the zorching looked much as you described it but with the added bonus of a big gout of flame shooting out of the front of the motor (followed by lots of smoke, of course). The coverband over the brushes was in place so I couldn't watch them directly, but the light show was intense enough to make it past the fan - and that is what caused me to say to myself, maybe I don't want to be next to this thing any longer...

It's quite possible that it was a field winding that opened up, not zorching, that did the motor in... it still runs, though... just not well. I'd guess an open field would mean no more running at all, unless there are multiple windings in parallel, that is... Hard to say until we get the thing torn apart. FWIW, the motor was running at 2800 rpm, which is quite a bit higher than the max RPM I've taken the WarP 9 up to while at 1000A (2000 rpm, IIRC).


----------



## Dennis (Feb 25, 2008)

> Anyone know any good motor rebuilders in the Tampa/St. Pete area? Not sure a Kostov 9 is worth shipping to a real pro to have it repaired, but its not out of the question...



Well here in SC we have a motor repair place called Darby Electric that is ISO9001 certified and is an EASA member. They are the real deal and should be able to fix your motor like it was when you first got it. 

http://www.darbyelectric.com/


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

In case you want to see an even better example of what pre-zorch sparking on the commutator looks like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0A-h1asLnM&feature=channel

This was just a brief test of a controller after calibration but check out the light show. 192V (nominal) pack that started off at 233V and sagged to around 158V during operation. The duty cycle hits 98-99% in this video. The run doesn't last an impressive length of time but I think that's mostly because we are now EXTREMELY reluctant to zorch another motor...


----------



## bblocher (Jul 30, 2008)

Just saw the main website and that you guys are taking orders. What a great looking controller and feature set. Seems to be worth the price with all those options. Just need to save up a bit.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Very cool


----------



## Grant_NZ (May 28, 2008)

oooooh thats pretty  

can they be painted in a custom color?


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

I wanted to go with the Henry Ford philosophy on color choice, "you can have it in any color you want, so long as it's black", but apparently we will sell it in several different colors.

The color is from anodizing, not painting, though. So far we have clear, which will likely be the default, purple, gold, red and (untested), blue.

Any color besides the default one will add some lead time and cost more, of course. I think as of now you can expect at least 1 week and $100, but that may (will) change depending on how much of a pain in the ass it is to handle different colors. After all, we can't change the color AFTER the controller has been built, so offering different colors makes it difficult to pre-assemble controllers... Not so good from a production standpoint.


----------



## Jokerzwild (Jun 11, 2009)

Can you post the website you are selling them on please


----------



## Guest (Sep 1, 2009)

http://rebirthauto.com
http://shop.solardirect.com/product_info.php?cPath=396&products_id=950


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

bblocher said:


> Just saw the main website and that you guys are taking orders. What a great looking controller and feature set. Seems to be worth the price with all those options. Just need to save up a bit.


With the Soliton-1 your S2000 will be a rocket especially with you having an LSD stock...Make sure and update us when you get it!


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Jokerzwild said:


> Can you post the website you are selling them on please


The Soliton-1 is being advertised in the forum (right hand column, look for the greenish box that says "EV Soliton1 Controller Available Now"


----------



## Grant_NZ (May 28, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> I wanted to go with the Henry Ford philosophy on color choice, "you can have it in any color you want, so long as it's black"


Thanks Tesseract, didnt want to be a PITA but will you be posting pictures of the finished colours?


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Grant_NZ said:


> Thanks Tesseract, didnt want to be a PITA but will you be posting pictures of the finished colours?


I only have a pic that shows three of the colors so far: gold, red and purple. We haven't had any enclosures done in blue and black but we plan on getting some this week. It costs us extra to change colors so we may be shooting ourselves in the foot trying to offer different ones.


----------



## ClintK (Apr 27, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> I only have a pic that shows three of the colors so far: gold, red and purple. We haven't had any enclosures done in blue and black but we plan on getting some this week. It costs us extra to change colors so we may be shooting ourselves in the foot trying to offer different ones.


Do the Apple iPhone thing and offer 2 colors. Seems to work for them just fine.


----------



## John (Sep 11, 2007)

From a thermodynamics point of view wouldn't silver or black have the highest emissivity? Silver would also be the most reflective and so should be the coldest colour. A tiny but never the less advantage in function.


----------



## grayballs (Aug 27, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> I only have a pic that shows three of the colors so far: gold, red and purple. We haven't had any enclosures done in blue and black but we plan on getting some this week. It costs us extra to change colors so we may be shooting ourselves in the foot trying to offer different ones.


 
Henry Ford,, I think "any color, as long as itis black '

Great work,,, start to finish


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

John said:


> From a thermodynamics point of view wouldn't silver or black have the highest emissivity? Silver would also be the most reflective and so should be the coldest colour. A tiny but never the less advantage in function.


This is a commonly mentioned argument but there are a couple reasons why, practically speaking, it doesn't matter what color the aluminum is anodized.

First is that just being anodized - which is a coating of Al2O3 - improves emissivity quite a bit over bare aluminum. Second is that radiation plays an almost vanishingly small part in removing heat from the enclosure/heatsink because forced convection and/or conduction (liquid cooling) are a far more efficient means of transporting heat.

Don't take my word for it, check out this chart (scroll about 1/3rd down) that lists the emissivity of different anodizing colors (and especially note that plain aluminum has an emissivity of 0.04):

http://snap.fnal.gov/crshield/crs-mech/emissivity-eoi.html


----------



## AmpEater (Mar 10, 2008)

I think the colors are a great idea. People like "bling", plain and simple. For the time being anyone who wants to create an EV with a show quality appearance under the hood has had 0 options for a visually appealing controller. Looks like that has changed. I really like the separate motor/battery connections, too. Very clean.


----------



## Grant_NZ (May 28, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> I only have a pic that shows three of the colors so far: gold, red and purple. We haven't had any enclosures done in blue and black but we plan on getting some this week. It costs us extra to change colors so we may be shooting ourselves in the foot trying to offer different ones.


very nice, I take it the gold is 18 carat?


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Grant_NZ said:


> very nice, I take it the gold is 18 carat?


For a *ahem* SLIGHT fee that is also possible. How rich are you?


----------



## Amberwolf (May 29, 2009)

I know gold conducts electricity decently, but how well does it conduct heat?
________
BUY ROOR BONGS


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Amberwolf said:


> I know gold conducts electricity decently, but how well does it conduct heat?


http://www.bimmerworld.com/html/gold-foil-protective-film.htm

gold foil insulating/protective film....


----------



## albano (Jan 12, 2009)

For Show and shine yes the color is important, but for drag not really. 

I don`t care about the color but do really care about the power. As i was nearly to put down the deposit for Zilla 2k ehv. I put myself on hold cause i want to see the different between Zilla And Soliton 1 on the track. Also have to wait for the series/parallel on Soliton 1. I just hope your controller will be great for drag.

Albano


----------



## piotrsko (Dec 9, 2007)

Ah yes, but can you now get / do a motor that can handle the controller?


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

piotrsko said:


> Ah yes, but can you now get / do a motor that can handle the controller?


Netgain is coming out with an 11" motor that can be advanced to handle 336V...and 9000rpm....and up to 1000A...

I think it will be a great match for the Soliton-1's continuous 1000A...


----------



## bblocher (Jul 30, 2008)

Bowser330 said:


> Netgain is coming out with an 11" motor that can be advanced to handle 336V...and 9000rpm....and up to 1000A...
> 
> I think it will be a great match for the Soliton-1's continuous 1000A...


That would be nice! Is this info officially posted somewhere?


----------



## 280z1975 (Oct 2, 2008)

bblocher said:


> That would be nice! Is this info officially posted somewhere?


