The Actual Electric Car Part

I have more or less completed the senior project aspects to my project, but I still have to get the electric car onto the road.

First I needed an idea of how long the range would actually be. In the planning of the car I had used a calculator to try and determine the range through weight and battery type, Ah, and a whole lot of other factors such as air drag etc. And the planned range I believe was around 70 miles, and someone who was helping us the calculations told us we would be lucky to get it past 60 miles with our gross vehicle weight.

http://youtu.be/OVB65SJZ6BE

So yesterday I took the license plates off another one of the cars we have and I took the car onto the road (It is street legal) and drove it around Jamestown, off the bridge, and I really tried to take the car up any hill possible to see if it could handle the challenge. The car did have a top speed of around 75 mph which is much more than I expected it to be (although it was mostly downhill).

And the car made it to around 107 miles (I drove it another four after this picture). So a big success since we were told it was possible the car wouldn't even go 60 miles.

And I don't remember if I mentioned it before, but my Dad blew out our 12kw charger which would charge the car to a full charge in around six hours, but since that needs to be fixed and we just couldn't wait to get the car onto the road, we got a temporary 2.5kw charger that can charge the car between twelve to thirty hours - it depends what it's plugged into.

(The 2.5kw charger mounted in the engine/motor compartment. Not pretty but practical).

And I finally managed to get the BMS (Battery Management System) working with the car, but when I floor the pedal it still max out at 400-600 amps, and the charger is still having some problems.
























So we still have some work to do on the car, but the end is fairly close. If I manage to figure out why the car won't floor to 400-600 amps and fix the problem, then I think the car will be ready to take onto the highway.

Ipad and Andromeda Installation

I'm extremely sorry to anyone who has been trying to follow my progress recently; my internet has been acting up a bit and I've been doing a bit of traveling for my internship on the side.

Anyways, the Andromeda finally managed to make it's way here from the west coast. I was really surprised to see the size of it, I was hoping it might be a tiny bit larger - but it will still do the job.

I put 12v onto the screen and it booted up nicely.

I had a bit of difficulty trying to figure out where I wanted to put the Andromeda. At first I wanted it to replace the stock dashboard gauges but it turns out we still need the stock speedometer  as we still need more equipment for the Andromeda for it to read the constantly fluctuating voltage from the speedometer sensor. And the Andromeda screen doesn't have an odometer so it might be sort of nice to still keep the stock gauges. 

This was the final position for both the Ipad and the Andromeda after a long time of putting them in different places to try and get the perfect spot for both.

I was a little worried at first but I believe all of the air vents are connected to each other, so the air that would have originally blown out of this goes to the other three vents. There is a little gap right below the wooden plug for the Andromeda wires to sneak down behind the dashboard to connect with the other 12v wires (headunit, the wires from the amp, etc).

I was trying to imagine where I wanted the headunit to sit behind the Ipad. 

Back to 4th grade tactics I suppose? I used a piece of cardboard to plan out the mount for the headunit (and just about anything else that needed to be mounted in place in slightly more complex locations). 

My Dad found some scraps of birds eye maple lying around and even though you won't really be able to see much of it, it would still look fairly nice in the dashboard.

Using this saw is one of the most infuriating things I have ever experienced. First you need to use a drill to drill through the wood and then you need to turn the saw around as you come around corners or need to change direction. But the blade is so flimsy that you can just break it with a really careless turn of the wrist. 

And unfortunately the saw wouldn't get all of the little details around the corners - so I filed them out with one of my dad's wood files. 

My Dad had to do this part as it got a little tricky. This is brazing (the welding of brass essentially), which got really really really bright - I had to wear two pairs of sunglasses to be able to see without hurting my eyes. Borax acts as a flux for the brazing rod. 

I had to cool the pieces off instantly so the flux peels off and doesn't stay on the pieces.

I am still a little nervous about the effect that these neodymium magnets (the strongest magnet a consumer can buy on the market) will have on the Ipad but my Ipad mini has a SSD (solid state drive) which is not affected in the same way that a regular hard drive is by magnetic fields. And the Ipad also does not have a true LCD screen so it will not get so dim over time - but these magnets are still really strong so I will just have to wait and see what actually happens to the Ipad over time. 

I epoxied them to my awesome G-Form Ipad mini case. Visit G-FORM to pick one up for yourself. I highly recommend it if you truly wish to protect your Ipad. 

Here are the drilled holes into the back of the birds eye maple piece for the Ipad to really stick onto there.

And this is the final installation for both the Ipad and the Andromeda. I actually forgot to plug the RCA cables from the amp into the back of the headunit the first time I assembled the whole thing so I had to undo the past two hours of my work to plug the cables into the headunit and redo the whole thing which was a little depressing but it looked fantastic when it was done.

First Audio Test with the Ipad in the dashboard

But I was still having a lot of static in the speakers when I turned up the gain on the amp, and even though we got rid of the alternator and the engine we won't have any of the whine from the engine in the speakers - there was still a possibility that there might be a bit of whine from the DC motor. So I ordered a ground loop isolator from amazon that plugs between the RCA cables of the head unit and amp. Audio Test with GLI The audio is completely crisp now with hardly any noticeable static and no pop in the speakers when I change sources.

First Steps: Audio

I began the Audio installation, first I had to test everything in the house before I tried to install it into the car. I got some Alpine mids and tweeters and some 6x9" cone speakers to cover the lower frequencies of the music to install into the rear of the car; and a relatively small amp (about 150 watts max) to add some extra beef to the audio system. For whatever reason, my father dug a 60ft trench a few years ago to run cables from his shop and his Edison cells that collect the energy that is harvested from our 2.5kw Jacobs wind turbine. One of the cables is a 12v wire (with a ground) which allowed me to test the audio system in the house - powered directly from my father's wind turbine.

