The control board and modified inverter came back this weekend and everything seems to be working. Hit it with 12V and you get a WiFi connection and web interface. Hoorah!

I’ve also received from Damien a daughter-board that provides the 35-pin AMPSEAL male connector and have designed a new 3D printed part to enclose this. A few designs for this have been floating around the forum but didn’t quite fit my needs so I created a two part piece to enclose the daughterboard on the outside of the inverter case. You can download it from here.

Now that all the critical components are assembled it’s time to begin wiring everything up for testing.

We have a few spare old car batteries that we picked up for free from an auto electrician down the road to power things. Initially one will give us 12V for the inverter and ancillaries and the other two will give us 24-28V as primary power.

We’ve screwed all the HV components down to a board (the top of the same washing machine from which we got the ‘current limiting resistor’) along with some controls in 3D printed brackets – throttle, keyswitch, direction switch, and a button for the brake.

For now all the connectors have been terminated with connecting blocks and we are routing a motley selection of cables between them, including (of course) some that were rescued from the washing machine.