THERE ARE STILL GOOD PEOPLE IN THE WORLD!

If you have been following this blog, you may recall the two year old still in the box unused HiPower batteries I bought that ended up being bulged out over charged used batteries with melting around the terminals. Out of the 40 I purchased and waited for three month to arrive, only 37 would hold a charge and none of them over 80 amp hours. Fortunately, I had paid for the cells with a credit card and my bank gave me a refund for the last 12 cells after I filed a complaint. I was able to test out the new Synkromotive Controller and drive the Fiero about 10 miles but they had bad voltage sag and the car was nothing like it is now, with just one of the Better Place modules.

That sets the stage for my next purchasing adventure, that I am glad to say turned out quite a bit better. Back in January I had purchased a TCCH charger as a back up, as the PIC chip that I tried to have programmed for the Zivan charger, would not turn the charger on. My plan was to use the TCCH charger while I was sending the Zivan charger to Mark Weisheimer, a local EV enthusiast, who is a wizard when it comes to repairing electrical equipment. I needed to buy some Anderson connectors so I could hook up the TCCH Charger and just never got around to it until June. When I got everything hooked up and tried the charger, all I got was a red green flash, that the label said indicated it did not see the pack voltage.

TCCH CHARGER

I finally dug up the ebay seller's contact information and sent them a message through EBAY.  EBAY user lu1535 promptly responded and had me try and short two of the control wires together. Excited, I went out into the garage but the charger still was blinking red green. Later that evening lu1535 sent me the manual and it said to hook the red wire to black wire. That is what I had already done, so at this point I was a bit discouraged. Even though I had purchased the charger 6 months ago and had already left  positive feedback, lu1535 offered to give me a refund for the charger! I really needed another charger,  so thanked him and declined. My plan was to have Mark Weisheimer take a look at it but he was in Cape Girardeau MO, helping the EVTV Hack Team unlock the Tesla motor, so I emailed TC Charger, and promptly received a reply telling me to contact Electric Conversions, their US distributor. Even though this was a TC Charger and Electric Conversions is listed as an Elcon distributor, I received a reply back from them in a couple days and was told to hook the red wire to ground. Having already hooked the red wire to  the black wire, I emailed back asking them which of the 3 wires was ground and received an email telling me that the red wire needed to hook to the green wire for the charger to start and that hooking the red to black wire could blow the 12 volt power board, which is not repairable. Again, luck would have that the board had not blown and indeed, when I hooked the red to green wire, the charger started working. Thanks to lu1535 and Electric Conversions for the help you gave me in getting this charger fired up!

Until Next Post,

Randy

LETS DANCE - CANCON

EVTV had the group that is reverse engineering the CAN communication in OEM electric cars, to get the TESLA motors spinning, so I was keeping an eye on the EVTV webcam. There was a post on the EVTV blog, commenting how it would have been nice to have had a web cam showing the TESLA motor bench, where the team was working. I had saved a couple of pictures from the shop cam and when I was looking at them on my picture viewer, noticed that the two in sequence made it look like the group was dancing, so I just had to do a gif and post it. 

EVTV CANCON 2015 - PRACTICING DANCE MOVES

On the bright side, it seems that in between all the dancing, the team was able to spin up the TESLA motors, so congratulations to all involved for another job well done! This really opens the door for some pretty cool conversions with plenty of power.

I made a trip to Ace Hardware to pick up some angle iron and aluminum plate to start boxing in the front of the Fiero to hold the batteries. After getting the material home, I was not satisfied with it and decided to order some aluminum angle from Alro Steel. I plan to screw the aluminum angle to the side frame and then fasten the flat aluminum plate to the angle. To get the battery module into the space in the front of the Fiero, I am going to have to break the pack in half and put 8 cells end to end. I am not sure if the module will be standing up or if I will put it on the side like it was in the original Better Place module. I am not much of an artist but below is the general arrangement of the batteries.

BATTERY MODULE CONFIGURATION

It has been hard finding time to work on the car with the kitchen remodeling we are doing but I have been trying to divide my time between the two.

Thanks for stopping by,

Randy