It's Alive!

Well, sort of.

Last Thursday a storm with fairly high winds knocked down a tree in my backyard which fell on the power lines, phone lines, and the cable line. I and several family members have spent the last three days cleaning up the damage. I was without power till this morning because the tree damaged the power meter as well as the line and I had to have an electrician re-build that. Of course it now has to meet the current code which cost more than just fixing the damage. Anyway, I got to work on the car for a few hours today. I had ordered the connectors from Mouser.com to connect to the serial port on the controller. I connected them today and powered up the controller.

I have only the back part of the car finished and the batteries are still on a shelf outside the car so I connected the cables to them temporarily and tried to run the motor but it would not run. The laptop connection worked so I tried to troubleshoot with that. I read in Ross's and Tim's blogs that the EEXNoIgnSwitch and EE2ShaftDirection variables needed to be set so I set them but it still would not run. After poking around for awhile I found one of the wires on the main interface connector was loose. After fixing that the motor now runs. I ran it up a few times with regenerative braking on and off. With it on it stops the rotation almost immediately after releasing the pedal. With it off the motor takes some time to spin down. I can't wait to try it out on the finished car.

The air conditioning equipment arrived last Thursday but I have not had a chance to look at it much. I'll have pictures soon. I will continue with the work in the front of the car after I make a brief visit to sunny (I hope) Algeria for a business trip. I should be able to continue the work in about a week.