Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

I’m delighted to report the first shipment of the first Tesla Model S drive unit with our Alset control kit. It is going to a startup in Oakland California that has big plans for electric boat propulsion – ergo the shipment. They have no need of a Quaif ATB Limited Slip Differential. That program is now well under way and drawings completed with a first manufacturing run scheduled for May of this year.

But you don’t need one for a boat. A boat poses some OTHER challenges, including a LOCKED differential so power is transmitted out one side of the gearbox. It remains to be seen what longterm success that poses for the gearbox. It wasn’t designed to work that way of course.

Boats pose some other challenges which I have outlined carefully for the purchaser. The primary one is that while cars accelerate and decelerate, boats typically run at quite high power levels more or less continuously. This takes them into kind of a different world of thermal management, and as many of you have heard me say numerous times, some days its seems the entire EV task revolves more around thermal management than electrical power.

Fortunately, boating provides its own solution to this problem to some degree. A LAKE makes a fantastic HEAT SINK. And so I have pointed him toward some through-hull heat exchangers where he can pump a lot of coolant through a heat exchanger that actually hangs in the lake water. And so instead of a liquid coolant to air heat exchanger transfer, you have liquid coolant to cool liquid heat exchange which is several ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more efficient. Probably need a largish fill tank, two through hull heat exchangers and pumps, etc to actually do this. But I think it can be done. The problem of course is that Tesla’s drive unit has the motor and inverter on the SAME coolant loop. This is why Tesla Model S owners who have taken their cars to the track have suffered such universal disappointment. Two laps on a nice track and you’re done for an hour or so. The inverter goes into current limit, and you limp back to the staging area in humiliation. The system works perfectly well for street driving, but when you go into the rigours of track racing, it’s a fail. You just can’t get rid of the motor heat quickly enough to keep the inverter below its 85C threshold.

I don’t actually pretend to know how all that works out on a boat. But I think he’s got a shot with a couple of largish through hull heat exchangers and a largish fill tank. I would use the tank to hold and have THREE pumps. One to pump it through the drive unit. And one for each of two heat exchanger loops. The object is to keep the fluid in the tank below 55C for the inverter.

In any event, we shined up one of the drive units with some aluminum polish and was delighted to see it polish up like a new dime. And as of this morning, it is scheduled for pickup on a pallet and shipment to California.

Along the way, the guy ordering all this wanted to provide his OWN drive unit purchased elsewhere. I don’t really know WHY he wanted that. I suppose he thought he could get it for less money. But he actually bought it from a guy who I buy most of mine from.
I explained that there were some interesting things going on in the Tesla space, and I had no confidence our system would work with all drive units out there. But if he wanted to ship it here, we could work with his drive train, but we had to test it here if we were to be involved at all.

FOR..TUNE….ATE….LY. It’s good to be me. Our system would not make the new drive system peep. It talked CAN. I can communicate with it. But it does not want to go into drive and turn the axles. And with one of ours right next to it, with the same harness and production compoenents, that one DID turn.

So our customer immediately begged to purchase the one I had wanted him to take in the first place. Leaving a bit of a mess. He had gotten a 14 day warranty against arriving DOA. But the seller insists it’s not really DOA. We just don’t know how to work it. Which is a bit circular in that we are the only ones that know how to work ANY of them. The only one that has made a single Tesla Drive Unit turn except us is Michal Elias, by REPLACING the entire control board in the inverter – not a solution we are at all attracted to.

But the supplier takes the bizarre position that it WOULD work in a Tesla so it cannot be DOA. Which is conveniently extremely difficult to prove one way or another. Making the DOA warranty not worth the e-mail its printed on. He knew full well what the customer was doing with the motor and it is indeed DOA for any practical purpose. But that’s rather between them.

The rest is again more or less absurd. There is ZERO market for salvaged Tesla drive units in Teslas. Due to some problems had on early versions of the model, Tesla has had to replace a number of the drive units. This reached such a level of concern, they extended the 8 year 100,000 mile battery warranty to cover the entire drive train. And to shut down the chatter, if you just allude to noises from the back of the car, they now change out the entire drive unit without question really. This ploy has been effective, but for some this has resulted in three or even four drive units in the same car. We have an early 2013 with 10,000 miles on it and so far, not a peep. But as a result, NO ONE would ever put a salvaged drive unit in a Tesla because all operational Teslas are still covered under the drive train warranty. And if they weren’t you would still be better off buying a brand new one from Tesla. So we have this bizarre circular conversation over a DOA warranty, on a unit that is DOA at the moment. I never got such a warranty from the same guy after buying six or eight of these. Of course, it never occurred to me to ask for one. And if he HAD given me one, I’m not sure what it would mean.

It does kind of prove the policy of “we build em here, we test em here, and no you can’t have anything until I SAY it says Haines.” Imagine this guy with an unknown motor, our kit, it not working, and we’re trying to fix this by telephone and e-mail between Cape Girardeau and Oakland. 100 telephone calls and 3000 e-mails won’t fix it, but with $15-$20k invested, he IS going to want to talk on the phone and send e-mail until he can find a bad guy to blame. I’m not signing up for ANY of that. It would be an impossible situation.

Incredibly, the seller contacted me to ask if I would GIVE the guy MY motor, previously bought and paid for from him, and take the lame one in its place. ????? I told him I had already sold the guy the other motor and he was enraged that I “stole” his customer. And so you can see what this all gets into. Minimum of two parties unhappy over what I’m trying to do to ENABLE better vehicle builds in the future. And at this time, salvaged Tesla Model S drive units are worth about $400 for scrap metal if you can’t make them turn. And so far, we are the only entity that has made one turn in public.

And I remain totally convinced that if we can enable YOU to build better, prettier, more effective vehicles, that you and that car will influence many many others to view electric vehicles more positively leading ultimately to a transformation entirely away from fossile fuels and into magnetic drive for ALL personal transportation and really in the grand scheme of things quite soon. Probably another six or seven years but to me that is soon. And the Tesla MOdel S drive unit is the crown jewel of all EV components as far as I am concerned. There’s a couple of things I would do different. And I believe they will. For example, the smaller 170kw Front Drive has TWO cooling loops, one for the motor and one for the inverter. But it IS the best available on-planet.

Which rather begs why I do all this to begin with. Despite the rumors of a cash-crazed EVTV attempting to rape all vehicle builders everywhere for the maximum possible ducats, it has really been no secret that I have more than enough resource to live out all my remaining days playing bridge at the club when the weather doesn’t support a golf game and sipping gin and tonic until I am permanently inured to the vicissitudes of malarial Anopheles gambiae. We price things based on repeatable sustainability and use the reaction as a vote to either redouble the efforts or a pretty good indication that nobody really values or wants it and not to waste time with it. But dealing with those who truly are all about the money can be tiresome. Everyone, it seems, has an axe to grind and how it is viewed becomes entirely a self-serving version of whose ox got gored.

My mission with the Tesla Model S drive train for me personally is to minimize product support issues and avoid disappointing customers to the point that our reputation and trust is diminished. And yes, I’ve seen some potential problems from the beginning.

But I was FLOORED by the reaction to the last video. With three drive units performing flawlessly in front of me, and one that we have never before encountered but does not work RIGHT OUT OF THE BOX, there was an ERUPTION of cheering fans that would do Donald Trump proud GLEEFULLY giggling like school girls that they knew we would fail all along. They were actually hoping and praying for our failure all along and were DELIRIOUSLY happy that “we had failed.”.

Now its true I’m not talking about the EVTV cognoscenti. Not at all. But the dilettante newbie wannabe poseurs on Tesla Motors Club again. I know. I swore I wouldn’t peek again. But the theories, along with the claims, are totally preposterous. Yep, the immobilizer got him. Secret codes. Info from the BMS. High Voltage Interlocks. Limp Mode. The theories rage. The one that finally caused me to understand what I was dealing with in the case of one of these guys that I had kind of accepted to work with a bit, was the insurmountable claim that in fact, the ones I DID have working were working in the of course well known 80kW LIMP MODE and so didn’t REALLY work at all, they just appeared to. Not only did I have one I would NEVER be able to turn, but indeed the ones I was turning WEREN’T REALLY. The code doesn’t lie and in a miraculous 45 minute disassembly of the actual machine language FROM the inverter, he could state unequivocally that I NEVER HAD MADE ONE TURN. It only APPEARED to have turned and you can take it to the bank Rubio, THE CODE DOESN’T LIE.

Unfortunately the poseurs do. Unashamedly.

As it so happens, I HAVE done a little bit of machine code reverse disassembly. Sufficiently successfully that the owner of the code actually took me under his wing, gave me his source code, and indeed we became partners. But it is heroically ugly. It doesn’t happen in forty five minutes or even a day. And you of course DO have to know what processor it runs on or their is no point starting the process. These guys know JUST ENOUGH to convince themselves of their own self aggrandizement, and perhaps fool a few of the truly lost. And I can report they become absolutely ENRAGED if you call them on it.

In any event, reversing machine code back into assembly and making any sense of it IS doable but it is kind of a last resort. And while I DID probably clear a million dollars on my PIMP program for TBBS in its day, being the first mail port using UUCP ever done in assembly language (and the last as far as I know) a million probably isn’t enough to go through all that again. I DID actually meet my wife at a PIMP (Personal Internet Mail Processor) party in the presidential suite of the Weston in Atlanta, so I guess it was worth doing it. But that was what I did to decompress and have FUN when I was publishing Boardwatch Magazine.

And if you can do it between e-mail messages on a processor that you don’t even know what it is or who makes it, you’re beyond a genius. Your a delusional wannabe poseur and really really need some medical supervision and probably ongoing for some time.

But it also laid bare how woefully ignorant of the BASICS of electric vehicles these guys are. With a little game coding skill, they think the car is easy. As you all know, not exactly. First an IMMOBILIZER is a particular reference to a specific thing in automobiles. It refers to the use of an RFID or radio fob to enable you to START the car. I think they believe that it somehow “disables” the “engine”. For the driver, that appears to be the effect, but of course it is a conversation with a receiver that then is linked to the Engine Control Unit (a multicontroller) which then just doesn’t do any of things it must do to START the engine. The engine doesn’t have any part of it. Or in an electric car the inverter. You COULD disable the inverter. It just never would occur to anyone designing such a thing to do so. You tend to hold transactions of that sort in the ECU or in the case of the Tesla, the MCU (the computer with the main console) because that’s where the processing power and acres of memory are located. It simply does not ENABLE the engine or in this case of inverter until it is good and ready to do so and that is suspiciously close to about the time it gets a valid RFID. So you would infer that it does IMMOBILIZE your car. But the engine, the inverter, the tires, the windshield wipers, and the seat heaters all don’t know very much about all that.

Similarly, the concept of an 80kW LIMP MODE is absurd. Of course, like DOA, it is a bit difficult to prove or disprove – which is exactly why it was proposed. I can, if I at all needed to, put a load on a Tesla Drive Unit and test it for power. The problem is testing it for 350kw. I don’t have a 350kw generator. Indeed it is just a dangerous amount of power outside of a car. Indeed, it’s actually a dangerous amount of power IN the car. But even cranking 80kw to 100kw starts to make steam and whistles and the building to shake. So it would take quite a bit to set that up (needlessly) and comfortably it would not disprove the assertion. Of course, you have to question where the assertion came from in the first place.

