On that note, Matt (or anyone), fo you think you could run the leaf motor from a prius inverter?
Certainly, yes.
You'd have to run through a tuning procedure that, at first seemed like a bit of an EE black magic but now has a fairly simple-brained set of both video and text tutorial. I think you're likely to succeed. And, regardless, there's now a parameter database so if ever anyone does get a good set of robust parameters, you can just use theirs. Or, subscribe to it and have it update as people further refine it.
Why would you want to run a prius inverter with a leaf motor?
Form factor, cost, or perhaps the donor has a blown inverter?
It's always hard pinning down which open source project will see more development in the future, as it depends so heavily on the passions and efforts of the few doing the hardest essential work of it (some of us can supplement and make it easier to adopt or polish, but lack the ability to lead or sail the efforts into new waters). That said, the versatility of the Prius Gen 3 (and to some degree, the Gen 2) seems to be leading the pack, back and forth with the GS450H. New stuff is happening monthly. I haven't heard Leaf news in a year or two.
My suggestion would be to just use a prius motor if you're going to use the prius inverter.
I don't agree with that, there's no advantage.
Suppose as you do that you only had a Prius inverter and are not changing that.
The Prius motor is presumably weaker than the Leaf motor. What is gained from moving from a Leaf down to a Prius motor? What does this have to do with which inverter you chose? A Prius inverter is no more paired or suited to driving a Prius motor than a Leaf motor. The choice of motor and inverter can thus be made independently of each other.
Package-wise, I generally think it's simpler to keep the Leaf inverter with the Leaf motor, just because they mechanically mate and were designed that way. The Prius inverter is mounted elsewhere, so, it's fine for either motor.
My biggest concern with a leaf motor is the voltage required to run it. Obviously, you get less power at 200 volts of input DC power than at the maximum that the leaf inverter accepts (400).
Indeed, and that's an important distinction to be made. Many critics presume that motors and inverters MUST be run at their max OEM voltage, when appears to be never true. Perhaps if you're using the original CAN comms, the computer would probably crap out, but, inverter-wise that's not true. In fact, Toyota hybrid hardware (Prius/Camry/Lexus/Highlander/Corolla/etc) generally are built for cars with low voltage packs (200ish), and then use a boost converter built into the inverter enclosure to rack it up. However, tests show that it only does this when needed, not constantly, that boost converter is toggled in and out of use.
That said, do you need the additional power? Would you use it? Would you notice if your pack was run at a lower voltage? Depends on you.
My concern with leaf modules is the degradation and energy density.
Energy density, yeah.
Degredation, apparently first gens are awful, but after that they're all respectable, nothing frightening.
Again, battery considerations are agnostic of motor or inverter considerations. Choose what works for you.
I'm having a hard time finding anyone who used a prius motor and inverter (at least from a quick search). Could you point me towards some resources for that?
Because it's a recent(ish) development, with respect to how long it takes people to complete project cars, there aren't many out there. But that's the direction I see most people headed. To the point of, conversion classes taught last year amounted to somewhere around a hundred projects focused on repurposed hybrid hardware in a conversion.
You'll see a lot more of them on the OpenInverter.org forums, where the community that's done the reverse engineering and support for it has congregated.
I'd say there are more repurposed hybrid projects out there than all other current builds combined, based on, when people do their research, what seems most accessible and likely to succeed for them. So, use that as your metric if you'd like. This is of course speculation, I'm going by what I observe and mentally catalog.
Looking at the prius motor online though, it seems small, and, well, prius-like.
I would say it's not performance-oriented, no. I'm weak on the specifics of the degree to which they're abusable beyond OEM spec. As I said, inverters seem to be good for 800%, short term, but I wouldn't say motors would be anywhere close.
Obviously I'm pretty new to conversions and you have loads more experience, so what it looks like to me might not be very accurate in reality.
Don't let me overstate my experience, I've yet to actually complete a conversion myself, though that's typical of large projects for me, life halts progress. That said, I do make efforts to help others and to collimate the advice and efforts of the community into something more usable by beginners, so, that's my perspective. I'm offering the advice I'm seeing is working best for people with the current DIY EV meta.
