Nice looking car for EV!!!!. By the way, may I ask?
How did you choose the motor and the battery in cluding the controller to satify your performance need?
I am in the planning stage of doing the conversion to meet quite similar performance
Nice looking car for EV!!!!. By the way, may I ask?Hey DIY Community!
I just purchased the donor vehicle for my conversion: a 2006 MINI Cooper S. I've started taking out the engine and plan to finish that by the end of this week. I'm completely new to the automotive and electrical field but I'm completely willing to learn and grow. My budget for this build is $5000 but I'm realizing that I might end up spending $7000 for everything.
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This conversion will be using a Netgain Warp9 DC motor, a Zilla 2K controller, and 4 Tesla battery modules wired in series stuffed in the trunk, if I can get my hands on some. My system voltage will be about 96V and will have 250 amp hours. I want to get at least 60 miles of range and be able to safely cruise on the highway, so a top speed of about 75 mph. I'm hoping to get the Tesla batteries either off eBay or from a Copart auction near me. I'm hoping that Copart is reliable enough because I've come across some pretty sweet deals on there.
I'll continue to give updates on this thread but I'm also going to be creating a blog, so I'll post updates here for that as well.
First, I looked for a motor that had a good horsepower rating, good rpm, had a large enough diameter, and weighed roughly 150 lbs. This motor has a hp rating of 32, a max rpm of 5000, a 9 inch diamter, and weighs 165 lbs. The rpm ensures that the car can reach a good top speed and the hp rating, diameter, and weight ensures that the motor can actually move the car, so the larger these three factors are, the larger the car the motor is able to handle.How did you choose the motor and the battery in cluding the controller to satify your performance need?
Yes so a 1k amp controller would be plenty enough but I came across a good deal for the 2k and I couldn't pass it up. The 2k controller would also give me room to grow and upgrade to better higher amp/voltage parts in the future.why did you decide on the 2k amp controller? I'm just starting to learn about this stuff, but it seemed to me like the 1k controller had plenty of capacity for your battery/motor setup.
I understand the purpose of the shunt and its placement in my circuit but I'm confused about the line that goes from the high voltage wiring to pin 6 on my meter. Do I just need to wire a line from one of the contacts on the contactor to pin 6 on my meter? Will this be safe?
That sounds good but I'm wondering if my potential 4/0 cables (I'm having some trouble choosing the right cables) will do for that current (ie. not blow up). Also the motor is rated for 500A and I'll probably set my zilla to limit the top current to 450A to protect the motor but I'll look more into that and motor cooling for higher performance.I have some potentially good news for you. You can push out a lot more than 32 hp with that motor for short periods of time. The controller you have is rated for 2000 amps, so hypothetically you could run 2000 amps thru the motor. Of course this would probably cause some issues, but it could work in theory. More realistically, you could run 1000 amps for short bursts of acceleration.
The biggest limiting factor for these type of DC motors is heat, since pushing more current thru them generates more wasted energy in the form of heat. If you force airflow thru the motor to keep it cool, you can get quite a bit more power out of the motor than what it's officially rated for. A neat perk of brushed DC motors.
If anything, 4/0 cables are overkill. 4/0 cables have a cross-sectional area of 107 mm2. To put that in perspective, Tesla uses 50 mm2 cables for everything high voltage. 2/0 cables would likely be more than enough, and with 4/0 I'd say you have absolutely nothing to worry about. I haven't heard of anyone using 4/0. 2/0 welding wire, or 2/0 shielded wire are what almost everyone uses it seems.That sounds good but I'm wondering if my potential 4/0 cables (I'm having some trouble choosing the right cables) will do for that current (ie. not blow up). Also the motor is rated for 500A and I'll probably set my zilla to limit the top current to 450A to protect the motor but I'll look more into that and motor cooling for higher performance.
Oh yeah that makes sense. I did realize this but I'm okay with that since I'm not that worried about top speed all that much, only want enough to go on highways which I believe I can do with such a light weight car. The cells have a good range from 22 to 24 volts, so I'm hoping to have the use of the full 96 volts sometimes, if that makes sense. As of now the cells read 23.1V each which I'm totally fine with.I just skimmed through the whole thread to date, and didn't see any discussion of the mismatch in voltages in the original description...
a Tesla Model S/X module is 6S, for a nominal 22 volts. Four of them will run (nominally) 88 V; 96 V is at the high end of charging, not what is going to be available in operation.
That depends on what "96V" means to the charger.The cells have a minimum of 18V so would I program my can-enabled charger for 72V, 88V, or 96V? I was thinking 96 since that's the max. Is that correct?