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
Project Corvolt Ken Johnson FVEAA Meeting - March 2024