But the telltale had nothing to do with the code lying nor not lying or there being any code to read. It was the gleeful assertion and the lack of knowledge as to what “limp mode” might refer to.

In an inverter, there is almost always a temperature sensor, and almost all inverters use the same temperature to safety itself. 85C. And at that temperture, the software simply limits the current output of the inverter to prevent the temperature from exceeding 85C. And it will do so right down to NO current if it has to. Properly referred to as current-limit, it is often termed “limp mode” because you can still drive just enough, maybe, to get back to the shop if you take it easy.

We have actually simulated limp modes based on state of charge, to save our batteries. We usually set it up where the car accelerates very slowly to 20 or 25 mph and not beyond. You could “limp” off the freeway and into a gas station or maybe home if you were close enough but even your “daughter” would know something is badly wrong.

Most of the cars we have built have been 80 KW FULL POWER on a good day. And while it is true that the Tesla is a bit heavy at 4600 lbs, an 80kW LIMP MODE would be about an 11 second 0-60mph, equivalent of the production acceleration of the 1957 Porsche Speedster, and with obviously no RPM limit a top speed of 130 mph. In other words, that ain’t limpin. Indeed, I think I could take a Tesla car and put an 80kw motor in it and a 100 mile per charge battery and it would be marketable – at maybe $25 to $30,000.
It would be sedate. But fully functional.

Actually with a 9.73 ratio, I would say 0-60 in nine seconds. So the whole concept is comically unschooled.

Let’s see. IT has to have voltage and current from the BMS. I hope so. We have voltage and current from the ISA and putting it into a BMS message is trivial. I kind of doubt it, but easy enough to do.

Oh yes, HVIL. One guy actually believes he has proven this one with a charger I think it was a wiring coincidence. But I’ve actually BITTEN on this one now TWICE. Otmar proposed it one time and I laughed out loud, but he IS Otmar and so for historical reasons I have a natural tendency to defer to him. So I had to try it. Made no difference at all. I tried it again this week. And again no difference.

The theory is that the device has a 60 ohm resistor in it and the BMS passes a voltage that causes exactly 20 ma of current to pass through a “loop” of all the major units. The charger, or inverter, in theory can then monitor the voltage drop over this resistor and either operate or not operate depending on what it sees.

Totally preposterous. No one would design such a thing. What they DO do often, is safety the high voltage system. In the Coda, they use a Delphi connector that is specifically designed for this. It has a separate little HVIL connector riding on top. And so the battery pack monitors this loop through the chargers, dc to dc converters, inverter, etc to make sure they are all in place and connected before energizing the contactors and connecting high voltage to a cable that might be dangling or otherwise not secured.

Tesla does the same thing, and in the same place. The battery module has contactors in it and it runs an HVIL loop out the battery and through about everything. Some things have this 60 ohm resistor and some not and some have lid switches and some not, but you have to make it entirely around the loop winding up with a known resistance value (beyond a simple short) before it will close the contactors and apply high voltage.

We have a couple pins on the inverter, and a 60 ohm resistor inside. But the inverter doesn’t care anything about it. THE BATTERY DOES. And since we don’t have a battery or contactors there’s no point hooking them up. In any event, on our original motor and again this week, I hooked up a 180 ohm resistor in series with 5volts for 20 ma and of course it has no effect on anything. These guys are reading messages from God in cloud formations, and KNOWING better I go for it anyway. MOstly because it’s simple to check. But it’s just a preposterous concept. It would be designing failure IN to a perfectly operational device on purpose and to no end I can conceive of. High Voltage Interlocks are COMMON PRACTICE and done more or less the same way every time.

So my faith in the better angels of human nature takes another bit of a blow. But beyond that, it is just silly noise. ANd I DO know not to upset the animals in the menagerie or even visit there.

Will we get the other motor working? And what of our other motors and controllers?

I don’t know. First, I’m not sure who the other motor and inverter belong to. I know we’ve changed the seals, the fluids, and polished it up. It isn’t leaving here until that is addressed.

Here’s the working theory. Tesla has indeed updated the software – the firmware – in the inverter to provide some sort of versioning handshake. All units removed from cars wrecked BEFORE that update should be mine. All removed from cars wrecked AFTER that update would appear to have some additional features so far unknown.

If that’s the case, I already have the software. Should be in my car. When we first start the obnoxious motor and inverter, it spews forth 356 frames of 5F4 message id. Encoded in that is an ASCII string describing some sort of four digit code that looks a bit like a month/day thing. It then quits sending that. It sends normal CAN after that. But we cannot make it spin.

On my car, it sends ONE 5F4 frame when FIRST STARTING UP and then a few seconds later ONE 5F6 frame with a similar number. I’m assuming the car returns one of the intervening messages to satisfy this handshake request.

To make it work, we either have to:

1. Figure out what that response is.
2 Figure out how to reflash an earlier version of the firmware into the inverter.

My preference, even if 1 is easy and it looks to be, is still 2. This would protect us from ANY future updates they might want to perform. Some automakers do indeed serialize their major components mostly to defeat your right to repair. While I would be disappointed if Tesla did this too, I would be a little surprised as well But its possible.

If we can download the old version and use UDS or whatever to reflash it into any drive unit, we’d be good.

And what of the D version – the front motor. It uses torque commands – no throttle input.

The answer is I don’t know. And that’s a good thing. You see, when all of this is easy, or when I do know enough about electric vehicles, to satisfy my own curiosity, I’m outta here. Just as I left the Internet. I’m on loan to electric vehicles until it’s future is assured and my intellectual curiosity is satisfied.

But the gleeful cheering and chortling is comical. Up to and including 128-bit RSA, we can break it. It’s about time and resource and how many times we want to reset it and do it again. It really is not unrealistic to set one up and let it chew for 3 months around here in automated fashion. Like mining Bitcoin.

But it won’t need all that. There’s only a certain amount they are going to go through before it causes them more problems than it solves. So I can absolutely count on a pretty meager level of effort to deploy and a similar level of effort to work around. The DMOC645 was a puzzle. The Coda was a puzzle. And this has already been a puzzle. It’s a bit more of one if this theory holds. And there is still the possibility that I was standing on a connector or had a pin pushed back anyway.

As I said, if I knew how it was all going to come out, I wouldn’t bother with it.

If it turns out to be REALLY HARD, I have six or eight drive units laying around here pulled some months back that are going to be REALLY valuable.

This week I have kind of concluded negotiations to have a specific thing built in China that we’ve talked about before. A DC CHAdeMO charge station. It will be under $25,000. Instead of a 3-phase 380v ac power input, it will use DC 150-500 volt power from a battery bank. It will do the full CHAdeMO 50-500v spec output at up to 125 amps (50kw) AND it will include a Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) solar charge function to charge the mother battery bank from solar panels. Would you believe I just have not found anybody who did this and indeed not found anybody that would even consider making me one, that just bypassed the AC input so I could use DC.

These guys have agreed to a very wide input (150-500vdc) and even wider output (50-500vdc). I suppose I could be completely wrong about this and biased because of the $55,000 AmerenUE wants to put 3-phase in my shop. But I think 3phase power is evil.

1. It’s not allowed by code almost anywhere in the United States in a residence. This includes apartment buildings and complexes. You just cannot install it at any price. So those who want fast charge at home just can’t have it. Sorry.

2. When and where you do get 3-phase in the U.S, almost ALL of the utilities are running a special on 3-phase power. A special gottcha that is. While we normally price electricity at a fixed rate applied over your total usage, 3-phase is magically priced at the PEAK rate of your maximum usage, and that is applied to ALL your usage. Fast charging is almost the anti-thesis of this. We charge at a HIGH rate for a short period of time, and then don’t use any at all for hours on end. But whatever we use, will be priced at the rate applying to the peak current load we consume. It makes it quite a bit more expensive – almost prohibitively so.

3. It’s hard to get an installation in rural areas, farms, or out on the Interstate between cities. Guess what? That’s where we NEED fast charging. In town it doesn’t matter so much.

Beyond that, there is an underlying current across EV ville that I’ve been aware of for several years. “I want to drive on sunshine.” Explaining that their grid tied solar feeds INTO the grid, and then it comes back out to run their normal charger and charge their car, and so it really really is driving on sunshine is one level of abstraction too far removed. No, they want to SEE it charging from solar directly. Ok, through a battery bank then.

We are NOT going to kit this up into a total solar/battery charge station. I get it. YOU want to do that part. Ok. We’re going to source and offer the charge station part, full CHadeMO specification. YOU provide the battery bank and solar panels. And, yes, you will be able to generate your own fast charge station anywhere.

And while $25k is dirt cheap for a fast charge station, it’s still a pile of ducats. So I’m not sure there is a huge market for such a thing. But I hear about it regularly and we of course need it here at EVTV. It will let us complete the other end, the CHAdeMO kit for conversion cars. But it WOULD allow the well heeled Tesla owner with solar plant to spin his own home fast charge system.

So I’m kind of excited about it. The company uses the usual stack of AC powered chargers in their normal offering. Which is why I usually can’t get anybody to talk about bypassing the AC rectifier. They can’t. It’s in the modules. So this is kind of a total redesign. But it’s a company in China that does these things anyway, does solar battery charging, and has decided I might have put them onto a possible seam in the zone here. So it is going well so far. As it is developmental, I always have the option of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. But I’m holding a good thought on this one. We have some pretty good communication going here.

With three drive units in front of me running, and one that doesn’t, I suppose I can accept that we have failed. But that is just a very different thing for me. Whevever I succeed at something I always wonder what parts i could have left out and still succeeded. In failure, sooner or later I always know exactly why. For 50 years I’ve kept a book of sex education – every time I got screwed I wrote it down. Guess which experience provides the best material for the book?

So creative failure is the source of knowledge for me, and success, while vaguely pleasant, offers little for the future and is inevitably short lived. This has gone on for so long that on the prospect of failure, I go into a kind of excited stiffie, and faced with the imminent prospect of success, my mind starts to wander toward other projects.

Similarly, we are anxious for any help from the gallery. Its not so much we need the help, but we enjoy the company of talented people in common cause. A reassurance that we are not the only savages on the buffalo hunt.

But if you are looking for self aggrandizement, have a secret project that is going to rain all the riches of Croatius on you and your descendants for a thousand years if you can just keep it a secret (while getting it exposed on a video publication) I can’t help you. And you bore the shit out of me almost on contact. Wannabe poseur hackers need not apply.

If you are just interested, curious, and technically inclined, I’ll actually stop what I’m doing and its all about you as far as I’m concerned. What part of all this do you want to talk about?

Did I tell you the part about changing the world? Forever?

Jack Rickard

The post The Power of Creative Failure and Separating the Players from the Poseurs appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

Over half the children born now in the United States are fatherless connards. So very many of their parents are so addicted to opiates, cocaine, or methamphetamines that we wind up with hundreds of thousands of feral children wandering through the streets and schools and what little they have of homes that they are essentially raising themselves in a feral state. Home school has become a euphemism for “didn’t go”, and indeed our public school institutions have become “zero tolerance” on misbehavior so that it is now accepted that schools can simply put children out on the street, truancy laws notwithstanding.

We have a worldwide religion that has declared the United States to be the handmaiden of Satan and who anxiously await an Armageddon where they will defeat our military in a huge upset on the plains of Syria. The belief system is so profound that they appear to have an endless supply of adherents willing to blow themselves up for Allah in an attempt to lure us into this confrontation.