I would also like the information as I haven't tracked anything official down (only the re-posted info from others on the "Future Netgain offerings" thread). The info posted there was from guys who e-mailed Netgain, but I do know EV Components has ordered a few to play with (I am SOOO jealous).

-Gregg-


----------



## EVComponents (Apr 20, 2009)

280z1975 said:


> I would also like the information as I haven't tracked anything official down (only the re-posted info from others on the "Future Netgain offerings" thread). The info posted there was from guys who e-mailed Netgain, but I do know EV Components has ordered a few to play with (I am SOOO jealous).
> 
> -Gregg-


The initial run of the Warp 11 HV was for 25 motors that will be finished in October. I bought 5 of them. None are for sale yet. These are for us to review. We are looking for a good match with our controller. If they perform as advertised, I am sure we will carry them for sale.


----------



## 280z1975 (Oct 2, 2008)

EVComponents said:


> The initial run of the Warp 11 HV was for 25 motors that will be finished in October. I bought 5 of them. None are for sale yet. These are for us to review. We are looking for a good match with our controller. If they perform as advertised, I am sure we will carry them for sale.


Do you think with their speced horsepower (4x the normal HV is in the 140 to 150 range I would think) and a good controller they would be able to be run direct drive? (if you like you can reply in the other thread, but post a note here so people can track over to that one) ... hijacking the thread over ...

-Gregg-


----------



## Dennis (Feb 25, 2008)

Tesseract, does your controller have transient voltage suppressors on the KEY input? In case of a non isolated DC-DC converter failure were to occur feeding full pack voltage which could fry the control board section. If the Soliton 1 does have TVS devices then what size fuse should be used for the KEY input such that the TVS devices will cause the fuse to blow thereby protecting the controller. If no such devices are installed then will TVS device 5KP15 mounted to the key switch and ground be sufficient?

Also one last question, other than the main filtering ultra expensive film capacitor, does your controller also use EMI suppression capacitors to help reduce motor EMI noise?


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Dennis said:


> Tesseract, does your controller have transient voltage suppressors on the KEY input? In case of a *non isolated* DC-DC converter failure were to occur feeding full pack voltage which could fry the control board section.


Bad idea, using a non-isolated dc-dc converter to keep the 12V battery charged. Not only does this significantly increase the risk of shock and fire (from a battery cable rubbing against the frame, for example) it also directly couples the noise in the high power loop into the 12V system. Oh, and you render totally moot all of the trouble I went to keeping the two sides isolated, even pack voltage is monitored through an optoisolator (some controllers (hint: starts with a K) cheat on this detail).

That said, every terminal on the Soliton1 is protected against spikes and noise with series resistors and shunt zener or TVS clamps and capacitors. All power inputs/outputs (including the fan terminals hidden under the nameplate) are further protected with PTC ("resettable") fuses. None have the energy handling capacity to withstand more than a very brief (a few ms at most) application of traction pack voltage - they are for spike suppression, not sustained overvoltage protection (designing for the latter condition is not practical).

Of course, if you use a non-isolated dc-dc converter anyway and it were to short out, EVERYTHING in your car that ran on 12V would be destroyed and it would almost certainly catch on fire within seconds. The Soliton1 surviving or dying along with the rest of the vehicle is pretty much a moot point if the vehicle itself is on fire, I'd think. But hey - on the plus side, it's not potted internally so repair is possible! 




Dennis said:


> If the Soliton 1 does have TVS devices then what size fuse should be used for the KEY input such that the TVS devices will cause the fuse to blow thereby protecting the controller. If no such devices are installed then will TVS device 5KP15 mounted to the key switch and ground be sufficient?


The Soliton1 draws 1A - excluding any 12V loads being driven by the auxiliary outputs - in normal operation so you could insert a 2A AGC fuse inline with the IGN terminal (ie - it's +12V power input). You can certainly add external spike protection if you want to but without an alternator present, and as long as you don't switch inductive loads unclamped, there's little need for additional transient protection.




Dennis said:


> Also one last question, other than the main filtering ultra expensive film capacitor, does your controller also use EMI suppression capacitors to help reduce motor EMI noise?


Nope. First off, those capacitors are RARELY used on series motors larger than what you'd find in a hairdryer; secondly, they need to be located at the motor terminals to be effective - otherwise the inductance of the motor cables renders them useless. The laminated bus structure does reduce noise quite a bit on the battery pack side of the controller, though. In fact, in every vehicle we've tested the stereo still works, at least the FM radio and CD/MP3 player functions (not AM, though... AM, by definition, has NO noise immunity at all.)

I'd be so bold to wager not a single other motor controller our there emits less noise than the Soliton1 (being totally enclosed in aluminum, along with the laminated bus plates, helps tremendously, is why).

Of course, I'm not exactly impartial


----------



## Dennis (Feb 25, 2008)

I am asking these questions for others to get an idea of what to do or not to do until a comprehensive manual is written for the controller.

So if someone wants to listen to the AM radio, what steps must be taken. Should they install ferrite clamp beads on the motor cables or power cables or will this solution simply not be effective? If ferrite beads are a good choice then what what # (71, 73, 51, etc..) ferrite beads should be used?


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Dennis said:


> So if someone wants to listen to the AM radio, what steps must be taken.


Keep the ICE.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Qer said:


> Keep the ICE.


I see another anti-EV lobby from AM station owners


----------



## 280z1975 (Oct 2, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> I see another anti-EV lobby from AM station owners


Wait you mean to tell me I can't listen to crazy-Right wing AM radio when I driving in the middle of nowhere Texas! That was worth hours of entertainment to make the hours go by ... I guess I might have to rethink an EV  ...

-Gregg-


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

280z1975 said:


> Wait you mean to tell me I can't listen to crazy-Right wing AM radio when I driving in the middle of nowhere Texas! That was worth hours of entertainment to make the hours go by ... I guess I might have to rethink an EV  ...
> 
> -Gregg-


If you need to drive for more than one hour, then you definitely need to rethink your EV and AM radio is the least of your trouble


----------



## Amberwolf (May 29, 2009)

Although, if you *really* needed a solution to that particular AM radio problem, there is one that ol' Rube would be proud of:

Assuming you have an in-car computer that has a soundcard, you can wire it to the sound system. 

Then if it also has a network card, you can get a satellite internet service, and setup a dish with tracking electronics/motors on the roof of the car. 

Setup your favorite media player on the computer to catch the internet streamed radio program from your favorite station.

Now you can listen to all the AM radio you want, if they have a stream. 

A slightly less kludgy system requiring more advance planning on each trip is to download the podcasts of just the specific radio programs themselves into an MP3 player, and hook *that* up to the soundsystem of the car. 

Hey, no one said it has to be easy, but it can be done!
________
How To Roll A Joint


----------



## ClintK (Apr 27, 2008)

dimitri said:


> If you need to drive for more than one hour, then you definitely need to rethink your EV and AM radio is the least of your trouble


The range of most EVs is about the same as a commercial break of Rush or Glenn Beck. Shouldn't be an issue.


----------



## Tom W (Jun 9, 2008)

I try to listen to AM on my 30 minute drive home after golf - usually about Rush time. It is pretty good for the first five minutes then the squeeling takes over. It also seems to be better when it is raining but I am not sure about this since it has only rained once this year. I sure wish someone could come up with some kind of filter to help. I can catch about 75% by finding a quiet spot in the accelerator and coasting whenever I can. To bad Rush is not on FM here.


----------



## Amberwolf (May 29, 2009)

I'm pretty sure that any filter that effectively took out the RF noise would also take out the actual radio signal you're trying to get. 
________
Nexium Lawyer


----------



## 280z1975 (Oct 2, 2008)

ClintK said:


> The range of most EVs is about the same as a commercial break of Rush or Glenn Beck. Shouldn't be an issue.


