Is the microswitch in the handle playing up?
On reflection I think the ignition lights were not coming on with the two blown fuses so maybe I did do it but I was trying so many things it's hard to be certain. In this case is it possible the CCU had thrown a wobbly and needed time to reset?
Also after finding the blown fuses I reconnected the battery through a halogen bulb to avoid any loud bangs so there was a few moments of very low voltage/current on the entire car which may have screwed things up a bit.
 
Other stuff happening

Printing out a case for the VCU.
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I tried to buy a case but didn't fancy paying £30 for a piece of plastic. 😲
And while huffing over the door not opening last night I fitted this.

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It's just a cheapo off Aliexpress but seems to work well however I suspect the LED's will need toning down but I'll worry about that later. The centre console was already off so it was a good time to do it.
 
On reflection I think the ignition lights were not coming on with the two blown fuses so maybe I did do it but I was trying so many things it's hard to be certain. In this case is it possible the CCU had thrown a wobbly and needed time to reset?
Also after finding the blown fuses I reconnected the battery through a halogen bulb to avoid any loud bangs so there was a few moments of very low voltage/current on the entire car which may have screwed things up a bit.
It's possible the CCU had shutdown, if it was missing a crucial live feed.
Fingers crossed it's sorted now.
 
It's possible the CCU had shutdown, if it was missing a crucial live feed.
Fingers crossed it's sorted now.
I hope so but it would be nice to know for sure what caused it.
I'm now working at fitting the ebike battery pack and controller for the PAS under the passenger seat. It works but will need a lot of fine tuning.
 
I hope so but it would be nice to know for sure what caused it.
I'm now working at fitting the ebike battery pack and controller for the PAS under the passenger seat. It works but will need a lot of fine tuning.
Have you thought about running the PS pump off the 12V battery, using a boost module to up the voltage?
 
Have you thought about running the PS pump off the 12V battery, using a boost module to up the voltage?
I hadn't though of that but it draws up to 200W. so the boost module would need to be pretty hefty.
Also I like the idea that PAS does not draw any power from the main battery.
In any case the battery is easy as I have a 36V ebike battery that I'm not using and it fits under the seat. The harder part will be controlling the controller so that it ramps down when the car is driving and up when manoeuvring at slow speed.
It is doable by using an Arduino to read speed from CAN driving the speedo or directly from the wheel speed but for now I'll put a POT somewhere on the dash and control it manually.
Automating this will be a job for future Ali. Present Ali is just trying to make the damn thing work. 😋
 
I hadn't though of that but it draws up to 200W. so the boost module would need to be pretty hefty.
Also I like the idea that PAS does not draw any power from the main battery.
In any case the battery is easy as I have a 36V ebike battery that I'm not using and it fits under the seat. The harder part will be controlling the controller so that it ramps down when the car is driving and up when manoeuvring at slow speed.
It is doable by using an Arduino to read speed from CAN driving the speedo or directly from the wheel speed but for now I'll put a POT somewhere on the dash and control it manually.
Automating this will be a job for future Ali. Present Ali is just trying to make the damn thing work. 😋
I have the electrics for the PAS pretty well finished and under the front passenger seat with just maybe a change of POT to control the speed as the 5kR one I'm using is a bit too high resistance so I'm waiting for a couple of POT's to come from Ebay.
I'm still not 100% decided on how I'll control it eventually, I'll probably use a relay to turn it on with the ignition but for now it is pretty much manual. The battery pack has a power button on the side and the POT is mounted on one of the spare buttons on the arm rest.
I did some testing with an ammeter and with a pretty nice weight to the steering it is drawing 3A at rest and around 10A when turning the wheels while stationary. This was at 40V so around 120W while driving and 400W while manoeuvring.
I still need to do the maths to work out if the battery pack I'm using is sufficient to power the steering for the max range of the car.

If the car can do 100 miles and the average speed is 40mph then the battery needs to last at least 2.5 hours

If we assume the steering will draw 150W average then in 1 hour it will draw 150Wh so 2.5 hours will draw 450Wh

The cells in the battery are probably around 2000mAh as it was cheap Chinese.
So at 3.7V average they will store around 7.4Wh each

With 10 in series that's 74Wh so for the pack to last 2.5 hours it needs to have 6 in parallel which I think it does so it should just about be OK but I'll probably build a bigger pack to be sure.
There is a lot of guesstimating in the figures above but I will know better once the car is on the road.😉
Having said that one of my projects when the car is driving will be to automate the power to the PAS pump so the smaller pack may be OK after all.
 
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VCU case finished and cleaned up.

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The last photo shows it after I removed all the supports but if you look carefully you can see a line half way up where I had to turn off the printer over night. I have a Creality CR10S which can restart a print after power off but it is not perfect and so restarted slightly off line but it's not a big problem as the VCU still fits fine.
I could have tried printing without support but didn't fancy waiting 10 hours or more to see if it would be OK.
 
VCU case finished and cleaned up.