As a nation, we are facing a $21 TRILLION dollar national debt, default on our Social Security and Medicare promise that tens of millions of Americans, having paid into these programs for 40 or 50 years, are absolutely dependent on to survive their final years. The federal government has waged war on employers so long and so successfully that it is simply now out of fashion to employ people. Work is either outsourced overseas or huge investments in robotics and automation have become no-brainers when compared to the unknown and unpredictable costs of employing humanoids, who routinely steal billions from their employer benefactors.

Higher education has become a game where government and finance join forces to screw children for money – graduating them with huge debt and no possibility of employment of any attractive sort. Our society is breaking down into the haves and the have nots but our leaders have no clue as to what it is or why it is. It is actually a very clear class battle between the technocracy (the haves) against the luddites (the have nots) but our political leaders are blissfully unaware it is even going on.

Our infrastructure has reached the point where our airports, roads, sidewalks, et al across the land is reaching such a state of deterioration that we resemble more a third world country rather than the richest country on earth. At the same time, we have a decimated military that still posts tens of thousands of troops to South Korea, Germany, and across the globe in 720 different overseas military locations. We pay the MAJORITY of the costs of NATO a defense leagues established to protect Europe.

And our communal campfire – the established television media, have been totally taken over by young homosexual communists bent not on reporting the news, but in manipulating the balance of power in Washington DC and ensuring the outcome most favorable to their bizarre belief systems.

Washington D.C. is now a firmly entrenched political class, pampered and feted to a marvelous lifestyle by huge corporations who in turn received guaranteed monopolies and pricing power to extort money from the 330 million strong populace at large.

And to quote George Carlin, if you take the average intelligence of the average American, understand that half the people you meet today won’t be that smart.

Sounds pretty gloomy. Actually we have survived this level of distress before and in pretty good style. The sturdiness of the main body of Americans, working every day for a better life, a better community, a better nation, and a better world, has generally been able to carry all this in pretty good style. But they’re a little surley at the moment.

It is no secret that I supported Ben Carson for President of the United States. He cites the grandeur of the original design of a government by and for the people and called for his own version of Jihad – a national spiritual renewal as the solution to these problems. I agree with him. The original plan was a great one. And piecemealing these problems avoids the central issue. By the time today’s feral children are 30 years old, we pretty much have to reap what we’ve sown and suck it up. It is my belief that only a ferocious wave of spiritual renewal sweeping the land NOW is the REAL solution to all of this. I had deeply hoped the time was at hand. But it apparently is not to be. Many of us threw in with him, but it did not reach a critical mass and so Dr. Carson has now bowed out of the race. He actually bowed out at a conservative convention a month ago to a standing ovation. If you ever hear this guy speak at length, it is a profound experience. If you ever seen him on television, it is generally an embarassing disappointment. But we live in a video age.

Starting with 17 Republican wannabees and a half dozen democratic hopefuls, we are at this moment down to three Republican and two Democratic survivors. And there IS a bit of a movement afoot – led by the two LEAST likely candidates. Donald John Trump and Bernard “Bernie” Sanders.

These two have each tapped into some serious voter discontent resulting in relatively huge rallies somewhat made up of people who do not normally vote at all. Bernie tends to attract youngish idealists and Trump older middle class heartland types.

You would think these two guys would be politically totally at opposite extremes. Not precisely. They have two endearing features in this political season.

1. The central message of both is that we have a pampered political class in Washington, funded by large corporate entities: insurance companies, big pharma, oil, and finance who then legislate to the advantage of these companies and to the detriment of the American public.

2. Both men speak rather directly and with the ring of truth in their delivery. That is not to say that either have a monopoly on truth. But they are persuasive that they BELIEVE the things they are saying are true at the time they say them.

ALL the other candidates cynically say whatever they think will give them the best result on the road to the presidency, managed hour by hour, minute by minute, question by question. The replies are so cynically parsed, that it is glaringly obvious to even the dullest observer that the quick way to tell if they are lying outright and deliberately is to look to see if their lips are moving.

And so both have basically launched frontal attacks on the party establishments particular – Trump to the Republicans and Sanders to the Democrats. And predictably enough, both parties have reacted badly with alternating waves of panic to stop them, or panic to co-opt them.

Trump has proven masterful in getting media coverage from a media who detests him. This is bizarre on so many levels it’s hard to parse. But the net result is that he has spent $35 million in over a year, mostly on renting venues from his very large “rallies” where his faithful cheer him on. But he basically occupies five TV channels 24×7 who simply chant Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump almost without stopping for breath. He plays the press like a Steinway, and any time another candidate breaks into the news with any substantive, Trump simply steps to the microphone, blurts out something bizarre and outrageous, and instantly refocuses the attention on Trump.

In an absolutely bizarre turn on Joe Scarborough’s morning show on MSNBC, a young female reporter noted that you never got anything substantive from Trump – “All we get is sound bites.” The others on the show picked up on this like crows on a telephone line chanting to each other “sound bites sound bites”. Duh. The only thing this media is designed by the very nature of their format is for sound bites. Trump has mastered feeding them exactly what they are designed to eat.

Result is a very low cost campaign, almost entirely paid for by Trump or very small donors, and no big buck backers who he would have to cater too.

Bernie Sanders has brought this to a new art form. He has raised over $40 million per month with an average donation size of $27 for MONTHS out raising all of Hilleraries efforts at landing large donors and with a virtual lock on all traditional sources of funds to the democratic party.

And his television commercials! While most political adds look like a cross between the Blair Witch Project and a rural small town auto dealer commercial, Bernard Sanders videos verge on a new art form. They are astonishingly BEAUTIFUL both the sound and the video and are enormously powerful.

Hillerary enjoys an insurmountable delegate lead in the Democratic contest, yet Bernie scored 83% in Alaska and 73% in Washington state. They have basically set off a race war within the Democratic party with Hillerary enjoying huge leads among older black supporters and Bernie virtually wiping her out with young white voters.

Technically Hillerary cannot ever be president for a couple of brutally simple reasons. First, she reminds too many men of their ex-wives. Second, she reminds too many women of their husbands ex-wives. And finally, she’s pathologically dishonest. The Clintons left the white house broke and currently sport over $130 million in personal wealth. They did not get that from careful savings of her salary as Senator or Secretary of State. She received $845,000 from pharmaceutical companies for example and is a strong supporter of Obamacare. Obamacare costs employers, employees, and even the newly insured BILLIONS of dollars more than what we had. It ALSO costs the government billions more (us collectively). But it virtually ASSURES both insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies UNLIMITED PRICING POWER with the entire nation REQUIRED BY LAW TO PURCHASE and NO controls on what they can charge WHATSOEVER. It is the grandest wholesale
sellout of the electorate ever designed.

There is no way, that the democratic party is going to let Bernard Sanders get the democratic nomination. He can get ALL the votes from here on in. They will not allow it.

< And the Republican party? Same game. Trump clearly won Lousianna in the popular vote, but somehow, Ted Cruz has gone into Louisianna and come out with 10 delegates MORE than Trump AFTER the election. I actually like most of his positions. But the man is a pathological liar of Hillerarian dimensions and worse, has this sneaky nasty propensity to game the system behind close doors to declare himself the winner of elections he has absolutely lost. After EVERY loss the entire year, he has come out in front of the microphones to explain how it was actually a huge win. Bizarre. The truth is, NOBODY cares what Trumps position is on anything. I do not share a SINGLE sentiment he has expressed. I WOULD note that he has a strange way of uttering nonsense, and once the fact checking and heroic efforts to discredit him get underway, we find a whole world of information that would tend to support his "instinctive" knee-jerk reaction. He has a kind of animal cunning feel for these things that has actually been enlightening in a lot of areas. But make no mistake, if he can come out of Louisianna 10 delegates behind Cruz after beating him soundly in the election, the Republican establishment just IS NOT GOING TO DECLARE HIM THE CANDIDATE in Cleveland. Again, he can get ALL the votes from here on in. It isn't going to happen. This could actually lead to the total destruction of BOTH PARTIES. They at least will never be the same again. The millions who back Trump are not going to go quietly into the night when they literally steal the candidacy from him in prime time national television debacle in Cleveland. A bunch of babel about rules and regulations and so forth.

And while the Democratic convention could be a bit tamer, we are talking about fractions here. Worse, we could very well see Hillerary escorted in handcuffs to the speakers podium to give her acceptance speech before reporting to her trial date.

Understand that I don’t quite believe either man should actually be president of the United States. Trump has a long and successful career in a viciously competitive real estate market. But it has been continously litigious with dozens of lawsuits along with charges brought by the government over racial discrimination in housing, and other really pretty sleazy events. His personal vanity simply has not bounds. And he is a schoolyard brawler who goes into attack mode over any slight.

Bernard Sanders has a 25 year career as a communist politician who has never accomplished anything in any legislative session that you could discover without test instruments. His concept of an economy makes Lennin look like a serial entrepreneur. NOTHING he talks about could ever gain sufficient votes to pass and if they did, none of it works at even the mechanistic level.

But lacking a feverish national movement of spiritual renewal, we kind of have to Bern what we have to the ground in order to rebuild it. And Trump and Sanders have thermonuclear destructive potential of maximum megatonnage.

So I think THEY should game the system. I think Donald John Trump should schedule a meeting PRIOR to the Republican convention to humbly ask Bernard Sanders to join him as his vice presidential running mate. They should announce their candidacy and partnership PRIOR to the Republican convention. And the Republican Party will then have the very simple option to select Donald as their Presidential candidate, or select someone else to run AGAINST Trump/Sanders in a third party/write in campaign. They could still get on the ballot in some states and I think for once in a row a write-in might actually work.

In any event, it would absolutely assure the Republican loss not only of the Presidency, but probably both the Congress and the Senate if they nominate someone else. Or they can all Make America Great Again while Feeling the Bern. I happen to know how that comes out.

We suffer/enjoy a quick four years of total chaos while the pampered class in Washington realizes the grand ball is over, and while the American electorate comes to terms that they CAN actually have a bloodless revolution on prime time television.

From the ashes, perhaps…….a new day…. But both parties kind of have to start over, and they would be best served with candidates that speak directly and honestly to the American electorate. I actually look for a Green Party, a Libertarian Party, an American Conservative Party, a Minority Coalition Party, and probably An American Progressive Party to show up to the next election.

Repulicans and Democrats will join the Whigs, the Federalists, and the Proletarians as a historical footnote.

TRUMP/SANDERS IN 2016

The post Trump/Sanders in 2016 appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

At last, a video without the Tesla Drive Train in it. Actually, that’s because it is mostly about Tesla. We should probably rename ourselves TeslaEVtv. But I love the car AND the soap opera.

There was a Christmas Eve some years ago when Elon Musk was dead broke, unable to pay the rent, his Tesla Roadster undeliverable, and payroll in arrears. He got some funding literally at the 11th hour and survived.

His SpaceX adventure was funded and designed to make 3 initial launches. If they didn’t make it, they would fold the company and call it a good effort. Understand that all three flights were miserable ignominious disasters. Total blowups with no encouraging elements at all.

At the center of every successful entreprenurial activity is an over controlling detail obsessed authoritarian asshole. If you don’t know who it is in your organization – you’re it. I must confess an automatic admiration of intelligent persistence in total violation of reality. And that is Elon Musk to a T.

I’m told by a birdie that recent successes have made him even more insufferable than he already famously was.

