CRUISING INTERSTATE 70

EVTV's Friday show was downloaded early this morning, so by the time I finished watching, it was after 2:00 AM Sunday morning. I woke up at 7:am but decided to sleep in a little. About 10:00 am, I got moving and went outside to prepare the Fiero to test on the interstate. Having run the car out of juice a couple weeks ago, I was a little nervous, needless to say. Before leaving, the names of a couple of towing companies were written down, the charge cable was disconnected, and voltage, amp hour, and mileage reading were recorded. The shift linkage was inspected to make sure the cable had not pulled out again. The camera was taped to the dash, the laptop booted up and the Synkromotive UI was brought up. Finally before backing up, the JLD404 was reset and the Synkromotive log program started. So finally, I was driving down the road in front of my house toward the entrance to interstate 70 and even with all the planning and preparation, the 12 volt negative lead to the inverter that the laptop was plugged into came out of the terminal. So much for planning, so I decided to drove across the interstate to the Flying J parking lot and re-connect the terminal. Ok, the log program is running again, so off to the interstate entrance ramp. Just when I made the turn, the negative lead came out of the terminal again. Oh well, here we go anyway and at least the camera was working. The car ran great and I cruised along at 60 mph until turning onto the off ramp at Etna and turned into the McDonald's parking lot to try and get the log program back up. This time I taped the negative lead to the inverter so it could not come out and got the log program back up and running. Then back on to Route 70 to continue the test drive. The car was still doing fine so I decided to pass the Rt158 exit and to on up the road to the Route 37 Exit. The shifter was still acting up but I was able to get it into fourth gear when on the interstate. 

INTERSTATE 70 TEST DRIVE MAP

Upon arriving back at the house, the drive was 20.9 miles and 50.5 amp hours were used giving me 2.4 amp hours per mile or 288 watt hours per mile. The controller had not limited amperage and drove normally the whole drive. When the other two modules are installed, I should have a good 60 mile range, that should be sufficient for me to drive to work in downtown Columbus, OH and back with out having to charge. 

Below are the graphs from the Synkromotive log file showing pack and motor voltage, pack and motor current, and all four on the last graph.

PACK AND MOTOR VOLTAGE

PACK AND MOTOR AMPS

PACK AND MOTOR VOLTAGE AND AMPERAGE

The last graph is a little busy but shows that just one module can power the car on the interstate without sagging the pack voltage too much. Also, the 12 volt system did not sag below 11.5 volts and always recovered to at least 13 volts after an acceleration.

There is a feed store and a granary close to my house with scales, so as soon as the other two modules are installed, I want to have the car weighed. The 288 watt hours per mile is a little higher than expected and may just be a result of the weight of the car. Fieros are notoriously heavy for a two seat car, so that may be the reason for the higher than expected watt hours per mile.

Below is a video of the test drive and I didn't put any music or voice over as I wanted to show just how quite the car is when cruising down the highway.

FIERO EV INTERSTATE 70 - 20 MILE TEST DRIVE

The day ended with a visit from my son Shane, his fiance Vanessa, and their husky, Finn. Shane and I enjoyed a growler of Buckeye Lake Blond draft during dinner and while visiting the rest of the evening.

Thanks for visiting,

Randy

TODAY IS A BETTER DAY

Sunday morning I went out to try and adjust the Fiero shifter linkage, armed with the shift position diagrams that were posted yesterday, and after pinning the shifter in third gear, disconnected the shift and select linkages at the tansaxle. After moving things around a little, I found that the select linkage was actually trying to lift the shift stem going down into the transaxle. This time I made sure that with the lever on the transaxle in the correct position, the cable could not push it up farther, causing the shaft to lift. Then the shift lever was put in the correct position, the play in the cable was taken out and then the connector tightened. There seems to be some play in one of the rods on the shifter and on one on the transaxle linkage, so that is probably the areas I will check out in the future. For now, it's working, so I am not going to mess with it.