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The last photo shows it after I removed all the supports but if you look carefully you can see a line half way up where I had to turn off the printer over night. I have a Creality CR10S which can restart a print after power off but it is not perfect and so restarted slightly off line but it's not a big problem as the VCU still fits fine.
I could have tried printing without support but didn't fancy waiting 10 hours or more to see if it would be OK.
Its impressive you can make this sort of stuff at home, but why did it need "support"? What is the support supporting?

Did you design this from scratch in CAD, or did you take a pre-canned file and print it?
 
I want one. I've wanted a 3D printer for a long time. I don't have the space to set one up at the moment.
 
Its impressive you can make this sort of stuff at home, but why did it need "support"? What is the support supporting?

Did you design this from scratch in CAD, or did you take a pre-canned file and print it?
The printer prints everything by laying down layers of molten plastic. Anything that overhangs needs something to support it so if you look at the first photos you can see the corrugated support layers. They are only there to support the wider bits near the top.
I was given the file required to print it by one of the guys in Openinverter.org. No way I could design this myself. :oops:


I want one. I've wanted a 3D printer for a long time. I don't have the space to set one up at the moment.
Check out this guys videos.
He has made hundreds of videos about the Creality Ender 3 which is very cheap and pretty small.
 
ARBID: 0x615 sent from the instrument cluster.
-B0 - AC signal. 07 - OFF, C7 - ON
-B1 - 00
-B2 - 00
-B3 - 00
-B4 - 00
with my K1.8 I get B0: 07 - A/C OFF and 87 with A/C ON so 0xxxxxxx=off and 1xxxxxxx=on.

Edit. I just tried our TD4.
with the refrigerant pressure switch disconnected on the TD4 I get the same as the K1.8
with the pressure switch connected I get the same as what you originally posted.
So, it seems that it's B0:-
00xxxxxx A/C dash button off
10xxxxxx A/C dash button on but low refrigerant pressure
11xxxxxx A/C dash button on and good refrigerant pressure

The k1.8 is low on gas I think so that's consistent

Additionally the other six bits (xxxxxx) seem to increase with the temperature of the air coming through the heater, but I'm not 100% sure on that. My suspicion is that it's the reading of the evap temp sensor.

B1 seems to indicate something about the status of the A/C as well but it isn't 100% clear yet.
 
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concerning 0x615: B1. ignition on but engine not running when I press the A/C switch B0 reacts but B1 doesn't, however, with the engine running I get the following:-
pressure sensor disconnected: when A/C button on it goes to F0
pressure sensor connected: when A/C button is pressed it goes to 10, then after a few seconds 20, occasionally it goes to 30 and then back down to 20.
 
concerning 0x615: B1. ignition on but engine not running when I press the A/C switch B0 reacts but B1 doesn't, however, with the engine running I get the following:-
pressure sensor disconnected: when A/C button on it goes to F0
pressure sensor connected: when A/C button is pressed it goes to 10, then after a few seconds 20, occasionally it goes to 30 and then back down to 20.
Thanks mate. sadly I can't add much to this as my ac was ripped out for the conversion but I'll update the first post.
 
Additionally the other six bits (xxxxxx) seem to increase with the temperature of the air coming through the heater, but I'm not 100% sure on that. My suspicion is that it's the reading of the evap temp sensor.
The xxxxxx being evap temp sensor was I think false.
Both the xxxxxx in B0 and B1 seem to relate to how hard the A/C is working. Basically the harder it's working, the higher the numbers. I wonder if they are actually refrigerant pressure?
The xxxxxx seems to report all the time, whether the A/C is on or off, whereas B1 only reports when the A/C is on.

Additionally I'm now pretty sure that 0x618: B2 is evap temperature not oil temperature.
 
if you get the A/C cold enough that it starts cycling on and off 0x615:B0 goes to 1xxxxxxx which is the same as button pressed but no gas. It's very odd and makes me wonder if I have really understood it.
 
is it possible that it's the instrument panel that actually decides whether the A/C clutch should be engaged or not?
so 0x615:B0:1xxxxxxx means "dash button pressed" and 0x615:B0:x1xxxxxx means "dear engine ECU, please engage the A/C compressor clutch"?

I doubt myself though because on the petrol FL1 the A/C pressure sensor and evap temp sensor are connected to the engine ECU and not the instruments.

Another possibility is that originally MG Rover designed it that the petrol engine ECU would decide whether the A/C runs or not and those sensors connect to the engine ECU, but, when they designed in the BMW TD4 engine later that the BMW ECU doesn't have that feature so they moved the control of it to the instrument cluster and the cluster just tells the BMW engine ECU what to do.

is that possible?
 
I had another look at the BMW forum mentioned in the EV thread and this is what is there now.
It might be worth looking on BMW sites for the info you're after.