But deservedly so. This week he illustrates the validation of all that that is and why it is so absolutely required for success.

We start with the March 31 unveil of Tesla’s much discussed Model 3. And while I have early, often, and repeatedly admonished our viewers of the crucial nature of the value proposition in the adoption of electric vehicles, I was indeed stunned by the immediate reaction to this car. Ok, it was a LITTLE cheesey that in an obvious move toward manipulation, he allowed people to put down a $1000 deposit on a Model 3 IF they showed up at a Tesla sales/service center BEFORE taking orders online. It was obviously meant to cause a bit of a stir as the whackos camped overnight to be “first in line”. Too predictable.

That they were plunking down $1000 on a car they had never SEEN even in concept drawing form, and had NO specifications for, makes the numbers even more surprising. But in all fairness, Tesla Motors had laid the groundwork with a strong history of 50,000 cars that in every case and every direction EXCEEDED expectations nearly universally.

I predicted over 100,000 registrations the first month.

But by the time of the unveil at about 8:30 PM Pacific time, he was able to announce 115,000 registrations. He also let slip that they expect the average “price” of a normally equipped $35,000 base model to actually be $42,000. That implies a one day product launch total of $4,830,000,000 which is undoubtedly the largest dollar sale of a any product, anywhere in history.

One week later registrations had slowed – to a first week total of 325,000 or $13,650,000,000.00 in implied sales. I say implied as the $1000 deposit is refundable. As you may recall, Nissan had over 100,000 early registrations for the Leaf – at a refundable $99.

But I find $1000 much more persuasive. And for a car you can’t possibly buy within two years?

I do have to confess that my early 2013 Tesla Model S P85, which has no autopilot features or hopes of any, is absolutely and in all ways the best car I’ve ever planted the Rickard tailgate in. It just is. The more I drive it the better I like it. That’s with sun visors flipping everywhere, door handles flashing in and out madly, tires shredding in all directions and a homelink autodoor opener that could star in its own sitcom. I have to do Yoga to get in it. And I don’t actually know HOW I get out of it. But I love it. I’ve only floored it twice and that was for a CAN capture. I don’t need that speed. I don’t need that acceleration. If I want to go fast and make a lot of noise I own a Lear 24D and I have the type rating to drive it. It will actually climb 7500 feet per minute. But I love the car.

I guess I expected a car for the rest of us at $35,000 that looked a little bit like a Chevy Bolt/BMWi3/Nissan Leaf. You know, the little hatchback with the teeny weeny wheels.

Instead, they rolled out the Model S again. Actually, they rolled out the Jack Rickard version of the Model S. 170kW rear drive. Plenty of acceleration for any rational human being 0-60 in 6 seconds. That IS as fast as we have made any car do at EVTV. And it is plenty quick. 210 miles EPA range. Supercharger equipped.

Yes, it is a LITTLE smaller. But they rearranged the interior, forfeiting the four foot deep dash that didn’t make much sense in the S anyway, and sliding the driver forward into the Frunk. Leaving the rear to seat three adults comfortably. Ok, I’ll miss the hatch. But not much. A normal trunk is fine for groceries. He claims it will carry a 7-foot surfboard. I could sell tickets to see me on a surf board at the beach. Actually I hate the beach. Just when I get a good nap going, a bunch of whale lovers always shows up and try to help me back out into the ocean, assuming I’ve grounded myself there.

Anyway, an upscale optioned model will feature 170kW rear AND 170kW front for all-wheel-drive and of course much quicker than 6 seconds 0-60 mph.

On April 8th, Musk scored AGAIN with a fabulous launch of the Dragon 9 SpaceX rocket on mission CRS-9. This is a capsule full of supplies sent up to the International Space Station.

The launch went perfectly. They had been trying to recover stage one on several flights to land on a drone ship out in the ocean. This borders on the absurd. A postage stamp sized ship about 1/10th the size of an aircraft carrier, pitching and rolling in the sea, with the wind blowing. They had blown the last two of these up and indeed lost video on both so we could only partly see it. Here’s a 4k resolution video of them STICKING CRS-9 like a lawn jart.

On April 10, Dragon capsule “berthed” with the capture arm on the ISS about 18 minutes ahead of schedule. It was full of Mousetronauts I understand. That must be some menu on the ISS these days.

As many of you may know, I have an odd affinity for the Smart ED electric car. We actually converted a Smart ForTwo to electric drive during EVCCON a couple of years ago and we have since acquired two of the later ED builds from Daimler. This was not the version with the Tesla components in it but a second generation with a different battery and drive train. Unlike the Tesla, the car is 2/3 door. I just walk up, open the door, and sit down. It’s actually very comfortable. And it buzzes around as an electric chariot. It’s not a GREAT electric car. And it does not pass the sniff test at $28,750. But if you can pick one up for $10k or so they are handy. No great range. No great acceleration. Just a little electric car that’s easy to hop in.

Daimler has never done any good with this car after spending nearly $3 billion on this project that was originally started by the Swatch Watch people. They put this horrible little Mitsubishi 3 cylinder engine in it that had a life span of about 40,000 miles, and coupled it with a manual transmission they converted to automatic (badly) with solenoids. Great little car design, with the worst power train ever sold deliberately. But as an electric, it kind of works.

They had 300 of these in a program in San Diego called Charge2Go. Charge2Go was kind of a car rental by the minute thing at 41 cents per minute, and they grew it to some 40,000 registered users. Last year, they retired the 300 original Tesla powered units with 400 of the new ones.

This May, they are pulling ALL of the 400 units and replacing them with the gasoline model. ??????

The program started in partnership with a company called Ecotality. They were supposed to install 1000 charge points in the San Diego area. They actually installed 400 before going bankrupt in 2013. And therein lies a tale that kind of explains a problem Tesla faces.

At any one time, 20% of the fleet of 400 is sitting either charging or needing to charge. There just aren’t enough places to charge.

Tesla of course sports an amazing 3600 (charge points) in 631 locations. But they just signed up 325,000 new cars. Now if 400 charge points is insufficient to service 400 Smart EDs, how many would it take to charge 325,000 Model 3’s, plus let’s say 100,000 assorted X’s and S’s? The answer is, I don’t know. And it’s kind of an apples and oranges comparison. The Smart gets maybe 75 miles per charge, the Model 3 gets 210. The Tesla Superstations are mostly for intercity travel. The Ecotality are all for local use. So there really isn’t a good analogy except that we DON’T KNOW how much infrastructure is necessary for 325,000 electric cars. We only sold 116,000 electric cars of ALL MODELS WORLDWIDE in 2015.

In any event, Elon has vowed to DOUBLE the number of charge points between now and when they ship the Model 3.

I STILL don’t quite get why GM and BMW in particular did not jump on Elon’s offer to “share” the Supercharger network. If he offered to share it with them, and asked EACH of them to pay 100% of the cost of construction AND operation of the entire network, it would have made PERFECT sense for them to do so. But they did not. Which makes ZERO business sense. Here I have a perfectly good electric car from Tesla that I can drive anywhere in the country quite conveniently and at ZERO fuel cost – that’s right, drive it coast to coast for nothing. Here’s a Chevy Bolt and a BMW i3 whose MOST NOTABLE FEATURE IS, that you CANNOT. That is THE MOST notable feature of the VW Golf, the BMW i3, the Chevy Bolt, and the Nissan Leaf. You CAN”T do what a Tesla can do.

The competitive disadvantage is INSURMOUNTABLE. I never leave town and I would still rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

Curiously, all three companies are solid backers of an entirely different standard – the J1772 Rev B Combined Charging Standard – CCS. This is the UGLIEST plug in all of electronics, and beyond that it is WEENY – unable to even do the 125 amps of CHAdeMO.

It’s only merit is that carmakers have one chargeport on the vehicle, instead of two. I have to point out that Tesla has one, not two. And it is gorgeous.

Instead of the ubiquitous CAN protocol, it uses the HomePlug Alliance GreenPHY protocol. HomePlug is the family name for various power line communications specifications under the HomePlug moniker, with each offering unique performance capabilities and coexistence or compatibility with other HomePlug specifications.

Some HomePlug specifications target broadband applications such as in-home distribution of low data rate IPTV, gaming, and Internet content, while others focus on low-power, low throughput, and extended operating temperatures for applications such as smart power meters and in-home communications between electric systems and appliances. All of the HomePlug specifications were developed by the HomePlug Powerline Alliance, which also owns the HomePlug trademark. The whole concept of Internet over powerline just never made the trip, dying a quick and almost silently painless death shortly after announcement.

The HomePlug Green PHY specification is a subset of HomePlug AV that is intended for use in the smart grid. It has peak rates of 10 Mbit/s and is designed to go into smart meters and smaller appliances such as HVAC thermostats, home appliances and plug-in electric vehicles so that data can be shared over a home network and with the power utility. High capacity broadband is not needed for such applications; the most important requirements are low power and cost, reliable communication, and compact size. The HomePlug Powerline Alliance worked with utilities and meter manufacturers to develop this 690-page specification.

In practice, it offers nothing over CAN that I can detect without serious test equipment. The Vehicle to Grid advantage is all the utilities. They want to use your batteries for storage, rapidly aging them while paying you nothing for the privilege. Ideally reducing your cost to charge from what it WILL be when they figure out they own you. Kind of a “payment in theory.”.

And it is needlessly complex.

So CCS appears to also be dead on arrival. But there is a NEWer consortium in Germany termed CharIN now that purports to promote CCS. It’s REAL agenda is to update it to 150kw and ultimately 300kW charging. Tesla actually paid the membership fee and joined as a full core member February 24th.

Why?

Well basically if we DID get to a 500 mile per charge car it’s going to have 150kw or more in battery capacity. This is inescapable. And so a 30 minute fast charge is going to require 300kW of power – also inescapable. And at 400volts, that’s 750 amperes. And unfortunately it is not 750 amperes for 4.2 seconds. It’s 750 amperes for 30 minutes. Just inescapable. And currently impossible.

There is no such thing at this point.

I’ve said many times that I’ve never met a connector I liked. I just can’t WAIT to see what this one looks like. Liquid nitrogen cooled 7/0 cable with pins the size of tomato cans? Wireless charging that absolutely ensures your entire family can only give live birth to girls for the next 12 generations? Elon’s obscene robotic snake in the rear end charger? Perhaps a plug-in bumper?

In any event, I view Tesla’s “core membership” to simply be money well spent to be part of the design and selection process for future (kind of far future) charging technologies. I do NOT see them actually supporting CCS anytime soon. It just isn’t happening. Indeed, more likely to offer to share their technology with ChargIN.

On the other hand, they do need to keep tabs on these things. Tesla has a different charge port in Europe than the one they have in China which is different than the one they use in the U.S. So ultimately they have to deal with everything.

We had a visitor this week from Moscow. He sent me an e-mail, and asked if he could drop by the shop for a chat. From Moscow? Sure. And he did, last Thursday.

It seems they have set up a maintenance and repair facility for the Tesla Model S in Moscow, with absolutely zero support from Tesla, and that indeed there are about 300 Tesla Model S automobiles that have somehow migrated/leaked into Russia. And they do their best to repair them and have had some success. And they want to build their own car, based on the Tesla Model S drive train. So he just wanted to “stop by” and chat and see what we were doing with the drive trains.

We’re actually getting a couple of pretty serious inquiries per day now on the drive train thing.