Long story short - after a few tests, whenever the song reached the peak loudness the entire system would shut off and then restart and would kind of act crazy for a few minutes. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZZwwmHGoCw) And this was due to two problems: the amp wasn't delivering enough power to the three sets of speakers (tweeters, mids, and rears/lows), and the voltage was fluctuating from the wind turbine. When the speakers wanted to draw more power, the voltage didn't stay constant at 11-12 volts, it dropped down to around 9 volts - and then the system would just shut off. So I got another amp (690 watts max) and just prayed the the flux cells would be able to provide a constant 12v current to the audio system.

And I did test the system in the car when the new amp came https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOdNbqj85Mc and the 12v did hold steady for the duration of the test song.

Here is a video of the relatively steady voltage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4Srz7fn4GI&noredirect=1

After the successful test, I began the speaker installation. I started with the door installations, to put in the tweeters and mids (and these run in parallel, so I just have to attach the tweeters to some little outputs on the speakers).

I took the doors apart (my dad was holding it while I took a picture - you couldn't pull the panel more than 3 inches away from the door because of some wire connections):

I then took the stock bose speakers off:

Then the tweeters:

And then I had to install my own speakers:

and tweeters:

A super tricky part was trying to get this long wire through the little bridge between the door and the car (the little black thing that looks like an accordion) that required me to rip up a bunch of panels.

And here is one door that is completely finished. 

As for the rear speakers - I made custom boxes for them since there was not really any space to put them in the car. The 500 lbs of batteries more or less block any access to the original bose rear speaker locations so I needed to come up with a new location for the speaker boxes that wouldn't impair my vision or really cause any other problems. 

Decided location: on top of the battery box. The wooden top makes for an easy mount.

Here I was drawing out the sides of the boxes on some redwood scrap my Dad had lying around.

One of the fun parts: soldering all of the little connectors for the amp and for the rear speakers so I could take the battery box top off with ease (the little copper wire was soldered into little banana connectors so the wires from the speakers and amps could be disconnected easily).

The 650 watt amp in the trunk of the car with all the copper wire from the speakers and the blue RCA cables that run to the headunit and the little banana connectors.

This is the final installation of the rear speakers (with a chaos of wires).

The Senior Project Outlines

The idea for the senior project is to install an iPad mini into the dashboard of the Audi to control the radio and provide GPS and whatever information I want since I can tether it to use the data that my phone does - so I have access to the internet wherever I have service; I won't just be restricted to using wifi.

Sort of like this:

And I had thought about having the iPad control the HVAC: the ac, heating etc... But this got fairly complicated. If you think about it, the ipad has one or two ports - a 3.5mm port for audio and a little 8 pin Lightning connecter to charge it. So I would have to build an adapter for either one of those ports and then connect five or six harnesses of wires (each harness has about 10-12 wires in it) to the adapter and on top of that I would need to create my own interface on the Ipad to change any of the settings, or the temperature of the ac or heating - it would require me to learn a whole new language of programming (probably on CodeX) and for that I would certainly need to start before the designated slot of two weeks for the senior project so I just didn't think it was going to be possible.

 So I compromised with myself to install a new audio system to replace the stock bose system - which I thought might be a little challenging as things get a little more complicated as there is a huge box of 500 lbs. of lithium ion cells in the back of a little sports car that takes up about 75% of the space I have, and blocks access to just about everything in the car except the front seats and everything in the area of the dashboard. And I need to install another screen to show the required information to drive an electric car: Amperage (charge and discharge), voltage, range of batteries, battery temp, motor temp, tachometer (motor speed), speedometer, individual cell information that can be provided from the Orion BMS that came with the flux cells. This screen we acquired from our friends over at Andromeda interfaces:

So here's the outline:

• Speakers
• Amp wiring
• Door Speakers
• Larger speakers for the back
• iPad Installation
• includes the new head unit
• custom made dashboard for the iPad
• Andromeda Installation

Not to mention to actually get the car running - it needs a whole lot more work, and those I just consider to be little side projects; like getting the car passed through inspection, and getting it ready for registration etc., and a lot of other little projects

A little History

So nearly five years ago I had an idea to make a car similar to the one found in this video "The World's Fastest Lotus?", basically to take a lotus (my favorite car), strip it of all extraneous weight and then super and turbo charge the engine. Due to a bunch of complications, I couldn't exactly do that so the project changed directions towards a hybrid car.

I still wanted the car to look pretty cool though, so my father and I drove down to Virginia for this 1967 Lamborghini Miura shell that was mounted on a 1969 Giulia Sprint GT chassis and I didn't think that would take the weight of 800 lbs. of (back then I was planning on installing lead acid batteries which was a huge mistake) lead acid batteries; so I mounted the Miura onto an s10 chassis (we drove to Maine for that) -which is why in this picture, the body is raised so high from the ground.

And since this original idea was for a hybrid, we needed an engine.

I liked the concept of a motorcycle engine: it was small, compact, and had about the same power as an average Volkswagen. But because of conflicting forces (the motor would be pushing against the engine and I don't exactly have access to the technology that real car manufacturers have, it wasn't going to work) we had to put that idea to rest and so began the electric car project.

Well, after a few more months of struggling with the red car (there were too many complications - as you can see from the picture, there is literally nothing besides the shell of the car), we eventually had to ditch that idea too and get another car.


And this is how we got to where we are today. We picked up an Audi TT from Connecticut, bought 180Ah Lithium Ion cells from Flux Power for a 144v system and used the motor we had originally bought for the hybrid idea from a company called Motenergy.