The amazing Damien Maguire is an electronics engineer in Ireland and part of the very active OpenInverter team who reverse engineer parts of EVs and hybrids and manufacture new control boards for them to allow them to be reused. I bought this control board from Damien mostly populated with parts…
My first disaster…
The Prius Gen 3 controller board from EVBMW comes as a kit that you need to do some soldering on to add various connectors. I’ve been soldering for about 35 years. But only ever through-hole stuff. Never surface mount and never particularly fine scale. I watched the instruction video from Damien at EVBMW and thought, “How hard can it be?” The answer: £300 hard. In short, I borked my first board. Or rather, the mistakes I made were so bad that by the time I handed it over to someone a bit more talented, it was pretty much unrescuable.
So, a new board is on its way direct to the person who is going to solder it up for me, and I am now practicing my surface mount soldering on old circuit boards. I’m still screwing it up. The lesson? If you are AT ALL unconfident in your ability to complete the soldering required to put this board together, hand it on to someone else and spend some money.
UPDATE [2020-06-16]: 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.