But we had another curious visitor this week. Kind of an angel.

You might recall that when we first acquired the Azure Dynamics DMOC645 inverters and Siemens motors that we were looking for ways to make it run. One of our EVCCON attendees is Phil Becker and his son is pretty good with electronics. Indeed, he built controller to control the DMOC645. But it was all hardware and kind of specific. So we developed the GEVCU as a more generalized device that could control it from minimal hardware and mostly software. The idea being that it was object oriented and we could make it easy to add additional drive trains as simple software add-ons. This all worked out.

Becker’s son is quite secretive but goes by WOLFTRONIX. And he has a neat series on YouTube right now where he does like a 15 part thing on building a DC-DC converter – kind of high power to charge or discharge etc. Like charge his car from a 48v Solar pack.

Recall that I had actually sent about $5000 worth of the latest Cree SiC power switches and gate drivers to our friend Paulo Alameida in LIsbon. He had a graduate there at the Institute of Engineering who did his masters on designing the inductor. Unfortunately, he apparently dropped the project then as it was never completed.

The inductor is the “passive” component at the heart of a buck/boost converter that stores and then transfers energy from one segment of the circuit to the other, either stepping UP the voltage or stepping it DOWN. For high power, it has to be able to handle a lot of current and of course it has to have quite a bit of inductance as well.

It is really quite related to electric motors. When you pass current through ANY conductive material, it emits a magnetic flux field. Conversely, if you pass a conductor through a magnetic field, THAT induces a current in the conductor. If you coil the conductor, you kind of fold this field back on itself so that any current through the conductor causes a counterforce of current induced by the magnetic field. We call this counter force REACTANCE. BUt it is only active when the conductor is moving through the field. If we hold the coil steady, the ONLY time it is moving through the field is if the FIELD is moving – either expanding or contracting based on the applied current. When we are applying current and it is expanding, this takes energy and so it RESISTS this current. Once the current has reached maximum, so has the field. So no motion. And no reactance. If we remove the current (by removing the voltage of course) the field collapses and THAT induces a current in the coil.

Net net is that a coil resists ANY change in current. If you apply a voltage and cause a current, it will resist or REACT to that. And if you remove the current, the collapsing field will try to CONTINUE the current by inducing a current in the same direction.

And so for historical/hysterical reasons, along with terming this an “inductor” or a “coil” we also term it a REACTOR. Actually more likely to call it a REACTOR if it is a big brawny piece used in high current applications.

So I’ve been watching Wolftronix and he is trying to do a couple hundred amps with a DC-DC converter. Me too. But he’s come up with a cunning strategy. Large high current reactors can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars. But the Reactor in a Toyota Prius is kind of widely available. They’ve made and wrecked a LOT of TOyota Prius (Priiii???) es. So you can get an inverter for a hundred dollars on eBay.

The CURIOUS thing about the Toyota Prius is that it uses a 200v battery and a 500v motor. To drive it, they actually step up or BOOST the voltage to 500v using a DC-DC converter. And so the Reactor is actually quite a piece of work and perfect for Wolftronix purpose. Readily available. Inexpensive. ANd probably overkill.

So I’m literally sitting at the shop watching Wolfie on about episode six, when Nick Kirkby stops by. An MIT grad, he and a friend were traveling from California ot New Jersey and just wanted to stop by. He and a small group of hackers had used a Freescale STM to drive the gate drivers on the Toyoto Prius inverter. And he was curious what we were doing with the Tesla stuff. He had asked if he could drop by on a Saturday.

I told him sure, but call as he got near and I’d go down to the shop and join him (450 yards from my house – range isn’t much of an issue on my commute). And so it happened that I was at the shop when he arrived.

We had a fascinating conversation on any manner of things. I showed him our Tesla stuff and we talked a bit about Chevy Volt batteries which he knows some about. He kind of described what they were doing with the Toyota inverters and I happened to mention that I was watching this video and kind of wanted to hunt down one of the reactors. He looked at me and asked me to follow him out to his car. The car WAS a Toyota Prius. But he had this trailer dragging along behind it that looked like he was hauling rope. Actually the rope was just there to hold on the tarp. And when he pulled back the tarp, it was loaded with JUNK. He reached over, popped the lid off one piece, lifted out a big blocky component, and handed it to me. I think that’s the reactor you were wanting.

Huh??? Yes. Thank you.

Huh?

I would be willing to bet, that if I held a convention for ALL the Toyota Automotive Dealer Technicians in the U.S.A. and had 5000 of them lined up in my parking lot, and asked how many knew what a Prius inverter reactor was or could identify it by sight, I would NOT GET A SINGLE ONE who had any idea what I was talking about. If I gave them a hint that it was a coil, that would only make it worse. The component does NOT look like a coil. It’s just a potted block.

And I would further bet there are about 15 guys in the whole country, because I think that’s about how many viewers Wolftronix has, who would know at all.

But a guy randomly driving across the country, who stops in to see me, actually had TWO of them on the back of his trailer he was pulling across country?

Thanks Nick. I think.

The problem is, this is a little spooky. I’m working on other things. I was just watching wolfie to take my mind down for a few minutes R&R. I don’t REALLY need a reactor. I’m not REALLY going to do a DC-DC converter. I kind of whine and hope somebody is going to do it FOR me. Now that the universe has hand delivered one, it’s kind of incumbent on me to USE it for something. Apparently something pretty important. Apparently a couple of people have had to relocate across country just so I could have one.

Jack Rickard

Lektrik Kooter

The post Hitting on All Cylinders …..in the Electric Automobile appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

In a dozen different ways, technology is a double-edged sword with no handle. I marvel at the magic rocks emerging from vendors such as Analog Devices, Texas Instruments, Semikron, and others. Just reading the data sheets gives me a creative spurt.

And that is a sign of our times as well. Twenty years ago I would talk to a sales specialist at Hamilton Avnet or other chip jobber and they would describe their new chips and offer to send me a sample and data sheet in the mail. Two weeks later I would have it. No charge (if you worked at McDonnell Aircraft, Emerson Electric, or Martin Marietta Denver Aerospace that is) but it was 10 days or two weeks to get it. And by then I couldn’t recall the conversation or need that inspired the request.

Today, Google is your friend. You can have any data sheet for any chip in 20 seconds. You can have data sheets for chips that actually don’t exist yet in 20 seconds.

All of this accelerates the pace of technology development. Printed circuit board design software such as Eagle or Altium, combined with this instant availability of chip libraries and spec sheets and reference designs has dramatically changed electronic design engineering. It’s become a kind of cut and paste design process. The entire world of electronics is kind of a cookbook process.

But adopting new chips sometimes leads to engineering “anomalies” as the first versions sometimes don’t react exactly the way the vendor intended. Indeed truth in spec sheets has followed our political process. Apparently it is just no longer a big deal.

This is often referred to as living on the Bleeding Edge of technology. The edge of the sword that cuts you and winds up dripping with blood. There be beasts lurking in those waters. Hence the term Bleeding Edge….

The wider media seems to have instantly grasped the concept of autonomous vehicles and to read about it, they apparently are already everywhere. The entire world is so enamored of this concept that it is a bit Luddite to suggest that it doesn’t actually exist yet. GM paid $1.45 billion for a San Francisco company of about a dozen engineers that had been in business for less than two years and had to date publicly demonstrated an autonomous vehicle in the same sense that an RC toy car is autonomous. It would automatically drive anywhere you wirelessly controlled it to go. I have no idea what they privately demonstrated to GM but it must have been impressive.

Understand this: there are no autonomous cars. Its a concept. Not a technology.

I have personally and publicly opposed even the concept in past videos as long as two years ago. I was totally mystified by the Elon Musk announcement of the intention. It seems bereft of any kind of common sense to me. But he’s a very bright guy. He must know something I don’t.

Accident-causing mechanical breakdowns of automobiles are so rare that we don’t really take them into account. Our entire legal and civil court system, a large part of which has been devoted to automobile accidents, simply assumes that one of the drivers caused it. The question devolves to which driver is at fault and even that has kind of resolved with the advent of no-fault insurance.

Automobile manufacturers get a free pass. The only time they get involved is with a national recall of their vehicles and in the legal system, really only when they try to NOT do a recall and hide some accident causing defect for ten or twelve years to avoid the consequences. THAT can be expensive when you are finally busted. A very recent ruling allows ignition switch lawsuits from BEFORE GM’s bankruptcy to penetrate the bankruptcy and reach the NEW GM that was supposed to have all that behind them.

But the only time the manufacturers are really on the hook for the safety of their products legally is when they pull some cheap shit to avoid a recall or the expense of the fix. If they belly up and do the recall timely, they’re just not held to account.

Why would you give up this virtual legal immunity on purpose?

Musk’s original announcement struck me as crazy – it’s like volunteering for a court date. I can just hear the 17 year-old tittie-blonde in court now: “But your honor, I thought the car was driving – the web site said so!”

Musk was quick to restate the mission: It was not an autonomous car, it was like an autopilot in an aircraft and you were supposed to actually be responsible for it like an aircraft pilot and monitor its’ operation.” But in the next sentence he is talking about being in LA and requesting his car come get him from New York, actually stopping to charge itself along the way.

The autopilot analogy fails badly and rather starkly reveals that Musk is not a pilot. But Straubel is and he should know better.

Aircraft have a huge advantage over automobiles. It is the concept of “Big Sky”. That is, the sky is so big, that the odds of two airplanes meeting mid-air are essentially non-existent.

Now it IS true that they DO meet in mid-air. But statistically ALWAYS in what is termed “congested airspace” and almost always “controlled airspace”. After flying around the world in the big sky, the aircraft ALWAYS lands at an airport. And the air around the airport is full of other aircraft taking off and landing. So in about a 15 mile bubble, you have controlled airspace and it is termed “congested”. Some of it VERY congested.

But once you depart the bubble, you are in Big Sky. And aircraft are comparatively tiny. There IS a growing congestion caused ironically by GPS navigation. The GPS is so good that it tends to “funnel” aircraft into fairly narrow lanes between cities. Previously, even on published routes, Big Sky was big enough. But mid-flight mid-air collisions still simply don’t happen by accident. The statistical odds are just unfathomable. It cannot occur.

So flight crews are kind of on high alert taking off and navigating out of the Class B airspace. Once out of the bubble, it is pretty much autopilot on and get a cup of coffee. Pilots have a really funny sense of what to talk about. In the air, they talk of nothing but women. On the ground, in the presence of actual women, they talk of nothing but flying. And they use their hands like Italians when they talk about flying.

So 15 miles from the airport, the coffee comes out and the discussion of women commences. Aircraft cockpits with female pilots are notoriously quiet.

Despite extremely rigorous technical and inspection requirements, in flight failure of the autopilot does happen all too frequently. But it’s rarely an emergency. There are several ways to disengage them. And it only takes a minute or so to sort everything out. About the worst that happens is an altitude deviation (you departed the allowed range of your assigned altitude). A quick correction and radio call to apologize pretty much covers the destruction.

Automobiles not so. If we didn’t have roads, and just drove across country like a covered wagon, it would still be two dimensional but better. In aviation we have a third dimension from zero feet up to about 45,000 feet depending on what aircraft you are flying.

But we are entirely dependent on roads. So while 6000-8000 aircraft are carving up Big Sky at any one moment, 100 million automobiles are on earth, confined to paved roads. And they are generally moving at 75 mph separated laterally by 18 inches and longitudinally by a couple hundred feet.