That settles it, no Rush no EV! 

-Gregg-


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Ok well, lets get back to the main purpose of this thread which is to talk about the new controller from EVnetics...which i guess is not really a prototype anymore! 

I know I speak for many members when I say: *We want more videos like the Rebirth Auto Beetle video!!*


----------



## kittydog42 (Sep 18, 2007)

While I will probably never be in the market for a $3000+, true 1000A controller, I am excited about this controller because I am hoping that there is a $2000, true 500A version in the future designed in a similar vein. I like many issues of the design and the quality control exhibited so far from customer reviews.


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

kittydog42 said:


> While I will probably never be in the market for a $3000+, true 1000A controller, I am excited about this controller because I am hoping that there is a $2000, true 500A version in the future designed in a similar vein. I like many issues of the design and the quality control exhibited so far from customer reviews.


Members have stated that they were able to pull 450A from the 144V500A Curtis all the way up to 4000rpm...1500$...probably one of the most used controllers out there...


----------



## EVComponents (Apr 20, 2009)

kittydog42 said:


> While I will probably never be in the market for a $3000+, true 1000A controller, I am excited about this controller because I am hoping that there is a $2000, true 500A version in the future designed in a similar vein. I like many issues of the design and the quality control exhibited so far from customer reviews.


I think you are correct. There is a market for a new 500A version of these controllers. Something more reliable and safe that doesn't blow up like some of the cheap controllers. Synkromotive had a good one at 700A (400A continuous) and $1,600. The problem is the long lead time on delivery. 3 months or so if you get in line now.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Dennis said:


> If the Soliton1 does not meet a profit margin you guys wish to obtain in some time period then do you perhaps have a economy Soliton1 like a 144 volt *Soliton1 Jr*. in the works which is rated 550 amps max like the top selling Curtis to bring about a quick boost in profits so your VVFD design can be started?


Doesn't work that way. From the beginning we had planned to do a half size Soliton as well but realised pretty soon that cutting the performance in half only made 10-15 percent on the price so we abandoned that idea. It wouldn't be cheap enough to compete with Logisystems, Curtis etc anyway. The Curtis 1231C is about half the price for Soliton1 and Logisystems 550A controller is even cheaper, no way we can compete with that without designing a new controller from ground up.

You know the classical "Price, performance, reliability. Pick two"? We didn't pick price.


----------



## mattW (Sep 14, 2007)

*Moderator's Note:*

I've done a little thread pruning to keep the focus of this thread on the Solition1. The discussion of the possibility of an AC controller for industrial motors has been moved to a new thread and a few off topic posts have been deleted.
Cheers
MattW


----------



## few2many (Jun 23, 2009)

My purpose for posting on this thread was not to hijack it for ac, or to get back into the classic ac vs dc debate. 
I was posting on a prototype controller thread because they built a very nice dc controller from the ground up. Then, followed through from design to production with great results. I wanted to know the feasibility for them to do this for ac controllers. Ac industrial motors can be lumped together pretty easily, 230v, 460v(I know there's small variations). Instead of the wide range of voltages and types for dc motors.


----------



## ClintK (Apr 27, 2008)

few2many said:


> My purpose for posting on this thread was not to hijack it for ac, or to get back into the classic ac vs dc debate.
> I was posting on a prototype controller thread because they built a very nice dc controller from the ground up. Then, followed through from design to production with great results. I wanted to know the feasibility for them to do this for ac controllers. Ac industrial motors can be lumped together pretty easily, 230v, 460v(I know there's small variations). Instead of the wide range of voltages and types for dc motors.


I don't think you're being accused of hijacking the thread... it's just a normal evolution of a thread to be split to make it easier to view the DC topic versus the AC topic. Take it as a compliment that your post expanded to the point of needing its own thread.


----------



## dory (Sep 20, 2009)

So, did you work out the specs and price?


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Hey dory... welcome to the forum.

http://www.evnetics.com/soliton1specifications.html

The official specs are on that page. They will get tweaked and refined as time goes on and we do more testing (like when we convert the dyno to twin Warp9's).

Retail price will depend on who you buy it from, but for now it is approx. ~$2800.

One thing of note is that we are having some "issues" with the local anodizing shop while we transition over to cast enclosures (that are then CNC machined to shape), so we are trying another place out. Unfortunately, the new place doesn't offer red (nor purple, but that's no great loss to me). They do have a kick-ass darker blue and olive green available, though.


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

We need more videos of soliton-1 driven EVs. 

The beetle video wet the appetite for more!


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

DIY anodizing? http://www.focuser.com/anodize.html


----------



## FarFromStock (Mar 16, 2009)

Bowser330 said:


> We need more videos of soliton-1 driven EVs.
> 
> The beetle video wet the appetite for more!


I asked Sebastien to make some videos of my BMW while it's being fine tuned in their shop. Hopefully, they'll make it to youtube soon.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> DIY anodizing? http://www.focuser.com/anodize.html


Yeah, that's a great link. Caswells has a lot of good info as well. 

Right now, though, the casting people are blaming the anodizing people and vice versa. The casting allow is 356 aluminum which is *supposed* to be the easiest one to anodize, but we keep ending up with white specks everywhere which indicates either alloying elements coming out of solution when the casting cools or not "de-smutting" the casting properly before anodizing... I suspect both people are at fault, but getting the raw shape of the enclosure cast will save hours of machining time as well as materials costs (and give us a bit more credibility as a "green products" business... hard to make that claim when you take a 100# block of aluminum and chuck out 80# of it!).

Anyway, each batch of castings are better and the new anodizing shop OUGHT to have two enclosures (blue) done today... Not holding my breath or anything but it ought to prove interesting if nothing else.


----------



## Newbnut (Jun 8, 2009)

Tesseract said:


> First, though, I need to modify the dyno setup to be able to test regen, and Qer needs to write the code to actually implement it.


How's the regen testing coming along guys?


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

We're too busy making controllers to futz around with the dyno to test regen (and series/parallel switching - though we have had a lot of inquiries about that one, so it is close to top of the list).

That said, we do have all of the stuff necessary to convert the dyno from a single motor to dual, and because of the demand for s/p switching it looks like the dyno will get modified next week.

Of course, the software has to be written to control regen, and that has some tricky timing (e.g. - switching from buck to boost mode before the field collapses) and feedback loop compensation requirements. Regen with the series motor is inherently unstable, though, and it may be beyond the ability of a lowly microcontroller to do the feedback loop computations fast enough to prevent destruction of the motor and/or controller (well, the desat detection circuit ought to be fast enough to protect the controller, but testing desat is a bit too thrilling for me to want to do it on a regular basis).


----------



## Drew (Jul 26, 2009)

Tesseract, one thing I've been wondering is why not make the fins on the top of the controller straight? It would cost negligable surface area, help flow and would allow you to use an extrusion for the top cover.


----------



## kek_63 (Apr 20, 2008)

Drew said:


> Tesseract, one thing I've been wondering is why not make the fins on the top of the controller straight? It would cost negligable surface area, help flow and would allow you to use an extrusion for the top cover.


But it would lose the cool, high end custom-built look it has now. 

Tesseract, I machine an aluminum casting for a customer. I'm very impressed with the quality and consistency of the castings. If you want me to, I'll get their suppliers name for you. 


PM me if you need info.

