Per our plan from the last entry, we have spent much of the last week cleaning the engine bay and components and preparing to start putting things back together. There’s still some cleaning to do (transmission mostly) but we’re now at a stage where we can start building. First order of business is getting a coupler made to link the electric motor to the transmission. … Continue reading Conscious coupling
Yesterday was a wonderful day. The sun shone and my daughter and I spent the entire day outside, working on the car. She proved, again, that her mechanical instincts are sound and, dare I say it, sharper than mine. While I was hunting around on forum posts for safe alternative jacking points, she was sat by the car saying repeatedly “Dad, it’s here.” She was … Continue reading Engine be gone
[2020-07-19] With the motor running and the rain falling yesterday, I put some time into the electronics that will run the car, beyond the inverter. I stripped out the existing ECU (what BMW calls a DME) from its neat little hidey-hole up against the driver’s side bulkhead in the engine bay. It sits in one of a pair of slots under a water-proof cover and … Continue reading Doing the can-can-CANbus
It has been another rollercoaster of a week on this project. At the end of last week I posted my inverter control board off to Jamie on the other side of the Pennines for him to test it in his setup. He found the same problems I did and set about trying to fix them. After much experimenting he came to the conclusion there was … Continue reading Rotation!
So, I’ve now ruled out human error on the inverter control board. I sent it across to a fellow OpenInverter forum member on the wrong side of the Pennines and he dropped it into his working setup. Sure enough, the DC supply voltage was all over the place. He’s kindly trying to work out why now. In the meantime, we’re cracking on. We’re making progress … Continue reading Pedal to the…plastic?
Progress over the last two weeks has been slow to non-existent. Two steps forward and two steps back. The problem is this: I am feeding around 30 volts into the inverter. The inverter is reading anything from 3 to 150 volts. Why? I have no idea. First thought was that the connection between the ADC (analogue to digital converter) on the microcontroller and the sensor … Continue reading The price of ignorance