ARBID: 0x615 sent from the instrument cluster.
-B0 AC signal. Hex 80 when on (10000000) Other bits say something else (Load, Aux fan speed request? system pressure?)
-B1
-B2
-B3 Outside Air Temperature: x being temperature in Deg C, (x>=0 deg C,DEC2HEX(x),DEC2HEX(-x)+128) x range min -40 C max 50 C
 
Some days I wonder why I bother. :(
During the week I was happily plodding away tidying up the HV junction box but every time I made a change I would test to make sure I still had motor spin.
All seemed to be going well until after very little changing I turned the key and BANG!
Something under the bonnet had let go in a BIG way and scared the cr@p out of me.
If your bored here is a post I put up on Openinverter asking for advice.


"I've been tidying up the wiring in the HV junction box for a couple of weeks (among other things) and would test startup and motor spin every time I changed something so that if I made a mistake it would be simple to backtrack. However last night after not really changing anything I turned on the ignition and there was a loud bang followed by no HV! After some investigation I found a blown 400A fuse and the negative contactor was fused closed.
:o

After the usual headless chicken routine I powered everything off then back on with the inverter disconnected looking for a smoking gun but I couldn't find anything. There are no shorts in the HV system so the positive contactor must have triggered before precharge had happened.
As I was tired I decided to sleep on it and as often happens woke this morning at 5am with a theory.

I have a Gen 1 Nissan Leaf VCU from Damien which has outputs to mitigate against this happening and I believe I have it connected correctly as the precharge is controlled by output 1, the main positive contactor by output 2 and the inverter by output 3. The VCU is not supposed to enable output 2 until after the inverter reports seeing pack voltage over 330V.

During all the testing I had done trying to get a reliable startup sequence I ended up connecting all of the timer relays to the ignition Pos 2 so they all powered on together, the Negative contactor triggers every time with the ignition Pos 1. I also had turned all the timers to 0 seconds as I was trusting the VCU to control precharge. I'm only using them as relays to drive the contactors.
After the issue while testing with the inverter disconnected, output 1 triggered but output 2 did not which is correct as the inverter could not see HV.

So if the VCU is operating correctly then how could the main positive contactor come on before the precharge has finished?
This is my theory and I'm hoping someone can advise if it is plausible.

Over the last few weeks I have seen the VCU hang at various times. I had put it down to being the laptop USB connection plugged in but wasn't sure as it seemed to happen randomly. Last night I had plugged in the laptop to see what voltage the inverter was reporting so this is definitely possible. Thinking back there were clues to what might happen that I didn't pick up at the time but on reflection it gives me a possible cause for the fuse blowing.

The first couple of times the VCU hung with the ignition on while I was testing. On these occasions I realised the motor had stopped spinning, turned the ignition off and on again and although the contactors all triggered as normal (I thought) I still didn't get motor spin until I reset the VCU.
A couple of times after this the VCU hung with the ignition off and I got no contactors turning on when I turned on the ignition. Resetting the VCU put everything back to normal. Mmmmmm

So it is possible the VCU was freezing with the outputs locked either on or off, depending on the state it was in when it froze and in this state when I turned the ignition off and on again all the timer relays would either trigger at the same moment or not at all. This would have the following results.

If it froze:-
1. With the ignition on, when I turned it off and on again reasonably quickly nothing bad would happen because the inverter would still be charged.
2. With the ignition off nothing would happen because the timer relays did not trigger.
3. With the ignition on when I turned the ignition off left it for 30 mins or so then back on all the timer relays triggered together and blew the fuse.

I haven't reconnected the inverter yet so don't know if more harm was done but now I have a plausible theory as to what happened will give it a try later today. Wish me luck.

So what are the take aways here?
1. It's good to have fuses
2. Do not have a single point of failure, nothing is fool proof. Had I turned up the timer for the Positive contactor even just a couple of seconds it would have been OK.
3. When something unusual happens investigate a bit more thoroughly than I did.
4. When Damien did his best to make his VCU idiot proof the world just went out and created a better idiot.
:lol:
"

The good news is after reconnecting everything the inverter seemed to be OK however after more investigation I discovered
the contactors were fused and needed replacing. I have spares so figured it would be an easy fix but some gorilla had overtightened the screws and I ended up having to remove the entire plate. I figured since I had it out it would make sence to tidy up a bit. I spent ages changing to a different type of contactor and mounting the relay modules on the alloy plate then cutting the wires nice and neat. Finally today I tried testing only to find the modules were shorting out through the alloy plate. :mad:

This is how it looked before I pulled it out before

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And this is how it looks now with a plastic mount for the modules.

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At this point I realised around 50% of the work I had done today would need redone so not for the first time walked off in a huff! :rolleyes:
 
I thought 1 of the benefits of EV over ICE is that its simple...

You wire your batteries to an inverter, the inverter to the motor, add in a charger somewhere and your sorted.

From your description above and the pictures - it sounds and looks anything but.

It looks to be a hugely complex piece of electrical engineering. Any electrical engineer fixing this sort of stuff will make an F2 electrical engineer look like a rookie, and we all know how difficult it is for them to fix an F2.

You've worked miracles to get all that kit working together.
 

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