EV Beetle Conversion Project

With my car having a type 1 inlet for charging, I need a type 1 to type 2 cable to charge on untethered EVSEs generally found for AC charging in public. These cables are usually pretty expensive, even used. I made one up for just over £30. The video below contains the details. Here I am grabbing some juice at a local carpark, I have a 3.3KW charger on board, so this is the maximum rate for my current setup. These particular EVSE's have a 3 phase connection and can in theory top out at 22KW.

 A fellow DIY EV'er friend is recording a series of chats with other DIY EV'ers, here's a link the Episode 1 featuring myself and the BugPlug. Enjoy

 With the removal of the engine, we remove the source of heat for the car and need some other way to supply cabin heat (or go cold). One option is to replace the heater core with an electric one, the problem is, this requires the whole dashboard to come out to remove and replace, not something I want to do. Enter the electric water heater from a Mitsubishi Outlander. This fairly small unit is CAN bus controlled and is reported as a 4KW heater. The problem was no one had worked out the messages required to control it, or if they had, they'd not published them. I had to spend hours and hours with this, trying to get a log from a working Outlander and working out the messages required to turn it on. The lightbulb was used as a visual indicator that the heater was working, using rectified mains as a power source, along with 12v to power the logic board.   After a bit of coding and prototyping heres an Ardunio sketch to control it: https://github.com/jamiejones85/OutlanderHeat...

 I'm really happy with the car as a whole, there's a few things I'd like to try and improve in terms of drivability. I currently have to use 1st gear to get rolling the switch to second for up to 65mph. I'd love to be able to just leave in second and do 0-70 with reasonable torque. I'm hoping I can tweak a few parameters in the Open Inverter Field Oriented Control software to achieve this. If not, I'll have to liven with it or change to a larger motor, such as the Outlander rear motor that can apparently generate 190NM of torque vs the 135NM of the front, which I have. Another option is to combine both the front motor and generator, reusing the outlander front transaxle/gearbox and replacing the Beetle gearbox. I've had to make some changes to my charging control code, after doing something silly and blowing the main 250 amp fuse, welding a contactor and destroying an inverter. I did have code to stop the charger for pulling current if the inverter has disco...

 Well the big day arrived and the Bugplug went in for the MOT. It passed 😀 I had the biggest grin on the drive home. I was expecting a list of things I needed to fix to get through, but a pass was awesome. I've now done 50 or so miles in the car, including taking a trip to the park with the kids and dog. So now while I can be using the car, there's still plenty to do: Motor Cooling, at the moment there's no oil circulating in the motor, on short gentle trips I've just been keeping an eye on the temperature, it's not gone over 50 degrees but will like to get some oil circulating as soon as possible. Charging, at the moment I have to charge with the key in the ignition, I have a little LM393 based circuit to close a relay when the plug is connected, I just need to wire it all in. Heating, while not really needed at the moment, winter is coming so I could do with a way of de-misting. Ill need a water heater, I don't fancy pulling the dashboard out to get to the he...

 So now the car is reassembled, I've spent the last few weeks doing various integration tasks and troubleshooting. Firstly the oil pressure warning and oil temperature errors needed to be snuffed out. The oil pressure input to the instrument cluster, needs to be grounded above 1000rpm to prevent an error, but if it's grounded before then, it'll throw an error. Another was the traction control light, with took some tracing, but it turned out the ABS/traction control control unit was looking for a specific message on the CAN Bus. A lot of tidying the wiring and tweaking code, all takes time. I also put in the water cooling loop for the charger and inverter. I've also create a web interface to the battery management system so I can see what's going on there while on charge and drive. Useful info is that status, highest cell voltage, lowest cell, but when on charge some more information is visible. And we had the first awesome drive of the project, I lost the audio in t...

  In preparation for attempting to get it's first MOT as a pure electric vehicle, I had to sort the handbrake binding very badly, the caliper body has corrosion that's holding the pads firmly against the disc, which is quiet scored and pitted, so while I'm cleaning up the calipers, I might as well stick some fresh discs and pads on there. While I was under the car removing the fuel tank, a good few months ago now, I noticed part of on of the sills corroded through. The underside of this car is in surprisingly good condition, with the exception of this area, it looks like someone has incorrectly jacked the car in the past, denting the sill and allowing corrosion to set in. It'll not be visible so doesn't need to be perfect.