On autopilot “failure” you have about 200 milliseconds to react. If you are napping or reading your Kindle, playing Pokemon GO or watching virals on YouBoobToob, you’re dead.

If you were watching EVTV, you probably ARE napping and you may even BE a Pokemon character.

Joshua Brown, 40, was apparently watching a Harry Potter movie on a handheld DVD player during a fatal collision with a tractor trailer rig May 7th in Williston Florida. According to the truck driver the Model S “went so fast through my trailer I didn’t see him”.

Brown apparently had the Model S in Autopilot mode. He had been an avid fan of Tesla and had even done a demo video of autopilot mode on YouTube. Ostensibly, Elon Musk himself then tweeted the video causing a viral number of views.

To my way of thinking, a company that cannot master the software on the Model X sufficiently to get it to open its own doors without tearing them off the car, or to fix my already operational garage door opener after four updates to do so, probably ought to delay release of autonomous driving software for an automobile.

Software is easy to write and impossible to write right during the first 300 iterations. It gets very very close to perfect in the version JUST before it becomes obsolete and nobody cares anymore. But the first 299 releases are bloody.

That’s ANYBODY’s software.

Here’s why I think autonomous driving software is destined to be a quick passing fad experiment and a technological dead end. The varied environments an automobile WILL encounter, not MIGHT encounter but inevitably WILL encounter, are so numerous they cannot be SIMULATED or FORESEEN. Which makes them a little hard to code for.

I lived in Denver for 20 years. I learned to put on sunglasses when I got out of bed in the morning. Little known secret is that Denver gets more sunshine days per year than either Miami or San Diego. But here’s an even less well known fact, if it snows a foot and a half, and then the skies clear and the sun comes out, in the thin atmosphere of 5000 feet altitude, you can actually get a SUNBURN being outside. And the light is of course totally blinding. You use WELDING GLASSES for sunglasses.

At the other extremes lies Montrose Pass. This is a lowish mountain pass between Denver and Colorado Springs. One foggy night the road iced up with what we call BLACK ICE – totally smooth ice you can’t really even see – particularly in a fog. Some 288 cars came around that bend one night only to discover they too were part of a massive hit taken by the auto insurance companies in Colorado that evening. The largest vehicle pileup in history.

And so it goes. I was riding down I25 North of Denver in the passenger seat of a Hummer. My wife was driving. I saw a small pickup truck weaving ahead of us and watched in amazement as the left rear wheel worked it’s way slowly out of the truck on the end of its axle. It finally broke loose of the truck which pulled over but the wheel and axle was doing figure eights in the road in front of us. WATCH THE WHEEL WATCH THE WHEEL I yelled. My wife dutifully turned her attention to the wheel – the steering wheel. BANG we hit it like a ton of bricks and the entire vehicle went up into the air and then dove vertically down on its nose. Fortunately the tires stick out in front so we bounced BACK up into the air and eventually bobbled to a halt – with a truck wheel and axle entirely wrapped around our undercarriage. It took two hours to unwind all of it. Miraculously no one injured and we drove the Hummer home.

So Mr. Musk, how DOES the Tesla Model S do on your simulations of wheels and axles slowly emerging from vehicles in front of you, and doing figure-eights in your lane on black ice in the fog with sunlight glaring off the snow so brightly that it can cause retina damage and burn the skin around your eyebrows?

Haven’t run that one yet have you? Is that so….

Until you do, I will rather fail to act as test pilot to fully test your autopilot features thank you. But I do look forward to getting my garage door opener operational again, and while you’re at it, if you are SO good at software – I’d like to have more than 3 doors coded into the car if it wouldn’t be too much trouble. And I’m all aquiver over what comes NEXT in the mysterious action of those door handles.

I’ll no doubt hear from all the Autopilot lovers out there. All I can say is “you go, girlfriend…”. But please take care….

I’m guessing the autopilot craze has another good two years. And then, like the wheel hub motors, no one will actually admit to ever having had a program to do that. It will have simply not happened. A glitch in my faulty memory.

It has been a month since our last video. I’ve been busy. But I get off track and then get off track from my off track.

The latest is a diversion into the world of Apple iOS applications. I love Apple. And I hate Apple. They have recently taken a very evil position lobbying against “Right to Repair” in at least four states and cracking down on anyone who will replace an iPhone screen for less than Apple charges to do it – which is nearly enough the cost of a new phone, which is what they really want you to do. Drop yours and buy another one from them.

But let’s own reality, the Apple iPhone and iPad are the dominant screen device on the planet. I’m astonished at the roving bands of gypsies here in Cape Girardeau wandering around in small groups hunting for Pokemon characters that you understand do not actually exist in real time. But they APPEAR to exist and indeed you can catch them and add them to your “ball” which doesn’t precisely exist either.

Bluetooth. It’s like Wifi on a starvation diet. The weak radio. It was designed to eliminate wiring clutter on the desktop. In theory you could connect to your printer 10 feet away wirelessly. Somehow, I have more wiring clutter, and Bluetooth was a short-range slow way to type text to yourself and simulate the action of a 300 baud Anderson Jacobsen modem from 1983.

But it has grown in function and utility. With version 4.0,the Bluetooth organization did a very strange thing. They adopted an ENTIRELY different protocol that is completely incompatible with Bluetooth “classic”. Bluetooth “Low Energy” was originally introduced under the name Wibree by Nokia in 2006. It was merged into the main Bluetooth standard in 2010 with the adoption of the Bluetooth Core Specification Version 4.0.

Bluetooth Low Energy, also termed Bluetooth “Smart” by the bluetooth.org, has a couple of unique features. You would think Low Energy would mean low power and so much more restricted range. It is not. Same power. Same range. But the protocol paradigm innately leads to transmissions that occur LESS OFTEN. And by using the radio much less often, they dramatically reduce the power consumption. To the point that a single lithium coin-cell could conceivably power one of these things for a year or more.

Two effects here. One is tiny low power devices that can run on a coin cell pretty much fit the description of the widely touted Internet of Things or IoT applications. So far, this has led to the development of 10,000 variations on the heart beat monitor and not precisely a second application. But it is ever pregnant with promise.

Second, Apple. Once the FOE of the Evil Empire, Apple now IS the Evil Empire. They have supported Bluetooth from the beginning but restricted programmer access to it most cruelly and effectively. The lone reason for this was digital rights management (DRM) and their absolute desire for control of audio and video piracy.

BLE gave them an out. While Bluetooth wasn’t great at transmitting large data, you could under ideal conditions theoretically do upwards of 1.5 Mbps. But BLE was seen as a paltry 5 or 6 kbps – impractical for music or video piracy.

So they threw the gates open on Core Bluetooth Software Development Kit, which is really all about BLE.

And that gave a LOT of energy to adoption of BLE as a wireless standard.

That said, BLE has a lot going for it anyway. The service uses some unusual nomenclature. It breaks the world into two groups: Peripherals and Centrals.

Peripherals produce data – typically sensor data. It might be pH or it might be liquid level in a tank or it might be temperature or indeed heart rate or atmospheric pressure, accelerometer data, gyroscopes, magnetometers, geiger counters, etc. They measure something and make the data available.

Centrals consume data. That’s where you gather data for use and presentation.

Peripherals broadcast or advertise their name and UUID – either 16 or 128-bit. They can even send the data in the advertisement packet, in which case you never even need to connect to it. It is an iBeacon in that event.

But more likely, it also advertises SERVICES it provides and within the services, CHARACTERISTICs. Ultimately, a characteristic is just a variable. A single variable. That is where the measurement goes. The ID of the characteristic and the service and the peripheral are all identifiers to get you to that variable.

And so to send the variable, you are talking about a 20 byte packet. Characteristics can be one of several types. A READ characteristic is one that can be read by a central. Easy enough. You can also have WRITE variables where the central can actually send data to the peripheral, which opens the door to actually CONTROLLING things with your iPhone central.

I think the most fascinating type is NOTIFICATIONS. This is a variable where you can connect to the Peripheral and SUBSCRIBE to a characteristic. There after, when and only when the variable is changed, the peripheral will send central a NOTIFICATION. Central then sends a READ request. And Peripheral responds with the newly updated variable value.

Seem a little convoluted? Perhaps. But that is three packets of 20 bytes going between the two devices. The latency is about 7.5ms. And once it is updated, THEY BOTH DO NOTHING until the next time a measurement indicates a CHANGE in the variable – 100ms from now or 2.5 hours later.

And so you see that a “connection” devolves to an irregular series of little spurts of 60 bytes or so. The average time spent transmitting goes to nothing. And likewise the power usage. Ergo: low energy. Not low power. Not low range. Low Energy.

Why would I care? Latency. Bluetooth classic offered higher data rates, but the latency was awful – 100 ms or more. Remember it was designed to send a file to a printer. Data rate matters but latency just does not.

In displaying data about electric vehicles, we don’t NEED to send very much data – as demonstrated by our use of EIGHT BYTE PACKETS over CAN. But we need a low latency between when we detect RPM and when we display it on a gauge. Changes should appear instantly in human perception terms. We don’t want a lag even if it is only 200 ms. That’s detectable.

So BLE has gained a LOT of energy from Apple getting behind it and implementing it in Core Bluetooth SDK. And Apple sees themselves as the final arbitrageur of heartbeat monitors everywhere. But we’ve been a little left out of the game on the sensor/peripheral end.

MIT graduate engineer Lada Frieda, AKA Lady Ada, is the principal behind Adafruit. Adafruit has made a big move into small things – Arduinos and Arduino shields and piece parts – offering excellent add-ons at very low prices they have found sales volume and turned into a New York entrepreneurial success story. They develop many of their own Arduino add-ons.

Lady Ada and Kevin Townsend have spent over a year developing a Bluetooth BLE module based on the Nordic nRF51822 Bluetooth Low Energy chip. This chip has an ARM MO multicontroller built-in with a Bluetooth RF radio and the Bluetooth LE software stack. Kevin Townsend has apparently programmed the multi controller and written an Adafruit library to go with it. The result is modules for Arduino applications that provide MOST of what Apple does for Bluetooth BLE. They still haven’t got encryption built into the latest June 28, 2016 release of their firmware (0.70) but they continue to develop.

So we have a way of adding Bluetooth LE to Arduino projects. Our GEVCU is compatible with Arduino Due and we are incorporating the Adafruit Bluetooth BLE SPI module into the board. We’re also becoming a distributor for select Adafruit products, starting with the Adafruit Bluetooth LE Friend SPI shield for Arduino and the aforementioned module.

In this video, I actually walk through a program to demonstrate use of the Adafruit module to set up a Peripheral, Service, and eight Characteristics using the Generic Access Profile (GAP) and Generic Attribute Profile (GATT) of BLE. In this way, you can advertise and provide data in the format used by Apple in their Core Bluetooth SDK. And THAT means iPhone/iPad connectivity.

Of course, Android supports BLE at this point as well.

Because these mobile devices are stamped out by the hundreds of millions, they are pretty inexpensive in a lot of cases. We’ve seen 7-inch Android tablets for less than $45 offering Bluetooth 4.0.

There’s just no way we can offer a dedicated device at that low a price. This is a demonstration of economies of scale that will hopefully reach electric automobiles at some point.