The shifter went through all of the gears smoothly, while sitting in the driveway, so reverse was selected and the car backed up to pull out onto the road. Second gear was selected and the car moved forward out onto the street in front of my house. The shift to third and then fourth was fairly smooth, so I decided to run it around and make a pass back down the interstate. The car accelerated smoothly from second, to third, to fourth gear and I leveled the speed out at 60 mph. As I progressed down the highway, the current went as high as 503 battery amps at 91 volts and 576 motor amps at 79 volts. I believe these cells are only rated at 350 amps or so and appear to have been designed for higher voltage and lower current. When the other two packs are installed, the pack should not see such a drastic sag and I should be ok.

VOLTAGE GRAPH

As shown in the graph above, the battery volts and motor volts are inversely proportional and actually were almost the same during the acceleration onto the interstate. I wanted to put battery and motor current on the graph but it kept formatting so that voltage just looked like a strait line, so did not really show anything.

TEST DRIVE SPREADSHEET

The Synkromotive Controller does a great job collecting data  and I really should have hooked up more inputs to it. I originally thought that my low voltage battery volts were limiting the controller but it appears the pack voltage is limiting the controller, as the low pack voltage limit is currently set at 90 volts. You know when you reach the limit because the car slows down and you can not accelerate back up to the same speed you were at before the controller started cutting back.

The pack voltage and current for each entry were multiplied, then each line added together for a 60 second period, then divided by the number of entries to get the average wattage. I was driving at 60 MPH so the average watts were divided by 60 and came up with 432 watt hours per mile. I may not have done this correctly, as it seems a little high but the emergency brake may have been dragging, so that may have been the cause of the higher than expected watts per mile number.

In about 4 hours the voltage has recovered to 125.1 resting voltage. The car has been driven 13.5 miles and has used 32.5 amp hours, so using 120 volts as an average, has used 3900 watts. Dividing this by 13.5 miles is 289 watt hours per mile.This figure seems a little closer to what I was expecting. 

The temperature is up to 56 deg today, the shifter is working much better, and I got another interstate test drive in, so today really is a much better day that yesterday!

If any of you are using the Better Place Packs, I would like to hear your experiences.

Thanks for visiting,

Randy

THE BAD NEWS BUT THE GOOD NEWS!

Back in August my garden tractor battery went bad after using it to regen discharge the Better Place cells with the Powerlab 6. Alien Motoin had their AM22-01 heavy duty LiFePo4 battery on sale for $209. My plan was to use it the rest of the mowing season and then put it in the Fiero this fall. A MCU Battery Low Voltage Disconnect Controller by Peak DBI was even purchased to keep the Alien Motion battery from over discharging. The battery worked great until last Sunday and when I turned the key on the garden tractor, nothing happened. Upon further investigation, the battery was puffed around the positive terminal. When I contacted Alien Motion, they said they were scratching their heads trying to figure out what happened and suspect the voltage regulator on the garden tractor was not working correctly. Then I did not hear anything for a couple of days and had to email them again, asking them what they wanted me to do. Finally they replied and gave me a RMA number and told me to send it back to them.

PUFFED OUT BATTERY

Then the Elite, Model DCM9040, volt, amp watt meter went bad, so it hasn't been a good week. The EBAY seller is going to send me another meter, so I guess it could be worse.

My son's fiance got a speeding tick when they were coming to our house on Labor day, and also got a ticket for expired license plates, requiring her to appear in court. My Son could not get today off of work, so I took a day of vacation to got to court with her. She was afraid she was going to lose her license and was in a rather bad mood on the drive to the Lancaster, OH Court House. There were so many people with traffic tickets there, that only the person with the ticket could go into the Court Room. With nothing I could do to help her now, I walked down the Main Street of Lancaster hoping to find some interesting shops to look around in. I was only gone 15 minutes when my phone rang and it was Vanessa. She was on the court roster hanging in the hall of the Court House but when she went inside the court room, her name was not called. When she approached the bench, the Judge told her she had paid her speeding ticket fine and renewed her license plates, so there was no need for her to be there. Great, the day was starting out very good.