Keith


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Sorry, Drew - I made the same argument but was overruled by my partner in this little venture. Oddly enough, it's my fault they are wavy, anyway, because I remarked one day that laminar air flow across the fins was detrimental to cooling efficiency... I expected them to be roughened up a little bit by, say, bead blasting, not made wavy, though.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Tell him there is new research that says straight fins allow faster air velocity that overcomes the detrimental effects of laminar flow  Not to mention it will help the bottom line.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

I think the bottom line is beyond all hope at this point. If you think the controller is an exercise in excess, wait til you see the throttle pot assembly...


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Not another overpriced throttle pot, we already have the PB6


----------



## azdeltawye (Dec 30, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> ...
> Regen with the series motor is inherently unstable, though, and it may be beyond the ability of a lowly microcontroller to do the feedback loop computations fast enough to prevent destruction of the motor and/or controller (well, the desat detection circuit ought to be fast enough to protect the controller, but testing desat is a bit too thrilling for me to want to do it on a regular basis).[/


Tesseract - Couldn’t you address the stability issues by running the boost converter in constant current mode? Then regardless of how much current the motor wants to push into the battery pack during regen it would be limited by the controller. Set the initial limit to say 30A or so to simulate engine braking and then when you wanted additional braking effect have the brake pot box input increase the current limit to some user defined maximum value. Possibly add a slew rate adjustment as well to prevent wheel lock-up and jerkyness.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> Not another overpriced throttle pot, we already have the PB6


Yeah, which people complain about all the time as being a cheap piece of junk.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

azdeltawye said:


> Tesseract - Couldn’t you address the stability issues by running the boost converter in constant current mode?




That is precisely what I intend to do - which does help - but the motor itself has a right half plane zero in its transfer function when acting as a generator. Stabilizing both converter and motor is possible IF a very low crossover frequency is acceptable (sub 100Hz for sure) which APPEARS to be workable, but you never know for sure until you test it


----------



## jwilczek (Feb 24, 2009)

Tesseract said:


> Right now, though, the casting people are blaming the anodizing people and vice versa. The casting allow is 356 aluminum which is *supposed* to be the easiest one to anodize, but we keep ending up with white specks everywhere which indicates either alloying elements coming out of solution when the casting cools or not "de-smutting" the casting properly before anodizing... I suspect both people are at fault, but getting the raw shape of the enclosure cast will save hours of machining time as well as materials costs (and give us a bit more credibility as a "green products" business... hard to make that claim when you take a 100# block of aluminum and chuck out 80# of it!).
> 
> Anyway, each batch of castings are better and the new anodizing shop OUGHT to have two enclosures (blue) done today... Not holding my breath or anything but it ought to prove interesting if nothing else.


Tesseract, if you are still looking for someone to try doing the anodizing send me a PM, I work with a company that does it the colors are Black, Red, Green, Gold, Purple, and Blue.

Joe


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Yeah, which people complain about all the time as being a cheap piece of junk.


Indeed, a $5 ? pot, plus a spring, housing, lever, and switch that sells for over $100. Stick in a better pot and sell it for a reasonable $50. Yours looks like a quality item, which I would expect, I just wonder if it's overkill? Unless it's priced more competitively than I'm imagining, this statement scares me:


> I think the bottom line is beyond all hope at this point. If you think the controller is an exercise in excess, wait til you see the throttle pot assembly...


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> Indeed, a $5 ? pot, plus a spring, housing, lever, and switch that sells for over $100. Stick in a better pot and sell it for a reasonable $50. Yours looks like a quality item, which I would expect, I just wonder if it's overkill? Unless it's priced more competitively than I'm imagining, this statement scares me:


We are not in the business of making _cheaper_ stuff, we are in the business of making _better_ stuff. Sometimes - usually when your competition is, um, shall we say "uninspired" - you can succeed in the market by offering something better, if more expensive than the competition. 

That's a totally sealed automotive throttle position sensor (that uses a Delphi automotive grade sealed plug) with positive stops on each end and an indexable arm (you can unscrew the bolt in the center to rotate the arm into a new position), an additional return spring to provide the redundancy required for drive-by-wire throttles, and ball bearings to protect against aluminum on aluminum contact.

That said, we priced the Soliton1 very competitively given it's performance - if you don't agree, by all means state your case - and the same will apply to the throttle assembly. Granted, we won't make nearly as much money off of it, but, then again, it requires very little human labor to assemble it as well (about an hour's worth of CNC time, which given the capital cost of the machine really should be billed out at $40-$80).

ANYWAY, we know you all are a bunch of cheap mo-fos that would rather drive around with a bunch of recycled _starting_ batteries in your EVs, but we forge ahead with our outlandish plans regardless


----------



## evlowrider (Jul 23, 2009)

Tesseract said:


> I think the bottom line is beyond all hope at this point. If you think the controller is an exercise in excess, wait til you see the throttle pot assembly...


Hmmm... I've seen close up detailed pics of the new throttle pot assembly... I better place my order before you come to your senses a redesign it to be less excessive


----------



## AmpEater (Mar 10, 2008)

A serious, depedable pot assembly that is weather sealed and built to be easily interfaced to standard throttle assemblies is something we've seriously been lacking. I don't see any any problem with a ~$100 pot assembly, unless of course its clearly $10 worth of parts thrown together without seals in place or longevity in mind.

Considering how much is riding on the throttle's reliable operation I'd gladly spend a few extra bucks for peace of mind. I like the double-gasketed weather tight connectors.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> That said, we priced the Soliton1 very competitively given it's performance - if you don't agree, by all means state your case


No argument from me on the Soliton, I'd say it's easily worth the price.


> - and the same will apply to the throttle assembly.


I'll withhold final judgment until the price is finalized. My perspective as a consumer is that the Curtis suffers from a ridiculous price and a poor quality pot, not that it needs a ground up redesign. Your indexable billet throttle arm is cool, but is it functionally any better than a stamped steel one? I'll pay for quality where there is a need to but sometimes good enough is really good enough.


> ANYWAY, we know you all are a bunch of cheap mo-fos that would rather drive around with a bunch of recycled _starting_ batteries in your EVs, but we forge ahead with our outlandish plans regardless


At least you know your customers


----------



## Russco (Dec 23, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Yeah, which people complain about all the time as being a cheap piece of junk.



Hmmm, JJ Tesseract, that pot of yours looks just like the TPS on the throttle body on my Buick! Pretty smart on your part. 

Russ Kaufmann

RUSSCO Engineering


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Hey Russ - yep, it's an automotive style/grade TPS. I first tried buying ones for popular vehicles (e.g. F150) from auto parts stores but the matching connectors were more expensive than the damn sensors! 

Anyway, the TPS we finally went with is from Mouser and costs $40 in single quantities but drops down to $32 if we if we buy 10 at a time. The Delphi connector with wire seals and pins come out to around $6, IIRC (required buying a $111 crimping tool, though!). Paying up for the TPS we don't mind, but the cost of the bearings (2 x $8) and the "helper" spring (also $8) really "torques our nuts"  

So our parts costs not including the minor hardware bits (probably another $1-2?) is ~$62. Machining time for the body and lever is around 1 hour. Final assembly including the matching cable takes, say, 15 minutes. We ought to charge somewhere around $180-190 given the parts costs/machining time, but because the most common selling price of the Curtis PB-6 is $140-160 we are setting the price at, I believe, $150. We are unapologetic capitalists out to squeeze every last red cent from you people, though, so if demand is strong that price WILL go up (after all, we can't machine Soliton1 enclosures when we are making throttle assemblies and guess which product we'd rather the CNC make?)

