EV Beetle Conversion Project

 Now I have the awesome adaptor plate I could set about getting the motor in place and start making up a bracket to support it from the engine mount on the drivers side. The passenger side is the gearbox and uses the stock mounting. So this is what I've come up with, with it mounted up I then stood on on top of the motor and gearbox, it was very sturdy. I need to cut it off and give it a paint, and maybe add some more strengthening sections, but I'll do that when it's time for the final assembly. I'll need to bring the charger mounts forward a little, it's fouling the brake servo, I also want to add a little more support for the inverter and charger, but for now my focus is to get the car to move a little under it's own power again. This means wiring in the motor resolver, tracing a couple of wires to my VCU (custom ECU replacement) to use for the CAN BUS to connect the inverter to the VCU for rotor position signals.  I also need to wire in the contactor control...

 Very exciting day. If you've followed these posts, you'll see that previously I'd made a very rough plate to mate the gearbox and motor, with limited success due mostly to my lack of accuracy marking and drilling the holes, I no longer need to make use of my ham-fisted attempt. A massive slab of aluminium of 350x300x30mm has become my new adaptor plate, with thanks to someone with the skills and tools to turn the slab in to this thing of bea uty. If you need CAD/CAM/CNC give  Garry @ http://www.gsmachining.co.uk/ a call Can't wait to get this in the car and the mounts made up. With a bit of wiring and some temporary fudges I'd be able to have the wheels turning.

 With the engine removed, there's now a shortage of weight upfront and also space, so I wanted to put the batteries somewhere under the bonnet. The only location available isn't ideal, but then again, you can only work with what you've got. The modules have nice mounting brackets in the case aluminium, so I'd be daft not to use those. I welded up an L shape frame to hang the modules on. I'm quite pleased with how this is coming together now. I still need to come up with some way of protecting them from the weather and road debris. Not be too long now. I may pick up a second pack and mount it in the old fuel tank location if I want more range, but as this is going to be for a local run about, I'm hoping for 25 miles on a good day. That should be plenty for visiting local family and shopping etc. Should be able to replace 80% of my driving with electric.

 Starting to get on with the job of finding places and making up brackets and mounting. We're getting ever closer to having some wheels turning under electrical power. Previously, I've had the Outlander motor turning, using the Gen 3 Toyota Prius Inverter, so now I've got the location for the inverter to mount. I've put a cross bar in, and the inverter and charger will hang from it. I'll also want to add additional support for both units before driving on the bumpy roads for real. I've given it a bit of black paint for rust protection. I really want to get something laser etched on to the nice flat surface of the charger. May once we're up and running...

 The Type 1 AC inlet from a Nissan Leaf, fitted into the location where the fuel filler used to be. I cut off the top of the fuel inlet, preserving the mounting holes and created a 3D printed part to epoxy on to it so that the inlet could be screwed in to place.  Quite pleased with this, although it still need to actually finish wiring to the front of the car where the charger will live.

 The wall boxes for charging EV's aren't actually chargers, they are just a fancy 240v (some can also be 3 phase) outlets.  The protocol is pretty simple, and can be found on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J1772 There's basically 2 signal lines, Pilot Proximity and Control Pilot, the control pilot is a 1 khz PWM signal, where the duty cycle represents the maximum current the car is allowed to draw. The proximity pilot is a fix resistance, one of 2 values. On denotes the plug is connected, another that the release button is pressed so the charger can immediately stop drawing current and so stops arcing. Inside the wall boxes are simply a EVSE protocol controller, an RCD, possibly a GFI and a relay/contactor. They are insanely expensive for what they are, so I've designed a simple circuit board that makes use of an Arduino Pro Nano, a cheap and widely available micro controller and a simple program that implements the bare minimum of the protocol.  The co...

 I picked up a 3.3kw charger from a Mitsubishi Outlander from Ebay for just over £150 delivered. This little unit is a CAN Bus controlled charger that's pretty flexible, it also has a pretty powerful DCDC converter built in to keep the 12v battery charged from the main pack, it requires liquid cooling. You only need 2 messages to control the charger, ID:  0x285 with byte 2 set to  0xb6 will load the control pilot to signal to the EVSE that a charge is requested. ID 0x286, the second byte sets the charge current desired (current * 10, so 30 for 3 amps), what ever is used to send these signals will need to watch the voltage to ensure it doesn't go over your desired battery voltage, it'll increase the voltage up to 420V I'll be using either a Teensy or Arduino to control it in the car, but here I've just got SavvyCan spitting out the messages and we're charing at 3 amps. :D  https://github.com/jamiejones85/DBC-files contains the DBC files to interpretate the CAN me...