We arrived back at the house and I changed cloths to go out and work on the Fiero. All of the battery connection were made up and the contactors were all wired up but the motor connections had to be made up, the dc-dc converter and battery installed, new wires connected to the battery pack for the dc-dc converter, and a new wire run from the positive side of the battery to the controller for it to measure pack voltage. For being almost ready to test drive, there sure was a lot of work to do but one by one, each task was completed. Now the moment of truth, I got in the car, turned the key to the run position, then to the start position but nothing happened. A laptop was connected to the controller and the pot box was re-calibrated. Same result, nothing happened. I was getting 13.5 volts to the controller when the key was turned to start but when it was released back to the run position, the voltage went to zero. So into the house to pull up the relay schematic. After studying the schematic and looking at the relay connections on terminal block, two of the wires were on the wrong connection. The wiring was put on the correct terminals and back into the car to try again. Now I was showing 13.5 volts when going back to the run position after the key was turned to the start position but still did not have any pack voltage showing. Upon further inspection of the negative contactor actuation wires, found that one of the wires had slipped out of the crimp connector. A new terminal was crimped on to the wire and another start try was made. This time there was 13.5 volts in the run position, and 124 volts pack voltage but the motor still would not run when the throttle was depressed. Seem I had pushed the emergency/maintenance switch, so pulled it back up in to the connected position. This time when I went through the start sequence, the motor ran when the throttle was depressed. Finally, success!

    

TEST DRIVE

As the insurance went into effect on September 13, I was finally able to take the Fiero on the Highway and run it up to 60 mph. It did great and the pack voltage did not drop lower that 114 volts under moderate acceleration from the 124 resting voltage. The 12 volt system did not drop below 12.5 volts and recovered to 13.5 volts when cruising. 

I am going to need to tidy up some wiring and get it in loom but then on to finishing the instrumentation and interior.

Thanks for visiting,

Randy

DISASTER AVERTED!....I HOPE!

Over the last six weeks I have been putting on the push trying to get the car ready for EVCCON and although I fell short of that goal, have got the battery pack installed and made much headway on getting it hooked up to the controller. In my haste, I put the motor compartment lid down last night after dark, not noticing that I forgot to put on one of the side covers, allowing the rain we had overnight to get into the Synkromotive controller. Fortunately, I had made a separate cover for the DC-DC converter, so it was protected from the rain.

COVER LEFT OFF OF MOTOR COMPARTMENT

CONTROLLER LED NOT BLINKING

When I went out this morning, the led was not flashing on the communications port. There was no pack voltage on the controller and only 12 volts, so I unplugged the connector and after 30 seconds or so, plugged it back in. The led was now flashing yellow, not a good sign. I took my wife to the grocery store to stock up for the week I would be gone to EVCCON and upon returning, started emailing the folks at Synkromotive, to find out what the yellow light means and to ask them what they think the water could have damaged in the controller. Before sending the email, I thought I would look and see if there was a code being flashed, so opened up the motor compartment cover, plugged the connector back in and to my relief, the port was now flashing green again. Not 100% out of the woods yet but I do feel a lot better and will hook up the computer to see if communications can still be established to the controller.

Copper sheet was ordered to make the bus bars for the battery module, positive side contactor and emergency/maintenance shut off switch and should be here when I return from EVCCON. Also, a new trunk seal was ordered from the Fiero Store to keep the water out of the trunk when it rails. 

There is a potential buyer at EVCCON for the HiPower cells that are currently in the car but since I am not bringing the Fiero, have no way to get them there without renting a vehicle, so will just have pass on the offer. I guess if they really want the cells, we can arrange to meet somewhere between Columbus, OH and Tulsa, OK, this fall. My wife has been after me to go somewhere together before the end of the year, so maybe a trip to St Louis, MO may work out.

Anyway, with any luck, I should be having appetizers and drinks at the EVTV shop by 5:00 pm tomorrow. Hope to see you there!

Thanks for visiting,

Randy