We have embarked on development of our own iOs and Android applications. The first will be BLEGauges, a simple application to display BLE characteristics on Tesla-style gauges. Hopefully, this will allow us better diagnostics for seeing what our Arduino BLE output looks like to the rest of the world. It will be available in iTunes hopefully within a few weeks.

BLE is rapidly emerging and rapidly developing. The June 28th firmware update to our Adafruit is the first to allow Description and Presentation fields to characteristics and these make BLEGuages actually pretty useful. Hopefully we’ll see encryption and the other new functions supported by Apple at least in future releases. Ada fruit has done something cunning in that you can update the firmware in the module wirelessly using their Bluefruit Connect program.

Kevin Townsend appears to have done the multicontroller software on the Adafruit Bluetooth LE nRF51822 chip. He has also been a contributing author to an O’Reilly book on the topic of Bluetooth BLE that I might recommend titled “Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy.”

In referring to software, I generally describe WHAT we have done. How we did it is not so much a state secret as just hugely boring to most of our viewers. But I’m sufficiently excited about BLE and the ability to interface Arduino type modules to mobile devices that we did our first line-by-line description of the code. A zip file with the code is available here http://media3.ev-tv.me/GEVCU6.2BLE_SPI1.1.zip

While it might be interesting to read through, you may have a little difficulty running it as GEVCU version 6.2 isn’t precisely available yet. We keep having more prototype reiterations to where it is more like GEVCU 6.29d5. But the Adafruit Bluefruit LE Friend SPI Shield works very well with our EVTV Due clone with CAN port. I’ve done a bit of a version of the program to read the first six analog ports on that and present them as BLE characteristics. http://media3.ev-tv.me/BLEShield.zip

Mounting a smart phone or tablet in a car so that you can actually view it has always been an annoying problem. We’ve seen all manner of devices. My first flight instructor, Brandon Jewett, actually now holds an STC (an FAA device authorization) for a device to hold an iPad in the cockpit of a Boeing 737 and he’s doing phenomenally well with it – airlines all over the world are ordering this thing. It took him years to get it approved and years more to get airlines to look at it. But suddenly he’s an overnight success story.

We’ve seen everything for cars and the best we could come up with was the Elon Musk bobble-head doll phone dock
Unfortunately Elon’s big head kind of blocks the view, and worse, it of course “bobbles”.

But we recently came across a little piece of magnetic jewelry from China that actually does work. I was at first put off by the fact that it came with little discs you had to put on the back of the phone with sticky back – until I realized the phones weren’t of any ferrous material and in any event, almost everyone has their phone in a plastic case. Suddenly the discs made sense. And it is one of those things that seem dubious, but in practice are just very well designed. It has just the RIGHT amount of magnetic attraction. It holds your phone securely while bumping down the road, but it is a very light touch to pick it off the magnetic holder and be on your way.

So we’ve kind of segued into an entire world of Bluetooth BLE and iOS application programming. And this probably has resulted in the most boring video ever presented on the Internet. So get your CPAP machine on and cinch up your Depends, we’re going in.

I’m told that Quaife is ready to ship our Automatic Torque Biasing Limited Slip Differential from the UK and so we are a bit closer to having product ready on the Tesla Model S drive unit.

It was recently pointed out to me that Jason Hughes had gotten a Tesla Drive Unit to turn in 3 hours while we had been at it for over a year. As we had exchanged some information with Jason, in return for some totally bogus charger info, I did not find this surprising. But I have to point out that we had it turning in less than 3 hours as well – one weekend in June over a year ago. Making it turn is not a product.

And it is quite true we’ve been chewing away on this thing for over a year trying to get something you can use in a car – successfully and hopefully somewhat safely. This illustrates the basic difference between “hacking” and engineering. Hacking is a quick fix presented in an attempt to impress the native aborigines with technology in the hopes that they will think it is magic and declare you a God. Engineering is a grindingly iterative process leading to a product or useful device.

Engineering should be done in private. When you do it in public, the viewers quickly come to realize you are just a cranky old man burning up 5000 different filaments looking for one that will work in a lightbulb. Think Asian bamboo….

Jack Rickard

The post The BLEding Edge appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

The adjective FREE commonly appears with either of two meanings: “at zero price” (gratis) and “with little or no restriction” (libre). This ambiguity of free is both entertaining and generally on point in a whole lot of situations.

Richard Stallman, referring to free and open software summarised the difference in a slogan: “Think free as in free speech, not free beer.”

I am most interested in two areas of “free”. One is the benefits derived from a freely open and capitalistic society. The other is as in free and open rights to liberty and having a minimum of governmental interference in our personal liberties.

Despite a very promising initial start as a nation under the articles of confederation and later under the adoption of the Constitution of the United States, we have wandered woefully from either at the hands of the ever well-intentioned but intellectually differently abled Hillerary Clinton types in the intervening years. Their incessant meddling with the model in an attempt to steer us toward dystopian nightmares such as socialism have seriously damaged our economy and future.

I was mesmerized by a recent video documentary by Wired Magazine on Shenzen China, where we get many of our EVTV products.

This documentary rather artfully confuses TWO very important experiments offering pointed lessons for all.

First, the concept of freeing technology and product development from the purported benefits of intellectual property protection. And second, the astounding admission by Chinese Communist leader Deng Xiaopeng that at some point you have to come to terms with the fact that economic failure is not a result of inefficient government operation – but is actually a failure of the basic policy. You might read that as an aging octogenarian announcing – “Hey, on second thought, this communism thing just isn’t working out.”

And it wasn’t. China, a vast country of unbelievable natural resource and an able and large population, had achieved levels of poverty just not obtainable by merely not working or hanging out doing drugs. They had actually managed to institutionalize starvation.

And so Shenzhen, an almost implausibly backward fishing village mired in poverty almost within sight of a booming Hong Kong, was zoned off as an experiment in what were at first very modest moves toward capitalism. Like you could bake bread, sell it, and keep the money yourself.

In 35 years of this laissez-faire from the heretofore mindlessly communist Chinese government, Shenzhen has grown to 25 MILLION people in a single city. No other city on earth has EVER experienced such growth. At the time of the documentary there were 287 buildings of OVER 70 stories each under construction simultaneously. Picture three hundred Donald Trumps all at it at the same time. Skyways at 25 stories linking eight, ten, or twelve towers with arial parkways complete with streets and trees. It boggles the mind. Never mind the technology that the documentary is actually about.

Or better, DO mind it. Because it spells out an economic future disaster in the United States that is already 20 years underway, and we not only don’t know how to stop it, but probably 3% of our population is even aware that we have a problem. Let me put a point on it. Take a look at documentary number two:

At the beginning of this documentary, I’m feeling broadly superior to this hive of poor wage slaves working away for $90 to $320 per month in this enormous factory. But in fact, that wage is over TWICE what they can make outside the gates, and the employees love the place. They have to PAY for a three year training program to GET IN!

By the end of the documentary I’m thinking how I could fit in and what I would have to do to be at the upper end of the wage scale – say $275 per month. And I probably should be riding a bicycle more. But hanging out in a dorm with a bunch of young Chinese chicks….well I might could endure that…$6 per month. Ok.

Contrast this with the work ethic, education, and ambition of the American workforce, and you start to get this sinking feeling. There may BE no solution to this, other than to learn Mandarin.

And our leadership? Trump is vaguely aware that there’s a problem, and has some ideas how he would address it. Barely. Restricting trade is not precisely the answer that will solve this.

Hillerary is worse – totally oblivious. She wants to tax corporations more, raise the minimum wage to $15, and give all women the power to sue their employer with the federal government paying their legal bills, while the employer pays their own. Oh, and the RIGHT to 12 weeks of paid maternity leave – it’s for the mothers you know. Eventually, we should all be working for the government, in true Maoist fashion.

This is the future. And this is us in it. Some 26% of ALL high tech products in the United States, are manufactured NOW in ONE city, Shenzhen. And the Euba factory isn’t even IN Shenzhen. Xeng’s experiment has now spread over all of China. There is no communism left. They may still restrict political dissent, but they are far more capitalist than the U.S. by any measure at this point.

EVTV began in anger against large corporations – Oil companies. I really DON’T have a problem with oil companies. I have NO problem with them doing anything they like, and I don’t mind in the least that they make a profit. At some point, like when the profits of any ONE of the top five oil companies in the world, actually exceeds the gross domestic product of over half the nations on the earth, I get to wondering why the price “I” pay is still going up. They view my dependence on their product as an opportunity to squeeze me. And I am offended.

At that point, I start to look at alternatives. Like an electric car circa 2008. Ergo EVTV.

But by early 2010 I was explicit on video in warning that we were to trade one devil for another. And that as soon as we got the oil companies defeated, we would have to fight the electricity companies.

ANd it is coming to pass. Now I don’t have anything against electric companies. And I don’t mind them making a profit…. same story. At some point, THEY force ME to look for an alternative…simply to avoid becoming a victim of their unapologetic greed.

Now here is where I run off the rails. When we put solar on our roof, we were absolutely required to hook it up to the grid, and in the event of loss of grid power, we lose our solar as well. It is legislated to be that way. Currently we are going to install some outlaw solar on my roof, that doesn’t comply with that. We will use it with batteries to charge our Tesla. And eventually of course to provide electricity if the grid goes out. From either the battery box or the Tesla or both.

But when they seek to restrict MY freedom to develop alternatives to their product, that’s where a little bit of rage sets in.

Our adventures in electric cars never did make economic sense. And spending $100k putting solar on your roof doesn’t either. But if sufficiently offended, you do it anyway. And as the offended make these choices, which do not make economic sense, the cost of making them goes down and it becomes more viable for others to do so as well.

My first solar array was 15 kW and cost $270,000. My most recent was 25kW and was $63,000, of which the utility company reimbursed $48,000, and not at all willingly I might add. None of it was their idea.

Solar adoption has gone viral in the last two years and the utility companies are now terrified of it. They actively are lobbying for a variety of fees to make it more uneconomic to put solar on your roof and they are doing so in every single state in the land. In Arizona, somewhat more successfully. In California? Probably good luck. I don’t think they are going to make much headway there but they might.

In this week’s episode of EVTV, we are homing in on our 18-month-old project to adapt the TEsla Model S drive train for use in custom electric cars. This should be easy, but it is not. There have been several other attempts at this, and indeed we show one in this episode that touts itself as very successful. I think it falls quite short. An 11.5 second quarter mile in a 2500 lb vehicle is somewhat less impressive if you consider that a P90LD, at 4900 lbs can do the same thing.

Aside from EVTV, the one place where solar electricity and electric cars do come together is Elon Musk. He is in the midst of merging Solar City and Tesla Motors in a stock swap merger that I think holds immense difference in potential, so to speak. But he is an enigma to me.

On the one hand, when questioned about his position on “open patents” he uses a very able analogy of a ship with numerous holes that is slowly sinking. And he says that if one team develops a new technology, say a bucket, to bail out the water, it ill behooves them to declare it a secret as if they don’t bail out from ALL the leaks, the ship is going to sink. I loved the analogy. And refer back to the documentary on Shenzhen.

Yet at the same time, Tesla has to be the most secretive car company in the world. It is the ONLY car I know of that you cannot take the engine out of a wrecked one and use it pretty easily in another car. This has opened up an opportunity for us if we can iron out the wrinkles by reverse engineering all of it. But this opportunity shouldn’t by rights exist.

