So, the time has come when I must let a professional examine my work and tell me what a mess I’ve made of it. I know this professional. His name is Jimmy, and I have been taking our cars to him for about the last 9 years. He is as honest and forthright as any mechanic I’ve met. But also prone to taking the piss out of me. So this could be interesting.
A good vignette of my relationship with Jimmy goes something like this, when I took my wife’s car in for some work:
Me, knowing it is a pig of a job: “Jimmy could you take a look at the blower, it has stopped working.”
Jimmy: “Big job that. The dash will have to come out.”
Me: “I know”
Next day, me, looking at the receipt: “Did you look at the blower?”
Jimmy: “No! Pig of a job that. I told you, you’d have to take the dash out. I don’t want to touch it! Anyway, are you telling me you can build an electric car and you can’t fix a blower?”
Reader, I ended up fixing the blower. Though at least thanks to YouTube, I found a way to do it without taking the dash out.
Ongoing snagging
Anyway, it’s going to be an interesting morning. Between now and then I need to bleed the brakes for a third time, as they are still spongy, and turn off a couple of warning lights.
This can be done in one of two ways. The right way is to hook into the car’s CANBus network and send the relevant modules (dashboard and active stability control) the right information to tell them there is a motor there after all and that it is all working fine.
The wrong way is to take the bulbs out. This isn’t really an issue for the engine management light. After all, there is no engine so I don’t feel bad about that. But I’d like the ASC warning to work properly for obvious reasons, even if the error it’s showing doesn’t actually mean the system isn’t working.
I’ve borrowed some code from Damien Maguire that should send the appropriate CANBus signals and have that loaded up on a spare microcontroller with a CANBus interface so in theory I just need to drop that in place. In theory…
I also noticed a vacuum leak that won’t be helping the braking system so that will need addressing. A 3D printed part combined with some RTV should do it I think.
I should probably give the car a bit of a clean too, to make a better impression. The kids can help with that.
Fully charged
In preparation for the trip to the MOT station I’ve been charging the car. This sadly remains a very manual process at the moment. As In, I have to sit by the car and control and monitor the charging with my laptop by sending/reading CANBus commands/data.
My Spaceballs/SIMP BMS (battery management system) board is in and communicating with the batteries absolutely fine. And I’ve sorted out the signal line that tells the system to go into charge mode. But when it does, it doesn’t yet send out the appropriate commands to the charger to connect to the charge point and begin pulling down electrons. This seems to be an issue with the CANBus communication, but I haven’t yet done any testing to work out what the issue is. It’s not going to stop me getting my MOT and that’s the focus now.
Other than that, there’s just a couple of lights causing problems. One side light, and the reverse lights. Hoping they prove relatively simple…
[UPDATE]: Fixed the CANBus issue with the BMS last night. Just some wrong SPI parameters.