Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 8:26 am
It was very good to see yesterday Kelvin. It made the plugging event a bit more important as we had an audience!
We had some more good news today after a quick test down the road at 6am. I hit 40mph without a problem and had very nippy acceleration! I think the car will go faster given some decent road.
The cables seem to be a bit fussy when you put the seat back on - it seems you have to carefully close the lid of the underseat component without pulling any wires accidentally otherwise it won't work
I've also dumped the laptop. I think I'll probably take it with me to check charge levels when I'm out and about but as it's a really old machine with no network connectivity I wasn't too keen to keep using it.
Luckily for me my garage actually has an old 1998 iMac - same year as my car! - and I've rigged up a USB to serial connection to it. The iMac's main job is to provide me with music and Internet access for checking technical specs etc when I'm working on cars in the garage as I live in a coach house and the rest of the house is on first floor level!
With a bit of quick searching on the Internet I found a driver for OS X for the serial/usb device I have and installed that on the garage machine. Next a quick trip up to my office where I have my main work machine. I opened up a terminal , started an SSH session to my garage iMac and voila! I have charging status and info on my desktop machine from the garage! My car is HOOKED UP TO THE INTERNET!!! *Grins like a mad woman*
The window in the centre with all the numbers etc in it is the output from my car's BMS. It's currently showing a full charge (in fact it's showing over voltage based on the settings I gave it so has stopped charging) and is equalizing the cells; something the BMS does when the car isn't charging or being used.
Next: The road test propper!
We had some more good news today after a quick test down the road at 6am. I hit 40mph without a problem and had very nippy acceleration! I think the car will go faster given some decent road.
The cables seem to be a bit fussy when you put the seat back on - it seems you have to carefully close the lid of the underseat component without pulling any wires accidentally otherwise it won't work
I've also dumped the laptop. I think I'll probably take it with me to check charge levels when I'm out and about but as it's a really old machine with no network connectivity I wasn't too keen to keep using it.
Luckily for me my garage actually has an old 1998 iMac - same year as my car! - and I've rigged up a USB to serial connection to it. The iMac's main job is to provide me with music and Internet access for checking technical specs etc when I'm working on cars in the garage as I live in a coach house and the rest of the house is on first floor level!
With a bit of quick searching on the Internet I found a driver for OS X for the serial/usb device I have and installed that on the garage machine. Next a quick trip up to my office where I have my main work machine. I opened up a terminal , started an SSH session to my garage iMac and voila! I have charging status and info on my desktop machine from the garage! My car is HOOKED UP TO THE INTERNET!!! *Grins like a mad woman*
The window in the centre with all the numbers etc in it is the output from my car's BMS. It's currently showing a full charge (in fact it's showing over voltage based on the settings I gave it so has stopped charging) and is equalizing the cells; something the BMS does when the car isn't charging or being used.
Next: The road test propper!