EV Conversion Update!

Yeah, it's been a long fuckin' time since I last updated this blog. But I finally have something worthwhile to share! There are two major things that have happened since I last posted anything at all, really. It's just been a long slog wiring things up, plumbing things, and mounting things in place. Just writing over and over again "I cut some things here, welded some things here, blah blah blah blah blah" didn't seem like compelling narrative, and I was also, just dragging my feet on this. Anyways, onto the good stuff:

Batteries and Charging

I've been spending a lot of time the past few days trying to figure out how to actually wire things up and integrate all of the hardware I'm using to charge my battery pack with.

For at-home charging, I'm just using a regular level 1 charger that plugs into a standard 120V AC outlet like you have at home, because I don't want to spend time wiring up a 240V circuit in my garage to hook up a level 2 charger (at least, not yet). The charging cable, I just bought off the internet. On the vehicle side, this is the hardware that I'm using:

In broad strokes, the way these pieces of equipment interact with each other is something like this:

  1. The Vero Charge is responsible for interacting with the charger (that is, the fancy power cable that I bought off of ebay). It's responsible for telling the charger that the car is ready to take a charge and to connect the car to the grid for charging.

  2. The Vero BMS V2, as its name implies, monitors the batteries and essentially implements the charging control logic. It ensures that as the car is charging, cell voltages remain balanced across the pack, and that voltages and temperatures all remain within safe and reasonable bounds.

  3. The charger is the piece of hardware that actually receives the 120V from the wall and converts it into the DC voltage required to charge the pack.

These three components need to work with each other in order to successfully charge the battery pack, and for the first day or so, I was having a hell of a time getting that to happen. For whatever reason, after the batteries got to around 45% state of charge, the whole system seemed to enter a loop where it would charge the batteries for about 5 seconds, then stop charging, and then attempt to re-start the charge for another 5 seconds before giving up again, and repeat this sequence ad infinitum.

I spent a good portion of a hot, humid summer day in my garage in Austin, Texas, begging and pleading with the machine spirit to please cooperate with me and stop power-cycling itself before finally giving up and moving on to the next order of business. Even though the charger was now refusing to charge the batteries, I still had enough juice locked up in the battery pack to at least move onto activating other parts of the build. And in my experience, sometimes a problem goes away after you just kind of ignore it for a while.

Activating the Drivetrain

A good friend of mine helped me out with this part. I had actually been helping her out with a van that she bought and was converting into a "van lyfe" van, so-to-speak, so in a way this was just me calling in a favor.

Unlike with the battery charging, this part went way smoother than I expected. All we did was follow the instructions exactly as written in the activation procedure for the NetGain Hyper9V motor and associated controller, and in no time flat, I was able to just press the accelerator pedal and watch the wheels on my car spin for the first time in over a year.r9V

After a year of frustration, lugging around heavy-ass batteries, grinding over my shitty, shitty welds, wrestling stubborn pieces of trim into place, cutting all of my high-voltage cables too short thus necessitating needing to order more in order to fix my mistake (and a very costly one at that), I was finally able to see that this all might actually just work.

The only hiccup that we experienced while commissioning the motor was that when I first turned the key, the motor started turning instantly, and kept accelerating until the whole car started rocking back and forth.

Thankfully, since my friend was there, I was able to shut down the car pretty quickly after that started happening and was able to quickly diagnose that the reason that was happening was because the motor controller was interpreting the accelerator pedal's neutral position as a request for throttle. After adjusting the throttle mapping with NetGain's software, this problem went away, and after calibrating the motor encoder, we were able to test that putting the car in gear and driving forward indeed spun the wheels in the forward direction, and that reversing worked as expected as well.

I have to be honest, I haven't really slept well since this result. It feels like the end of this project is in sight now, and I can finally move onto better things with my life. What a fool I am to embark on something like this. Why the fuck did I decide to gut my dear MANUAL TRANS Subaru Baja in order to fulfill this stupid fantasy I had about being some kind of "real builder" and converting this thing into an electric vehicle? What was the point of all of this?

Oh well, things are the way they are now, and the only way out, at this point, is forward.

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