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Hi,

my name is Alex and I'm from Germany. After being a reader only for quite some time now, I want to show my Nissan Leaf Inverter mod for the second gen drivetrain. I'm doing this to build my own electric Mini.

At first I developed a plug-and-play PCB to put into the inverter. It has my own FOC integrated and it really works well. Here is a pictures of my prototype board integrated in the Leaf's inverter:

After doing this I was interested in controlling the original inverter via CAN- Bus and managed to reverse engineer the messages for my 2013 inverter and now I'm able to demand the torque and get all the necessary information from the inverter. After all I'm currently developing a small PCB that will turn the signals of my pedals into the necessary CAN- Bus messages so I can run my Mini with the original inverter and motor.

Thats actually all there is to say at the moment ;-)

 

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Hi guys,

sorry for the late reply but the project was part of my master thesis and it took some time so finish everything.
But nevertheless I build a prototype ECU to control the Nissan Leaf inverter and motor via CAN-BUS. In addition, the inverter had to be customized so that it is closed and has appropriate HV-connectors. At the moment the whole unit is installed into my Classic MINI electric car for real world testing debugging and it performs really well.
At the moment I’m not sure if I will make it open source. The inverter needs some serious machining to make it usable in another car, so its not a plug-and-play thing.
Unfortunately, I didn’t take pictures of the Drivetrain outside of the car but here are some pictures of the drivetrain installed in my Classic MINI (the drivetrain is under the charger but I will take more next week if you are interested):

And two short videos of the drivetrain on the testbench and working in the MINI (sorry for bad quality again but I will do better quality nexttime):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8UVol4CxRw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2Tz6eZ74PU

 

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Nice to hear that there is so much interest in my project.
To answer a few questions first:

1. my thesis is not public and also written in german

2. The inverter would not have to be modified, if the charger would be used further. But I have not reverse-enginnered it, because for many vehicles the height would not be enough. That's why I didn't see any sense in it at first. But I will soon build a second powertrain with a Nissan Leaf powertrain for a second project, then I can make some more pictures for the modifications.

3. I use the engine with the original gearbox and I have custom made drive shafts.

4. As traction battery I use Nissan leaf modules.

Here are some photos from below and from the batteries in the trunk:

 

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Thanks!Some more interesting features are coming soon.

The english title of the thesis is:

Investigation of a commercial drive train for
electric vehicles and implementation of control algorithms
unsing universally applicable hardware and software

 

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Hi there!

Sorry guys I haven’t been following this forum post for the last couple of months.

Just to answer some questions:

Yes, we are running 29 Nissan Leaf battery modules. 17 in the back and another 12 under the back seats.

The torque was limited at that time because we are afraid of killing the driveshafts and then other projects needed to be done and so we didn’t do final testing with max torque at that time. But we are working on the Mini now and installing our new Nissan Leaf ECU kit. I can give you updates next week or the week after whne the Mini is running again. ;-)

We have also done some other changes to the Mini hardware wise and I will post some pictures if anybody is interested.