[JRP3]

I'm pretty sure those 12 volt lithium batteries are not meant for EV use, they are meant as vehicle starting replacement batteries.

[evlowrider]

In the EVnetics manual it gives an example tach:

TACHOMETER – this input accepts pulses (amplitude of 4V to 15V) from a wide variety of transducers to read the motor RPM (overspeed protection and idle can't work without it). On our dyno we use a generic industrial inductive proximity (“prox”) sensor with a NPN open collector output."

I have come across a relatively cheap prox sensor that looks like the one in the manual but it is a PNP type - does that matter at all?????

Thanks,
Pete.

[Qer]

As long as the signal is clean it shouldn't matter. The controller doesn't care about the pulse length or anything like that, it trigs on the positive flank and measure the frequency. Just make sure the signal's as clean as possible, even though the noise filter seems to work fairly well it still degrades the accuracy.

[Tesseract]

Originally Posted by evlowrider

I have come across a relatively cheap prox sensor that looks like the one in the manual but it is a PNP type - does that matter at all?????

Doesn't matter at all - either type will work fine, you just need to use a pulldown resistor (from TACH to SGND) instead of a pullup (from TACH to S+12V).

The value of this resistor is not critical - anything from 150 ohms to 2.2k works fine which should accommodate just about any of this type of sensor. Even though very little power is dissipated in this resistor, the 1/2W size makes it easier to span from TACH to SGND, though I have managed to stretch a 1/4W resistor across those two terminals.

Any other questions just ask, and don't forget to update your code/logger to the latest version when you are ready to start driving around.

[evlowrider]

Originally Posted by evlowrider
The sort of thing I am thinking about is having a sport/economy setting for example on my dash and to be able to switch between those modes by making the necessary calls to change the controller settings (on the fly even?).

Originally Posted by Tesseract

This is an incredibly popular request but we haven't quite decided on the best way to implement it (without cluttering up the web interface page).

Tesseract or Qer - can you confirm whether the controller can handle setting changes to the Soliton1 while driving.

For example to automatically switch between two preconfigured settings from a 3rd party software using the same methods as the default Web Page console.


Thanks,
Pete.

[Qer]

Originally Posted by evlowrider

Tesseract or Qer - can you confirm whether the controller can handle setting changes to the Soliton1 while driving.

For example to automatically switch between two preconfigured settings from a 3rd party software using the same methods as the default Web Page console.


Thanks,
Pete.

Simple answer; I'd recommend against it since it's really something we test.

Longer; It doesn't seem to mind when I flip around parameters on the fly while testing, but there's always a very short time period where some settings might be undetermined or even conflicting (the code is not written to be fail proof for situations like that) so at least theoretically flipping the parameters on the fly like you say might cause unexpected results.

A better solution; In 1.4 the IO-module is rewritten so that the special limits are rewritten to a more general throttle limit. If it's enough for your needs, consider upgrading as soon as we release the new version. If you need to limit more parameters, please let me know which ones (and why) and we'll consider it for 1.5.

[DIYguy]

I hear that 1.4 release will include a output to control the coolant pump....so that it doesn't have to run all the time, only when controller reaches a certain temperature. Can you elaborate on this nice feature at all?
Any hints of other new goodies to come with this release?

Gary

[Qer]

Originally Posted by DIYguy

I hear that 1.4 release will include a output to control the coolant pump....so that it doesn't have to run all the time, only when controller reaches a certain temperature. Can you elaborate on this nice feature at all?

It's pretty straight forward. You select an output on the controller to switch on the pump and when the controller reach the temperature when it'll switch on the fans (~40C) it'll also switch on the pump. Not much more to elaborate about it...

Originally Posted by DIYguy

Any hints of other new goodies to come with this release?

• The special limits (for LVC, motor snap switch) has been unified to one simple limit (per customer requests) which will limit the throttle to a certain max percent. You can select all three inputs to different limits and lowest active wins. Can be both inverted and non-inverted.
• SoC output is skipped since it never worked well (and only did a somewhat useful work for lead-acid). Instead there's a pack voltage gauge output.
• The pack LVC now has a two point threshold so you define min pack voltage for no battery current and full battery current and the LVC will adjust linearly according to those two pints. For example, if you define LVC to 150 Volt at no load and 120 Volt at 400 Amps LVC will trig at 135 Volt at 200 Amps. If you define both LVC settings to the same voltage LVC will work like it does today.
• There's a button for writing all settings to a text file. It's mainly implemented to make T's life easier since he simply can ask a customer to save and mail the settings to him, which will be a lot more convenient than to ask the user to do screen dumps in the browser, but I trust that you people will figure out a use for it as well (like you did with the logger which was mainly implemented for debugging and dyno runs ).

However, the biggest change you won't really see. Most of the web server is rewritten to allow for the html to be compressed to use less flash memory so we can keep implementing features. Things started to get a bit cramped on the inside...

The web server now uses a kind of template page system which makes it a lot easier to add new features too, like the writing settings to file-feature. Wouldn't have happened otherwise. The penalty for this is that the web server is a bit slower now, but since it's a motor controller rather than a search engine we're talking about I figured it was worth it.

[DIYguy]

Thanks for the reply.
I suspect the pump circuit will require a relay since IIRC the outputs are rated to 1 amp...?

[Tesseract]

Originally Posted by DIYguy

Thanks for the reply.
I suspect the pump circuit will require a relay since IIRC the outputs are rated to 1 amp...?

Yes, you must use a relay. The outputs are rated 1A *peak*, 0.5A continuous.