Project Corvolt

Ken Johnson
FVEAA Meeting - March 2024

Electrifying a 1963 Chevrolet Corvair 700 Coupe

This one is mine ⤴

Conversion Parts

  • NetGain HyPer 9 HV AC Motor
  • SME HyPer-Drive X144 Controller & Inverter
  • 7 x Tesla Model S 5.3 kWh battery modules
  • SimpBMS from Vero Electric
  • Elcon/TC 1 kW DC-DC Converter
  • Elcon/TC 6.6 kW Onboard Charger

Motor Install

Battery Support

Battery Module Capacity Testing

Charging



232 Ah (Tesla Battery Module, Brand new) / 32 A = 7.25 hours!

Discharging

via resistive load

Yes, that is a pile of old headlights... Hot, Smelly & Wasteful!

Regenerative discharge between modules

Logging Equipment

  • Raspberry Pi 3B with...
    • MCP2515 SPI CAN Transceiver
    • Two Python scripts
    • MQTT Broker
    • InfluxDB Time Series Database
    • Grafana
  • VeroBMS (aka SimpBMS) w/ Teensy 3.2
  • 100V / 100mA Shunt Resistor
  • UNI-T UT161B Multimeter w/ USB Interface
  • Contactor + Fuse + Disconnect Switch
  • Some wire capable of carrying 40A
								Raspberry Pi
  |
  |---[CAN Bus]---[VeroBMS]---[All Tesla Module BMS Boards]
  |
  |---[USB]---[Multimeter]---[Shunt Resistor]
  |
  \---[Network]---[MQTT]---[InfluxDB]---[Grafana]

Data Acquisition and Calculation

  • Total Current and Voltage from each cell in a module under test is recorded to the time series database
  • Averaged over a minute
  • Exported to a Spreadsheet
  • Now we can calculate:
    • Watts consumed per minute
    • Each module's Amp-hour and Watt-hour rating and State of Health %

Pressure Testing

Next Steps

  • Finish welding up battery boxes
  • Get the battery boxes mounted into the car
  • Wire up all the things
  • Setup cooling loops for inverter and batteries