I'm revealing these tidbits because A) it preemptively addresses those people who would whine about the price of water in the Sahara and B) if someone wants to duplicate our effort and make throttle assemblies for a living we say, More Power To Ya! (we'd rather make controllers and stuff)

JRP3 - no, a CNC machined piece of billet aluminum for the lever arm is not necessary, but you know the old saying, "when you're a hammer everything looks like a nail"? When you have a CNC you tend to mill everything, rather than use some other fabrication technique. Actually, getting stuff stamped isn't really practical until you get up into the 1,000s. If demand looks like it will be that strong, though, we will likely have the body and arm cast just like the Soliton1 with just a finish pass for machining. That would allow us to reduce the price somewhat, I'm guessing.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> We ought to charge somewhere around $180-190 given the parts costs/machining time, but because the most common selling price of the Curtis PB-6 is $140-160 we are setting the price at, I believe, $150.


Where are you shopping? PB6 with microswitch $80, PB5 $70. 
http://store.kta-ev.com/throttlecontrols.aspx
So you're about twice the price and considering the higher quality and the "bling bling", that isn't too bad. That does put you in the same range as the Curtis foot pedal, which I don't know the quality of but always liked the idea of not having a cable to deal with. One less mechanical failure point. I suppose you could make a pedal option for yours, fire up that CNC again.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> Where are you shopping? PB6 with microswitch $80, PB5 $70.
> http://store.kta-ev.com/throttlecontrols.aspx...


Yep, I know about that one, but I consider it very suspect since no one else sells the PB6 for that low of a price but plenty of places do sell a Chinese knockoff for anywhere from $40 to $65. Here's one example:

http://www.fourthgen.net/potentiometercart.shtml

You might infer, then, that I couldn't care less that there are cheaper potbox throttles out there. After all, there are cheaper controllers than the Soliton1 in existence but that doesn't seem to be hindering sales of it


----------



## kittydog42 (Sep 18, 2007)

You shouldn't discount your pot box to match the price of the Curtis. Charge what you need to charge and the people who want quality will buy it from you. Mandate that your resellers sell your products for a certain price as well, to keep the value high, as long as the demand is there. That will also increase the value of vehicles with your parts, because the EVNetics name will mean something. This is how I think about Metric Mind, from whom I buy many parts.


----------



## CroDriver (Jan 8, 2009)

I think that everyone appreciates their effort making everything public, helping people with non product related problems and their honesty.

That's the way of success


----------



## neanderthal (Jul 24, 2008)

I would gladly pay for a good potbox. That thing is beautiful, might I add. I paid for my pb-6 which is terrible, then I paid for my special logisystems magic potbox to make the jerkiness problem go away in the logisytems controller, and that pot stinks too! Its terrible. 

I have spent $200 or so in lame pots. I would gladly pay for this one!

I am just saving up for a soliton1 and a beautiful pot now...


----------



## Overlander23 (Jun 15, 2009)

Can the Soliton-1 do the following?

Say I've got 70 120AH LiFePO4 cells (224v)... and I've got a 192v motor. That's all well and good, even the manufacturer says the motor can handle the extra voltage (especially since the volts will sag under load). 

Now let's say I complete this conversion and need more range. Can I add 14 more cells (which will up the pack voltage, but increase overall capacity by about 5Kwh) but limit how much voltage the motor sees which effectively allows for more range with safe running?

Is this a reasonable idea?


----------



## fugdabug (Jul 14, 2008)

I just have to say,
The end product looks absolutely fantastic... 
I knew someone would FINALLY figure out that the cable mounting for the conductor bars needed to be totally re-positioned and it features EVERYTHING a person could ask for in a DC controller... but even on sale today, I can't touch it.
I would support your company with my money... but it has to be cautiously doled out right now. you're a year late... but it is absolutely beeutimus!!! (P.S. Provided I can get caught up this Winter, I may buy one down the road, just make sure I have one that I can pull out for back-up!) It is tighter than most folks want to believe up our way. 
Beautiful craftsmanship!


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Overlander23 said:


> Now let's say I complete this conversion and need more range. Can I add 14 more cells (which will up the pack voltage, but increase overall capacity by about 5Kwh) but limit how much voltage the motor sees which effectively allows for more range with safe running?
> 
> Is this a reasonable idea?


That should work.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Overlander23 said:


> Now let's say I complete this conversion and need more range. Can I add 14 more cells (which will up the pack voltage, but increase overall capacity by about 5Kwh) but limit how much voltage the motor sees which effectively allows for more range with safe running?


Provided you stay at 342 Volt maximum (4,07 Volt/cell, I don't remember how high this number usually go at charge, someone else can probably fill in here...) as final voltage when the batteries are topped off, yes. Otherwise the controller will cancel precharge with an over voltage error and you'll have to wait until the voltage drops down a bit.

However, since your peak power will be limited not only by battery voltage but also battery current you might want to consider, say 55 160 Ah batteries and later add 10 of those instead. Especially since it means you can add an additional 10 batteries on top of those 65 and that way get more range than with your original plan.

55 cells still give you a nominal voltage of 187 Volt which should be perky enough, see this as a reference:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5sf3JbPyCE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8PBEGcHBok

That's with 132 Volt gel acid if I heard correctly. 187 Volt LiFePO4 won't be worse...


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Qer said:


> (4,07 Volt/cell, I don't remember how high this number usually go at charge, someone else can probably fill in here...)


Now I stumbled over info that says that apparently most BMS starts to shunt at 3.7 Volt and if that's the case for you as well then your original idea will of course work.


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

Overlander23 said:


> Can the Soliton-1 do the following?
> 
> Say I've got 70 120AH LiFePO4 cells (224v)... and I've got a 192v motor. That's all well and good, even the manufacturer says the motor can handle the extra voltage (especially since the volts will sag under load).
> 
> ...


So 14 more cells = Total of ~269V (84 * 3.2V)

So if i understand your question correctly, you are asking, what benefit does a higher pack voltage have to your overall range if you limit the voltage to the motor to less than the pack voltage.. in your example...limit motor to 192V even though your pack voltage is higher at 269V...

Setup#1 = 192V pack and 192V to the motor

vs

Setup#2 = 269V pack and 192V to the motor

Will the range be the same for Setup#1 and Setup#2?


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Bowser330 said:


> Will the range be the same for Setup#1 and Setup#2?


Range is measured in kWh. If both packs are made up by the same kind of batteries (for example 120 Ah) then range will increase proportionally with every added battery.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Overlander23 said:


> Can the Soliton-1 do the following?
> 
> Say I've got 70 120AH LiFePO4 cells (224v)... and I've got a 192v motor. That's all well and good, even the manufacturer says the motor can handle the extra voltage (especially since the volts will sag under load).
> 
> ...


First off, yes, the Soliton1 can accommodate both situations and you can limit the maximum voltage seen by the motor to 192V in either case. 

That said, switching losses for _any_ controller (including ac inverters) goes up with voltage, and just like the Zilla, once you cross a certain voltage the output current capability is reduced*. IIRC, the published inflection point for the Zilla HV models is 192V, while for the Soliton1 the _calculated_ threshold is somewhere around 240-260V when using air cooling and 300V when using water cooling). Unfortunately, my test controller doesn't have liquid cooling and we need to finish building the dual-motor dyno setup to evaluate this fully because no single motor can take even 192V and 1000A for long enough for heat buildup in the controller to be a problem! 

I would echo Qer's sentiment, though, that you start with fewer cells with a higher Ah rating rather than more cells with less Ah (e.g. -160Ah or 180Ah). This is so you can push a full 1000A through the motor up to a higher duty cycle without exceeding the 3C limit on the pack for best life. Either way, once you cross 192V (60 cells at a nominal 3.2V) at 160Ah you are talking about a fairly large pack... even if your conversion has the aerodynamics of a brick and you drive it at 70+ mph that size pack should get you 55-65 miles of range. And because you are lower down on the voltage limit of the Soliton1 (or Zillas) you have a lot more room to add more energy capacity to your pack later (the Soliton1's limit is 90 cells at a full charge voltage of 3.8V).


