The Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV has two inverters, one for the front pair of motor/generators, and one for the rear. I’m hoping that the rear inverter I picked up very cheap (£100) will be able to drive my front motor, as an alternative to the Prius inverter that has been giving me issues.

The Outlander inverters can be directly controlled over CANBus so don’t need a new logic board adding in, though obviously you do need a logic board to control pre-charging etc.

High voltage connections

Inside the inverter there are three phase connections for the motor, two main battery terminals, and sued auxiliary outlets/inlets for the air conditioning system and the DC-DC converter/charger. These are pictured below.

Low voltage connections

There are two connectors on the inverter, one grey and one black. Mine were absolutely fried – looks like fire damage, though the inside of the inverter seems fine.

These connections have been documented over on the OpenInverter wiki. I’m copying them for my reference below along with the wire colours and numbers I have used for the tails I put in for testing – ignore the stuff in brackets:

Connector 1 (D211 – Grey)

• 1: Not connected (NC)
• 2: Unknown
• 3: Unknown
• 4: GND (Black)
• 5: CANBus Low (Grey)
• 6: CANBus High (Clear)
• 7: NC
• 8: NC
• 9: Unknown
• 10: Unknown
• 11: NC
• 12: RSDN (connection to ECU, unknown use)
• 13: IGCT – 12V (Red)
• 14: NC

Connector 2 (D212 – Black)

• 1: Not connected (NC)
• 2: TG2 – Thermistor ground for W-phase coil (Black) – Maps to pin 15 on motor connector (numbered cable 2)
• 3: TG1 – Thermistor ground for U-phase coil (Black) – Maps to pin 14 on motor connector (numbered cable 3)
• 4: RGND – Resolver ground (Green) – maps to pin 7 on motor connector 2 (numbered cable green)
• 5: S4 – Position coil 2 (Yellow) – maps to pin 6 on motor connector 2 (numbered cable 5)
• 6: S3 – Position coil 1 (Green) – maps to pin 5 on motor connector 2 (numbered cable 6)
• 7: R1 – Exciter coil (Yellow) – Maps to pin 1 on motor connector 2 (numbered cable 4)
• 8: NC
• 9: TH2 – Thermistor +ve for W-phase coil (Red) – Maps to pin 12 on motor connector (numbered cable 5)
• 10: TH1 – Thermistor +ve for U-phase coil (Red) – Maps to pin 11 on motor connector (numbered cable 6)
• 11: SLD (white)
• 12: S2 – Position coil 2 (blue) – maps to pin 3 on motor connector (numbered cable 2)
• 13: S1 – Position coil 1 (white) – maps to pin 2 in motor connector 2 (numbered cable 3)
• 14: R2 Exciter coil (blue) – maps to pin 4 on motor connector 2 (numbered cable 1)

CANBus deciphering

As an initial test I hooked the inverter up to 12v and CANBus and ran a sketch on a NodeMCU to capture the outputs (I have some more sophisticated hardware on the way).

This worked first time, much to my delight. So started searching around for some help deciphering the codes. I found an extensive capture over on the myoutlanderphev.com and used that to start to work out what I was seeing.

The first code that came up was ID 289. This contains information about the rear motor/inverter outputs.

Rear motor torque is calculated as “(A*256+B-10000)/10”. I take ‘A’ in this case to be the first bit, and ‘B’ to be the second. Normally I think the data bytes are in reverse order – 7 to 0. But plugging this in I got some weird results – negative 1000 ish. So I stuck the first two bytes from the left in and sure enough, I got zero, as it should be. So I carried on.

Rear motor RPM is calculated from “C*256+D-20000”. This should obviously be zero as well, but wasn’t, whichever bytes I put in. Hmmm.