Hello everybody!
I have been reading here for a while and I'm simply impressed by the projects shown here.
So today I want to make my first humble contribution.
Short story:
1,5 years ago I came up with the idea of converting a regular ICE car electric (how unusual ). I decided it would have to be an AC-motor since most of the complicated parts of spinning it are done in software plus it offers the best effiency. I also found out that standard ACIMs are really cheap and can be overpowered for short periods. Unfortunatly I also found out that controllers are really expensive.
Being an electrical engineer I decided to give it a try. My first inverter consisted of some BUZ50 mosfets and controlling circuitry around it. It basically worked but of course would only drive a 1:10 model of a car
So I scaled up and have now got this:
It uses a 1200V 90A IGBT, IGBT drivers, a hardware PWM-module and a PC. It basically spins the motor at whichever frequency you set it to and it even uses the space-vector modulation scheme to achieve the highest possible amplitude. I know 90A isn't much but it's a start.
At the top you see the voltage with the little space vector "dent" and the current at the bottom.
There is one problem though: it is all open loop and it uses a PC. Also the PWM resolution is just 8 bits.
My plan is to put the controller program on a little µC which offers 16-bit pwms. For closing the control loop I want to start out with a speed sensor and thereby control the slip of the ACIM in some clever way that is still to be figured out. Since I have never seen any serious motor controller without current sensors and vector control I might have to implement that as well. There are closed loop sensors already on the IGBT-module but their output somehow didn't seem to linearly follow the amplitude of the current.
When all is finished I want to document it like the well known Open Source Motor Controller.
So... do you think this is a promising project worth continuing? And if yes, any suggestions?
Looking forward for replies
Johannes
----
State of the project
As of today there are probably around 100 vehicles making use of this project. There have been forks by "Jack Bauer", arber333 and others to use the technology in OEM inverters (Tesla, Ampera, i3, Leaf, ...)
Web shop here: https://openinverter.org/shop
Forum here: https://openinverter.org/forum
Tesla Boards here: http://evbmw.com/index.php/evbmw-webshop, Source:https://github.com/damienmaguire
Inverter Source code here: https://github.com/tumanako
Please let me know what else should be mentioned here.
I have been reading here for a while and I'm simply impressed by the projects shown here.
So today I want to make my first humble contribution.
Short story:
1,5 years ago I came up with the idea of converting a regular ICE car electric (how unusual ). I decided it would have to be an AC-motor since most of the complicated parts of spinning it are done in software plus it offers the best effiency. I also found out that standard ACIMs are really cheap and can be overpowered for short periods. Unfortunatly I also found out that controllers are really expensive.
Being an electrical engineer I decided to give it a try. My first inverter consisted of some BUZ50 mosfets and controlling circuitry around it. It basically worked but of course would only drive a 1:10 model of a car
So I scaled up and have now got this:
It uses a 1200V 90A IGBT, IGBT drivers, a hardware PWM-module and a PC. It basically spins the motor at whichever frequency you set it to and it even uses the space-vector modulation scheme to achieve the highest possible amplitude. I know 90A isn't much but it's a start.
At the top you see the voltage with the little space vector "dent" and the current at the bottom.
There is one problem though: it is all open loop and it uses a PC. Also the PWM resolution is just 8 bits.
My plan is to put the controller program on a little µC which offers 16-bit pwms. For closing the control loop I want to start out with a speed sensor and thereby control the slip of the ACIM in some clever way that is still to be figured out. Since I have never seen any serious motor controller without current sensors and vector control I might have to implement that as well. There are closed loop sensors already on the IGBT-module but their output somehow didn't seem to linearly follow the amplitude of the current.
When all is finished I want to document it like the well known Open Source Motor Controller.
So... do you think this is a promising project worth continuing? And if yes, any suggestions?
Looking forward for replies
Johannes
----
State of the project
As of today there are probably around 100 vehicles making use of this project. There have been forks by "Jack Bauer", arber333 and others to use the technology in OEM inverters (Tesla, Ampera, i3, Leaf, ...)
- Hardware
- Logic (brain) board based on STM32F1
- Simple 4A gate drivers
- Melexis current sense boards
- Isolated voltage sense board
- Software
- Bootloader for firmware upgrade without programming hardware
- Firmware with mature support for asynchronous motors and experimental support for synchronous motors
- Web interface using ESP8266 Wifi chip supporting Parametrization, plotting and firmware upgrade
Web shop here: https://openinverter.org/shop
Forum here: https://openinverter.org/forum
Tesla Boards here: http://evbmw.com/index.php/evbmw-webshop, Source:https://github.com/damienmaguire
Inverter Source code here: https://github.com/tumanako
Please let me know what else should be mentioned here.