* - A slightly technical aside: this is because it takes a certain amount of time for the heat from the semiconductor dice inside the module to travel through the baseplate and heatsink to the temperature sensor - this thermal lag is why the controller starts limiting output current at 55C, even through the dice are rated by the manufacturer for operation up to 150C and the full current spec is still available with the baseplate temperature at 70C.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

This weekend I've put SOME hours into the tachometer code. Problem before has been that noise has been picked up on the tachometer input (anyone that has tried to listen on radio in an electric vehicle or close to high power electric understands why) and thus the signal has to be filtered. It doesn't work with an ordinary low pass filter since the frequency range for a tachometer input is too wide for that to work, thus a more, err, complicated approach were needed.

It took SOME testing, debugging and a few visits to the concrete wall (wall, meet head, head, meet wall *WHAM*) before, finally, after 30+ hours and three attempts the tachometer code actually seems to work! Finally. Here's a nice little graph:










Kindly ignore that little 200 rpm plateau in the start. The code simply can't go down to 0 rpm (since it measure the time between pulses) so I'll add some code that reports 0 when RPM drops so low the actual value isn't really interesting anymore. The reason the time between pulses is measured instead of counting the pulses over a time period is because before the controller has counted to 8000 the motor might already be all over the pavement. That would be impractical.

Tesseract had some fun testing the code in real life:






I feel sorry for the floor.

This will be in software revision 1.1, among other improvments, and an update will be downloadable from EVnetics homepage as soon as all bugs etc are ironed out.


----------



## Bowser330 (Jun 15, 2008)

This is awesome. I cant wait for more rpm data...

Please correct my summary of the graph's last data points...

PWM is at ~29%
Rpm is at ~2170rpm
Motor Amps ~290A
Motor Volts ~61V
Motor kW ~17.7kW 

290 Motor A (@29% PWM) = 84.1 Battery A
61 Motor V (@29% PWM) = 210 Battery V

Quesitons:

(1) So with 210V Pack you could extract 17.7kw or 24hp with 84A. If 24hp is enough to cruise @ 75mph then wouldn't 160AH batteries would give a 143mile range to 100% DoD ?

(2) Since 29% PWM = 290 Motor A....then does 100% PWM = 1000 Motor A ?

(3) Since 2170rpm = 61V....then does 210V = 7470rpm ?


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Bowser330 said:


> Please correct my summary of the graph's last data points...
> 
> PWM is at ~29%
> Rpm is at ~2170rpm
> ...


More or less correct. The RPM limit was set to 2200 for this test. I wanted to bring the motor RPM right up to the very limit without exceeding it and make sure that noise pulses didn't accidentally trip it. It ran stable for quite awhile.

The problem with testing RPM limiting on the dyno is that it has NO inertia, so when the motor current is cut because the limit is exceeded it behaves very differently than it would in a car. Still, we needed to deal with excluding noise that falls squarely in the frequencies of interest for a tachometer. So far so good.




Bowser330 said:


> Quesitons:
> 
> (1) So with 210V Pack you could extract 17.7kw or 24hp with 84A. If 24hp is enough to cruise @ 75mph then wouldn't 160AH batteries would give a 143mile range to 100% DoD ?


Sounds about right. Of course, that would require 60 of those 160Ah cells. Lots of volume required.




Bowser330 said:


> (2) Since 29% PWM = 290 Motor A....then does 100% PWM = 1000 Motor A ?


IF the RPM is held constant, probably (excluding losses).




Bowser330 said:


> (3) Since 2170rpm = 61V....then does 210V = 7470rpm ?


IF the torque is held constant, probably.

(in both cases I'm assuming you did your math correct - didn't double check it)


----------



## Dalardan (Jul 4, 2008)

To check the inertia problem about your dyno setup, you could ass a removable flywheel on the motor shaft. This way, if wanted, you could add as much inertia as wanted to test different setups.

It needs to be pretty well planned, because if it breaks appart/fly away, it can cause severe injuries... This might be added to you double motor dyno setup? Also, I suggest installing the motor + dyno in a solid steel support. This would be inexpensive (100-200$ max) and would maybe safer for your floor... 

Dalardan


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

It's graph time again! But before you look at the graph, keep in mind that it's generated using my motor emulator and thus is very much just a raw test of the code. This is NOT an actual motor! This is *NOT* an actual motor!

*THIS IS NOT AN ACTUAL MOTOR!*

Got that? Good. Now you can look.










This shows two things, how the controller reacts on over-RPM and also how it handles idle RPM by automatically applying throttle. This is of course useful if you, for example, have an automatic transmission or if the AC and/or servo pump is connected to the main motor.

And just because I'm paranoid it refuses to work if there's no tachometer input. If RPM drops to zero this routine drops throttle immediately, which of course means that when you start the car you'll have to nudge the motor manually into motion so the controller gets tachometer reading to being with.

Seems to work fairly good for a quick little evening hack, now Tesseract et al "only" have to test it in real life too.


----------



## CroDriver (Jan 8, 2009)

Which motor have you used in the test?

Just kidding 

Cool feature


----------



## Wirecutter (Jul 26, 2007)

Qer, Tesseract -
It's been a while since I've visited here, but I'll try to be quick.

Oh. My. Gawd.

You've really done it! Beautiful work, and I think the price is reasonable. I find myself wanting to buy one and then figure out what to put it in.
I know you must get a bazillion feature requests, despite the fact that the Soliton1 is pretty full-featured. But I just can't help it. Is or will there be an option for some kind of non-mechanical throttle? Let me elaborate:

Back in the day, I opened up an old Morley (?) guitar volume pedal. Rather than a pot, it had an arrangement of an LED, a photodetector, and a sliding plastic shutter with a long triangular slot punched out of it. The shutter went between the LED and the detector. The action of the pedal would slide the shutter and vary the degree to which the photodetector could see the light source through the narrow tapered slot.

I mention this because this particular volume pedal was completely free of the noise you get from an aging traditional potentiometer. It also has less wear, at least on the electrical side.

Maybe I need to pick up a soldering iron and get busy with this...

Anyway, congrats on the release of the Soliton1. Are you allowed to say how many are currently in existence? Thank you thank you thank you.

-Mark


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Wirecutter said:


> I know you must get a bazillion feature requests, despite the fact that the Soliton1 is pretty full-featured. But I just can't help it. Is or will there be an option for some kind of non-mechanical throttle?


If you build one that will generate an output voltage that increases with more throttle, sure. It will work. Try to get at least a few volts between min and max and there will be no problem at all (just calibrate it), if you get very little difference between min and max the response might be a bit jerky due to lack of ADC resolution.

It's also possible (or at least will be in version 1.1 of the softare, released Real Soon Now...) to set a preferred mid point value in case the throttle gets too sensitive in the beginning or the end of the scale.



Wirecutter said:


> Are you allowed to say how many are currently in existence?


Uh, I neither know if I'm allowed nor know the exact number... 



Wirecutter said:


> Thank you thank you thank you.


Oh, hush!


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Wirecutter said:


> You've really done it! Beautiful work, and I think the price is reasonable. I find myself wanting to buy one and then figure out what to put it in.


Yep, we did it, and thanks for the kind words! 



Wirecutter said:


> Is or will there be an option for some kind of non-mechanical throttle? ...


