MES-DEA TIM-600 Experience: I distroyed and repaired it.

Dear all

With this post I would like to share my experience so far with the MES-DEA TIM-600 motor controller. There is not so much information about this on the Internet so maybe this may help others that are using this controller. In general I'm quite impressed by the controller.

I bought a car that was once rebuild to electric. When I bought it, it hadn't been running in years due to failing battery (the original MES-DEA salt battery). So I had to build a battery and tune the motor controller to this new battery.

How I broke the TIM-600
---------------------------------
One of the problems I had is that keeping the battery relays open even when the car is parked takes quite a lot of power from the 12V battery. So I wanted to close these relays (precharge and normal relay) only when the ignition was turned on. However this meant that high voltage power only arrived to the motor controller when it was already turned on (had received ignition signal). This triggers the A10 undervoltage alarm. Problem with these alarms is that they do not go away when the condition is removed: i.e. you have to clear the alarm with the PC application.
So I thought I would be smart and remove the A10 alarm trigger (you can disable in app). I though that when the high voltage power (HV power) arrived at the motor controller a few 100ms later, and I would press the speed peddle only then, by then the alarm would no longer exist and the car would operate fully. How wrong I was ..... Within no time I had an additional A3 Power Failure alarm. My thinking: the A10 alarm seems to protect the motor controller IGBT's (high power transistors) from being operated. When you remove the A10 alarm, also this restriction is removed. As a result the IGBT's are being operated when in fact there is still insufficient HV power. This may result in power legs not being open/closed at the correct time and may subsequently damage the IGBT's....

How I fixed it
------------------
I opened the TIM-600 (see pictures). After removing the main PCB you will see 3 IGBT's below the HV + and - strips. I also removed the strips and checked the IGBT's for correct operation (there is nice videos on youtube how to do that). I found one of the transitors in one of the IGBT's to be gone. I ordered a new IGBT on AliXpress (60 euro) and replaced the old one (new cooling pasta). Luckily afterwards everything was fine again (nothing else replaced).

Lessons learned:
-----------------------
1) Do not disable alarms unless you really know what you are doing.
2) A3 Power Failure alarm seems to indicate IGBT failure.

Other aspects:
--------------------
a) The PC application I used indicated quite erronuous parameter descriptions. E.g. many parameters that are indicated as ("not used") in fact do have meaning. The parameter description from the manual was ok.
b) The main parameters to adjust when you insert a new battery are P241(max HVbat voltage) and P242 (min HVbat voltage) I am especially impressed by how the motorcontroller implements: it gradually throttles the used power when the battery comes near the P242 voltage level. This is very nice because it avoids a sudden stop of the motor (no hard cut at below P242) but just a slowly fading of power when you come near P242. I.e. it will make your battery cells not suddenly highly loaded when at low power levels while still allowing you to drive a little.
c) Also regenerative braking works nicely. However it seems that if the CAN bus is enabled, the motor controller wants to receive information over this CAN bus (I assume max HV bat voltage?) in order to use regenerative braking. So if you do not implement the CAN bus messages coming from the battery (I might still work on that in the future), you have to switch off the CAN bus with "connection" C52.
d) Note that in general parameters can only be changed when drivetrain active is turned off. In addition, many parameters require P60 to be set to the appropriate password as specified in P100 (default value is "95"). Do not forget to save to EEPROM if you want the values to remain after ignition off/on.