Saturday, November 17, 2007

Another Change

After more research, mainly on powering the accesories, I have looked back into my motor choice. The ADC A00-4009 is a single shaft motor, which is fine for driving the car, but leaves me looking for another motors for the AC compressor, power breaks and power steering. So I am going back to the drawing board, and after more research for the ADC L91-4003 that has two shafts on it, and it can take more power to improve efficiency and range. The actual cost of the motor is cheaper than me using the A00 and a second 1HP scooter motor system for accesories and powering the car.

I can run the ADC at 84 volts, which is the max of this controller, but the motor can be run up to 120 volts, and some people say 144 volts for more HP. So that leaves a future upgrade nice and easy, maybe when this current pack of lead-acid batteries die out, I can go for a 120 volt Lithium-Ion system and a higher end controller.

Friday, November 9, 2007

The Charger Prototype


Ok, so I setup the charger prototype and it worked! I used hard drives to regulate the 5 volt line, and to keep a constant load for the ATX switching power supplies to stay on. I am going to get some 10 Ohm 10 watt resistors to regulate the power better and get closer to the 12 volts per ATX PSU. With both power supplies in series, I got 22.75 volts, only 1.25 volts off from the 24v, which is pretty good for only being a prototype.

I took a video, but I didn't get any fireworks, so I don't think I will upload it yet. I will keep it on my files in case I decided to make a DVD out of this conversion.

Saturday, November 3, 2007

EV Resources

I think it might be a good idea to list my resources, since I haven't yet. All of these websites I have found extremely helpful.

http://www.austinev.org/evalbum/ Photo Album of hundreds of EV across the world
http://www.evconvert.com/ Conversion blog by Jerry Halstead- Extremely detailed and useful
http://www.evconvert.com/tools/evcalc/ EV Calculator, and the most useful tool I have come across so far.

It's raining again, so I am taking a stab at the ATX power supply daisy chaining. I have two ATX PSUs, and I have modified one of them with the removed ground and plan to test it tomorrow outside when the rain stops in case anything happens. I still have to wire the PSUs up to each other, and create a power switch. Tomorrow I plan on hooking these up, and setup the volt meter and a video camera to record this. If it works, then I am on the right track. If this goes up like the 4th of July, then I will have a very sweet recording.