I went ahead and sent some money to the guy who is going to build a controller for me. (You can see his ad on EV Trading Post) There's plenty of stuff on Youtube about the Open Revolt controller and there's also 30 EV owners that are using them as listed on EV Album. The primary idea was to create an open source way for people to either build a controller themselves or have one built for them. As I mentioned in the last blog, controllers aren't cheap. A person with good soldering skills can build an Open Revolt for about $350. I'm having one built for $700. That's still about $900 cheaper than a commercial off the self comparable item. The only draw back is having to wait for a week and a half until it is built. I am missing prime EV driving time!
PRE-CHARGER
There is a pre-charger requirement for this controller. Look at this:
http://www.diyelectriccar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25419
A well written article on how and why to pre-charge. After reading that, I went outside to the shop and wired my contactor to a separate switch instead of coming on automatically with the 12V switch. I then wired a high voltage relay to act as a pre-charger.
Since I won't need heat anytime soon I used the heater relay. (Guess I'll need to order another one from MINIBMS) I put one of my extra LED resistors in the high voltage line going to the controller.
The start sequence will be like this --
turn on the 12V switch,
then turn on the pre-charger.
Now wait for the controller supercaps to match the battery pack voltage,
hit the contactor switch,
now turn off the pre-charger and you're ready to drive.
And of course, while I was doing all this I tested my contactor and it too was fried from the controller melt down that happened yesterday. So.... I dragged out the old Curtis Albright that I had sitting around and it still works just fine. I like it when Plan B works.
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