The throttle input on the Soliton1 accepts a voltage input (0-5V with 0 = off and 5V = full throttle) so you can use any transducer you want, not just a 5k variable resistor. The EVnetics throttle assembly uses an automotive TPS (basically a robust 5k pot) but you can use a Hall effect pedal, linear variable differential transformer, inductive analog promitixty, capacitive with f-to-v converter, etc... I mean, sky's the limit when your input is a voltage, rather than a current. The downside is that this makes the input more sensitive to noise so it is heavily RC filtered (and zener clamped). Still, a couple hundred Hz of bandwidth is more than enough for the throttle input, I think 




Wirecutter said:


> Anyway, congrats on the release of the Soliton1. Are you allowed to say how many are currently in existence?


Apparently the number we have sold (and shipped) is commercially sensitive information, but I will say that they are selling better than any of us had anticipated. I honestly thought we might sell 100 in a year but at the rate we are going we'll easily blow through that number.


----------



## Wirecutter (Jul 26, 2007)

Tesseract said:


> Yep, we did it, and thanks for the kind words!
> 
> 
> <snip>
> ...


 Sorry, the sensitivity of this info hadn't occurred to me. 

I'm glad to hear that business is at least "exceeding expectations", since so much effort went into getting this far. It's worth noting also that things are going so well despite the rough economy. Great work!


----------



## 280z1975 (Oct 2, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> _snip_ ....., but I will say that they are selling better than any of us had anticipated. I honestly thought we might sell 100 in a year but at the rate we are going we'll easily blow through that number.


I am glad to hear that things are going beyond expectations ... just hope it doesn't mean long waits on the units. I know you designed these to be less labor intensive to build than other controllers. Is the design working out well for production? 

-Gregg-


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

280z1975 said:


> I am glad to hear that things are going beyond expectations ... just hope it doesn't mean long waits on the units.


The worst case lead time is 1 week, and that would be if you caught us without any machined enclosures. As (if?) demand increases the modular internal construction lends itself well to higher volume production.

No way will there ever be a 6 month lead time on the Soliton1


----------



## piotrsko (Dec 9, 2007)

I am guessing that you saw the eye candy by the zilla group. Do you have any equivelant drool worthy pix?


----------



## Woodsmith (Jun 5, 2008)

I have finally read this thread, bar the non controller bits and the stuff that was over my head, and I am impressed not just by the controller but by the amount of work that actually goes into designing and building it. Hats off to you guys.

It is well out of my price range, as are LiFePo4 cells, but I recognise a good thing when I see it. If I could afford it I would be interested in having one for my conversion as I think, like the Zilla, the investment in a strong design is worthwhile.
I would sooner design my conversion around a number of strong units that form the foundation of the build and change other parts later then have a build that is being let down by a part that ultimately forms the basis of the system.

I can always upgrade the motor and and batteries from an old fork truck unit and LAs but I wouldn't want to have to change the whole control set up that will be built into the car.

However, I will have to re-examine my budget.


----------



## Woodsmith (Jun 5, 2008)

Something else that just crossed my mind.
I was just wondering about the imobiliser on my car thinking that it has stopped working, however, it probably only imobilised the starter and ignition for the ICE.

Is it possible, or reasonable to have an immobiliser built into a controller? Maybe something that allows a key switch, remote keyfob blipper or finger print recognition to be connected so that an EV can be properly immobilised by disabling the controller?

Just a thought.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

piotrsko said:


> I am guessing that you saw the eye candy by the zilla group. Do you have any equivelant drool worthy pix?












Cooler than that it seldom gets in Sweden.



Woodsmith said:


> Is it possible, or reasonable to have an immobiliser built into a controller?


The thought has crossed my mind too. However, don't hold your breath, but it's definitely a thought.


----------



## Amberwolf (May 29, 2009)

Woodsmith said:


> Is it possible, or reasonable to have an immobiliser built into a controller? Maybe something that allows a key switch, remote keyfob blipper or finger print recognition to be connected so that an EV can be properly immobilised by disabling the controller?


It's been done on ebikes, including one that works by RFID, and other variations, over on Endless Sphere forums.
________
Live sex webshows


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Right now I'm working on idle rpm and quiet mode, it's the two things left to be done before the next software version can be released. Quiet mode is an interesting thing to get done since keeping the frequency high means the motor will actually be quieter (neither Tesseract and I really believed it'd be possible to hear the difference but some real life tests showed that it actually makes a noticeable difference) but it also means that the losses will increase which, of course, will make the temperature rise faster.

So even though a quiet motor is nice and dandy, an overheating controller isn't. Thus I came up with this plan to get a quieter motor but still be able to use full power from the controller (after bugging Tesseract about details like power losses at different switching frequencies etc):










I'll mess around with the actual values some more, but this is the plan at least. As long as you're just crusing around and the controller is properly cooled you'll benfit from the quietness of 14 kHz, but if you start to push it the frequency drops to avoid rapidly increasing temperature.

Should work, just have to get all the details in place too...


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Great idea, and a cool graph to boot


----------



## CroDriver (Jan 8, 2009)

Is the noise really noticeable if the controller is outside of the passenger cabin? 



Qer said:


> As long as you're just crusing around and the controller is properly cooled you'll benfit from the quietness of 14 kHz, but if you start to push it the frequency drops to avoid rapidly increasing temperature.


This makes sense, good approach.


----------



## dimitri (May 16, 2008)

CroDriver said:


> Is the noise really noticeable if the controller is outside of the passenger cabin?


The sound comes from the motor, not the controller, but usually controller is 2 feet away from the motor anyway, you don't want 1000amps going thru longer than 2 feet cables.

I'd say the sound is barely audible at low speed and not at all at higher speeds when road noise hides it, but it would still be nice to make it completely silent.


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Woodsmith said:


> ...However, I will have to re-examine my budget.


Isn't that how it always is in life? 

But at least you got the weak dollar working for you, though! Probably one reason so many of our initial sales are to international customers (it's a lot easier to take a chance on the "new kid" if it costs you 30-40% less than usual).


----------



## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

CroDriver said:


> Is the noise really noticeable if the controller is outside of the passenger cabin?


It depends strongly on the installation, of course, but I would have to say one of the worst is this respect is Rebirth Auto's VW Bug because there is only a flimsy piece of pressboard between the motor and the passenger cabin. I can hear the motor sing when the controller is in dithering mode (basically at low speeds) in the VW, but not in of the other vehicles I have personally tried out (BMW 2002, '37 Cord replica). Oddly enough, I could just barely hear it in Dimitri's Mazda Protege - also only when it is in dithering mode - which is why we are actually taking his constant complaining seriously - kidding!  

Dimitri, you will be happy to know that the beta version of the 8-14khz spread-spectrum algorithm pretty much eliminates all switching noise, even during dithering (which I thought for sure it wouldn't change one bit) and there was a less than 10% decrease in run time before hitting thermal limiting at a constant amperage, so the penalty paid for switching at the higher frequency was a little better than I expected, too.


----------



## Woodsmith (Jun 5, 2008)

Tesseract said:


> Isn't that how it always is in life?
> 
> But at least you got the weak dollar working for you, though! Probably one reason so many of our initial sales are to international customers (it's a lot easier to take a chance on the "new kid" if it costs you 30-40% less than usual).


Even with the weak dollar it isn't quite weak enough to counter the weak income of a part time teacher!
I'd really have to be looking at the new kid if it was available for only 30% of the cost. I don't think the exchange rate will ever be that good, or bad, depending on your point of view.

However, that doesn't change the assumption that it is worth it, even if I can't yet afford it.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Analysing logs can be quite interesting sometimes, like today. Apparently the controller is a control freak because it seems that it's only reluctantly letting the user being in charge of throttle and doesn't hesitate to fight over who's in charge.










Idle RPM runs quite stable at the beginning of the graph but when throttle is activated something very weird happens as RPM starts to increase. The idle loop fights over the control over PWM and won't give up until it's obvious that it's lost which leads to the current suddenly ramping up like crazy which trigs over-RPM and, a bit slower, Tesseract to cut power. Finally idle RPM gets the control back again and everything's peachy.

