Wow.  It seems like a lot of things are happening in a short amount of time.  We pulled the engine from the truck and I sold it (post about it coming soon).  We have the materials in hand to make the motor adaptor plate and coupler.  I bought a brake …

I just finished watching this movie.  It doesn't make you feel good (unless you work for the oil companies I suppose).  I was already aware of a lot of the bits and pieces of this story.  I had read about key battery patents being held by oil companies. I was aware that most of the electric vehicles developed by auto manufacturers around the turn of the century were taken back by said auto companies and destroyed.  I was aware that the auto companies felt that there was not enough demand to support an electric car market.

I realize I have not updated this site with any new information or video of MOSFETs blowing up lately. Despite the lack of posts, we are still working on this project. In November we were experimenting with another battery balancing scheme that involves using inductors to transfer charge between adjacent cells. I got the idea from a TI application note. While I was able to make it work on a small scale, it was very inefficient and was going to prove to be a lot of trouble to get working in a useful way. Sorry I don't have any circuits or scope photos to show you for this.

An electric kart will be used for development and testing of the proposed motor controller, and possibly other components depending on feasibility.

The major components of the kart are as follows:

We have been spending the last few weeks collecting a lot of information about motors, controllers, batteries, etc.  We have all been getting a quick education in these topics.  But up to now we have not really made any solid decisions about how to do this conversion.

There are so many things to decide on when you start looking at what is involved in the conversion.  AC or DC system?  Once you decide that, which specific motor?  What kind of battery technology?  Which batteries?  Motor controller, charger ... it goes on and on.

I want to nail down some of these decisions so we can start making some progress on solving specific problems.  So here is what we have decided so far:

I have been thinking about doing an electric conversion on my truck for several years.  Especially when the price of fuel started to go up.  However, I thought it would be too much work and could end up being one of those kind of projects that I start and never finish.  Plus, while I feel I have a good understanding of how the system works, I don't have any fabrication skills to do things like welding brackets, etc.  My background is in electronics and embedded software.

I have also been greatly frustrated by the poor fuel mileage of the vehicles available