Very interesting bug. Good thing we never do our first test runs of new software in a vehicle... 

On the other hand, I'm pretty happy anyway since the important test was idle RPM. Making it stable with all kinds of different static and intermittent loads has proven to be exactly as tricky and problematic as I've feared. Software never bugs as much as when it's exposed to the unforgiving mother nature.


----------



## JRP3 (Mar 7, 2008)

Maybe a dumb question from a non programmer type but wouldn't you set it up to cut out the idle circuit as soon as throttle input is sensed and then reactivated once it's released?


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

JRP3 said:


> Maybe a dumb question from a non programmer type but wouldn't you set it up to cut out the idle circuit as soon as throttle input is sensed and then reactivated once it's released?


I've pondered that, but the problem then is that if throttle is, say, 20 Ampere, which is too low to sustain idle RPM, then the motor would simply stop which would mean that the automatic gear box, power steering or whatever would lose power.

I could of course add a threshold for throttle, but I consider that a horrible cludge I'd prefer to avoid.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

This place needs a party-emoticon!



















Perfect would be to exaggerate. There's a nasty case of damped oscillation, but at least it's damped! However, since my setup does a pretty poor simulation of a motor this has to be tested in the dyno and also a few different cars before I consider it a success (and I bet the algorithm has to be tweaked once or twice too), but at least I've got idle to stop fighting for control now. Just a small bug...


----------



## FarFromStock (Mar 16, 2009)

Qer said:


> This place needs a party-emoticon!
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Don't forget that Rebirth still has my BMW. I offered to Sebastien that you guys can use it as a test mule. Since we will be running air conditioning, stable idle RPM would probably be a good thing.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

FarFromStock said:


> Don't forget that Rebirth still has my BMW. I offered to Sebastien that you guys can use it as a test mule. Since we will be running air conditioning, stable idle RPM would probably be a good thing.


Yep. That's why I haven't gone for your typical every day PID-loop since I'm afraid it'd go bonkers when the AC switches on and off. Instead I've done a somewhat mutilated PI-inspired Qer-speciality with extra onion, how it handles the AC will be a VERY interesting thing to find out...

Tesseracts first comment from the first tests in the dyno (just a minute ago) was "I'd say the response time is way too slow. But it is very stable." which more or less is the opposite from the previous test run...


----------



## piotrsko (Dec 9, 2007)

Qer said:


> Yep. That's why I haven't gone for your typical every day PID-loop since I'm afraid it'd go bonkers when the AC switches on and off. Instead I've done a somewhat mutilated PI-inspired Qer-speciality with extra onion, how it handles the AC will be a VERY interesting thing to find out...
> 
> Tesseracts first comment from the first tests in the dyno (just a minute ago) was "I'd say the response time is way too slow. But it is very stable." which more or less is the opposite from the previous test run...


I suppose those are the hazards of writing code while the EE is still building the hardware. Perhaps too much onioins?


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

piotrsko said:


> I suppose those are the hazards of writing code while the EE is still building the hardware. Perhaps too much onioins?


Na, the hardware is finished since a while ago but I've been lagging behind a bit lately since I have a daytime job too. Version 1.0 of the software is pretty much just running the controller with basic functionality, version 1.1, 1.2 and so on will be improvements and feature creeping. I have a looooooong wish list.


----------



## 280z1975 (Oct 2, 2008)

Qer said:


> snip ... version 1.1, 1.2 and so on will be improvements and feature creeping. I have a looooooong wish list.


I do like the sounds of that ... features, wonderful features


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Yes, we're still alive. Yes, we're still working on the controller. Yes, things are still being improved. Today Tesseract and Seb tried out a new feature, power limit!










What you see here is an example of Tesseracts sense of humour. When Seb let go of the throttle (at about 462) Tesseract reduced maximum power to 20 kW which meant that Seb suddenly were driving a snail. Then, at around 513 or so, Tesseract restored power while throttle were still engaged! maniac!

(note: I don't recommend messing with the parameters while the controller's running, but they were, after all, testing things and thus have my forgiveness)

So this is how the different limitations for the motor corresponds.










There's of course RPM-limit too, but that didn't really fit into the graph... 

The reason for "chipping off" a corner of the power cube is of course that high voltage AND high current is very stressful for the motor, thus this little feature has been on my todo list for a while and since I've added an output setting for a power meter on the dashboard it kinda made sense to add a power limit so the meter knows what range it should use for 0-100%.

I guess I should start looking at SoC too now...

...or perhaps I should sleep. It's midnight in Sweden right now...


----------



## TheSGC (Nov 15, 2007)

Qer said:


> What you see here is an example of Tesseracts sense of humour. When Seb let go of the throttle (at about 462) Tesseract reduced maximum power to 20 kW which meant that Seb suddenly were driving a snail.


Haha a snail. My EV gets 20 KW power for the first 5 seconds, then its down to under 12 KW after that. Good on battery life, awful for practical driving.

I don't know what sounds like more fun, adjusting the parameters while driving or having someone else adjust it and the driver have no idea what's coming.


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

TheSGC said:


> Haha a snail. My EV gets 20 KW power for the first 5 seconds, then its down to under 12 KW after that.


My condolences.



TheSGC said:


> I don't know what sounds like more fun, adjusting the parameters while driving or having someone else adjust it and the driver have no idea what's coming.


As I said, I don't recommend it. Since it's software there's always a risk it contain bugs and there's simply too many parameters that can be changed in too many ways for us to be able to test it thoroughly.


----------



## major (Apr 4, 2008)

Qer said:


>


Hi Qer,

The kW (red) line is a bit confusing. It looks like it is a 100 kW curve. And the only time you'd get that 100 kW is when you're at max demand between about 450 and 800 amps. Is that correct?

Regards,

major


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

major said:


> The kW (red) line is a bit confusing. It looks like it is a 100 kW curve. And the only time you'd get that 100 kW is when you're at max demand between about 450 and 800 amps. Is that correct?


Yep. Or whatever kW you punch in. For a daily commuter this might not be the number one favourite option in the web interface but for a high volt application you might like to be able to limit kW since you could theoretically peak over 300 kW with the Soliton1, which I personally guess would completely toast any DC motor fit for EVs. On the other hand you probably want to be able to get 1000 Amps at low RPMs OR as much voltage as the motor handles to get good top speed, just not at the same time...

Thus, kW-limit! Tadaaa!


----------



## Qer (May 7, 2008)

Todays experience; a small software error in a test version (no worries, that particular version hasn't left the shop so no risk for any Soliton out there) resulted in a unintentional test of the hardware protection.

We're still messing with the idle code and found out the hard way that PWM width at some rare occasions could turn negative, which wrapped around to maximum integer value or, in "human terms", 100% pulse width. What that means is that the motor got full pack voltage while standing still which, of course, made current go ballistic. THANKFULLY Tesseract doesn't quite trust software (which is ok since I don't fully trust hardware  ) so there's a built in hardware protection for over current that kicked in which cuts the power to the IGBT's and signal back to the micro controller which then cuts power too and drop the contactors (and that part of the code actually worked...).

The good thing is that the protection worked flawlessly and the controller in question still works fine (and a software version later idle does too). We've kinda dreaded doing that short circuit test (it's not that fun to short circuit a battery pack) so I guess it's a good thing that the software ended up testing it for us by mistake... 

The bug is properly disposed of and there's also a new safety catch for negative pulse widths that now gets caught (yes, we tested before fixing the actual bug in question) before things go suicidal.

Sometimes life get's a tad too exciting...


----------