If he agrees the bucket should be shared, why is it so hard to get repair information and parts from Tesla? We actually have a HIGHLY respected Limo fitter who had done Escalades and Lincolns and Mercedes and Hummers and on and on simply UNABLE to complete a Tesla Model S project for Intel. Tesla has actually actively been working against him in what can only be described as a coldly evil manner.

Similarly I’ve simply never seen an automotive manufacture flatly REFUSE to sell repair parts to the public.

Our first conversations regarding differentials were courtesy of Doug Yip of British Columbia. He is preparing a vehicle for competition and very much wanted a limited slip differential. I suggested Quaife and we received our first units 10 days ago. Jan 5 – Aug 9. Seven months. Of course, Euba probably could have done it in 7 days. But in any event, we now have them.

It is my belief this is kind of a big deal for using Tesla Drive Units outside of the Tesla Model S. As I’ve said several times, the Tesla is so tightly integrated – I’ve just never seen anything like it. Bill Bayer was marveling at the same thing while taking the entire car apart. You can kind of tell it’s a scratch design that was done on a computer-based design system. Things are simply fitted together in ways that would not be possible without that kind of visibility and ability to edit shapes essentially for free before they are ever manufactured.

Similarly, the Tesla Drive Unit is not designed as a generalized drive unit. It is designed to be used in a Tesla and they do generalize it sufficiently to put it in other Tesla models – that all feature basically the same controls.

In 1971, Buick introduced MaxTrac, which used an early computer system to detect rear wheel spin and modulate engine power to those wheels to provide the most traction. A Buick exclusive item at the time, it was an option on all full-size models, including the Riviera, Estate Wagon, Electra 225, Centurion, and LeSabre.

Cadillac introduced the Traction Monitoring System (TMS) in 1979 on the redesigned Eldorado.

When the traction control computer (often incorporated into another control unit, such as the ABS module) detects one or more driven wheels spinning significantly faster than another, it invokes the ABS electronic control unit to apply brake friction to wheels spinning with lessened traction. Braking action on slipping wheels will cause power transfer to wheels with traction due to the mechanical action within the differential.

This often occurs in conjunction with the powertrain computer reducing available engine torque by electronically limiting throttle application and/or fuel delivery, retarding ignition spark, completely shutting down engine cylinders, and a number of other methods, depending on the vehicle and how much technology is used to control the engine and transmission. In the case of the Tesla, the inverter is simply commanded to reduce power.

Since Tesla has an excellent ABS braking system and everything is done by multicontrollers over CAN, electronic traction control kind of shows up automatically. So there was not much impetus to add complexity to the gearbox with a limited slip differential.

But all that requires speed sensors on all wheels, independemtly actuated electronic brakes via ABS, and more that is IN a Tesla but not necessarily in a 1968 Camaro or a 1990 VW Doppelkabine truck. So we are almost certain that the vehicle the drive train will wind up in won’t have electronic traction control, and it would be an enormous undertaking to try to provide one.

In 1984, Rod Quaife received a patent for a “torque biasing” limited slip differential. This used some helical worm gears to progressively transfer torque smoothly from one side of the vehicle to the other when traction was lost on the first side – up to 90%. It had no friction plates, clutches or other high wear parts and was an immense improvement over the earlier limited slip differentials of the time. There are no “lockups” or sudden reactions or clunky noises at all with a very smooth function that basically apportions torque continuously based on available traction surface.

So much so, that today, with the patent expired, Eaton and virtually everyone else building differentials uses some variant of the original Quaife design. But no one has really been able to materially improve on it. It’s been used in F1 Formula Racing vehicles for years. Their current product line features ATB differentials for Audi, BMW, Porsche and dozens of others. It is OEM equipment on a 500 HP Ford Focus RS production car.

But they remain a fairly small 70 person firm in the UK and we found them remarkably responsive to deal with. So we have high hopes that testing will show this an effective replacement for electronic traction for safety.

For performance, it should be a singular improvement. The idea in competition is NOT to put on the brakes and NOT to decrease power but rather increase power and do less braking. So we believe the Tesla itself, used for competition, would benefit handsomely from torque biasing.

To me, the thing every automobile manufacturer the world over should aspire to in designing cars, is to become as iconic as the 1968 VW Beetle. And one of the things that made it so beloved was the ability to get information about it, work on it, and yes adapt it to all sorts of alternate uses.

If Elon Musk is sincere in his quest to advance the adoption of electric cars, I fail to understand the competitive advantage, particularly after TOUTING the open source concept, of making everything about the vehicle a state secret. I do not think it enhances their competitive position at all, and ONLY serves to alienate their base group of supporters. Indeed, he has publicly CRITICIZED the extant auto industry for seeing repair as a profit center. Worse, he actually endangers the insurability of his own product with this position. The insurance industry is TOTALLING Teslas with truly minor damage. All that gets paid for by someone somewhere eventually. And while you may indeed be able to afford $100K for a car, you ARE going to choke to death over paying $5000 a year to insure it.

So once again I would call on Tesla to put us out of business entirely and wipe out 18 months of my effort by just allowing anyone who wanted to BUY a brand new Tesla drive unit, and publish how to use it. Since they seem reluctant, we will continue our efforts pending their epiphany with the hope they get religion soon.

We are not looking for free beer from the oil companies, the utility companies, or Tesla. But sufficiently offended, people will find alternatives. We have the freedom to do so, and in the event we don’t, we will do so anyway under the theory that we have the right to the freedom to do so. Libre, not gratis.

In the meantime, we will continue our efforts to advance electric cars, use solar photovoltaics to charge them, and dig Tesla drive units out of trash piles. Like the Terminator, it is what we do. It is ALL we do. We do it all day. And we do it into the night. And there are many who help us and believe likewise on all three counts.

My personal thanks to all those who have so generously aided and abetted us along the way, from the smallest tidbit of information to the biggest breakthroughs in the reverse engineering process. And a special thanks to Doug Yip for bird dogging a very important issue with the Tesla Drive Units. I view it as a critical safety issue in the application of these very high power drive systems.

Jack Rickard

The post Free as in Speech…Free as in Beer. appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

I left the United States Navy in October of 1979 to begin a working career as a civilian. In the Navy, “computers” were rather simple devices made up of NAND gates and AND gates and OR gates, each of which occupied a chip, and some “core” memory – literally magnetic cores with two wires bisecting them that would store 1 bit per core.

If you couldn’t make it in analog signal processing, you could always troubleshoot “computers” because they were so simple to troubleshoot and repair. Everything was a 1 or a 0. A beeper probe would tell you which it was now on any pin of any chip. And so the lesser lights tended to wind up working on “computers” and we heroes devoted our time to operational amplifiers and signal processing, the ultimate being of course radar.

So we referred to the computer guys as “queens” and were rather dismissive of them.

But on leaving the canoe club, I found something interesting afoot – the home or “personal” computer. Kind of a new concept at the time. I ordered a “kit” from a guy named Clive Sinclair in the UK, soldered it together, and I have been waiting for something to load, something to save, or something to print ever since.

Along the way, a lot of learning curves. BASIC programming. Z80 Assembly language. C. Wordstar. Photoshop. Ventura Publisher. Quark Express.

Each new environment promised two things. An essentially impossible learning curve with poor or no documentation, and truly amazing things if you could master it – or even become basically non-incompetent in its use. Word processors. Spreadsheets. Databases. Programming languages. Each opened astounding worlds where productivity at some human activity was improved two orders of magnitude.

For a writer, word processors were miracles. They just altered the entire process of creating text for other humanoids to read. This ONE invention was so astounding, it could reduce a roomful of 300 technical writers to a small group of 20 over the course of two or three years. It enabled communication in writing to a far more astounding degree than Guttenburg’s clumsy little printing press.

But the cost was high. Rodney Zak’s book “Z80 Assembley” was over 1000 pages. I remember sitting there at 2:00 AM one morning with this thing in front of me and saying “I’m never going to get this. It’s just impossible. It is beyond me….” The despair and sour taste of utter failure in my mouth was an enormously bitter thing to face at a tender age of little confidence anyway, A wall too high, A mountain too steep. A bridge too far.

Of course four days later I’m cranking out 200 lines an hour, loading registers and saving registers, and doing arithmetic shifts left and right. At the end of two weeks I think I’ve invented the language. And a couple weeks after I’m looking at someone else’s code thinking “How can they think like that. This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Windoze took some learning. It just wasn’t right not to have C:\ in front of you. Leaving it gratefully behind a decade later, Linux just seemed impossible. Mac OSX IS a mess.

Along the way, at 24 the learning curve is pretty exciting because you yearn so much for the rewards. And they are not insubstantial. I call it transparency. At the point where you don’t really see the keyboard, don’t think about the keystrokes but simply pour the text on the screen entirely oblivious to what you are doing mechanically, you have achieved transparency. The tool literally DISAPPEARS and at the point the creative process is enormously empowered by the technology.

But at this point there have been a LOT of word processors come and go – each with their own learning curve. Wang. Wordstar. Word Perfect. Microsoft Word.

The same with page layout programs. Ventura Publisher let you simply place images and boxes on a screen and “pour” the text in around them. It was a miracle. Adobe Pagemaker more so. Quark Express, even better. Now I could pour DATABASES into page layout programs.

BUT at some point, you get a little jaded. In starting EVTV, I knew what I wanted to do an why I wanted to do it that way. In 2009, nobody could WATCH videos online – a tiny tiny fraction of those already online and cruising the web could download a video at all. HD video? Fahgitaboutit.

But it was as clear as a new dawn to me. Younger people didn’t read anymore. They watched TV. And video would subsume the world wide web to the point that text would simply be plate decoration, nearly pointers, to video.

And so I embarked on kind of triple simultaneous learning curves using Canon Vixia video cameras, Apple and then Amazon cloud storage, and worst of all Final Cut Pro. And at the point where my FIRST stumbling efforts were starting to pay off, Apple upgraded it to Final Cut Pro X. It was all COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.

These were steep learning curves for a guy then in his fifties. But believe it or not, they have become reasonably TRANSPARENT tools for me now. I can “make video” really from a few scraps of raw video now in an hour or so. I can stack clips one on top of another and size them and add titles and do cross fades and scene transitions and adjust color and audio so quickly I can barely follow the steps I’m using to do it. I’m just grabbing scraps of video and images and sound from various places and weaving it together into a cloth.

But at some point, you just look at a new empowering technology and the prospect of ONE MORE learning curve just makes your knees weaken and your stomach churn in rebellion. Do I really want the gain badly enough to pay the price? Could I talk someone into doing it for me? Couldn’t just ONE cup pass these lips??? I really HAVE been waiting for something to load, something to save, or something to print since 1979….

As I may have mentioned, we recently came across some kind of new developments in a protocol for wireless data transmission called Bluetooth Low Energy. It is somewhat a case of less being more. Instead of a big negotiation and argument across the ether as a prelude to doing ANYTHING, you kind of decide on specifically WHAT information is crucial, and pass it in miniscule 23 byte packets, and then only when something changes and it matters. The two ends do all the work and have to know what to do about it. It is not a protocol for passing images or video or any kind of large stream of data. It’s more about how LITTLE can I get away with passing, how quickly can I pass it, and what can I get away with here.

Picture logging onto the Internet, and instead of entering a search term and getting 20,000 results, and then slogging through nine of those to find ALMOST what you were looking for, you didn’t ask any questions at all, and it passed you three 32-bit integers, and that was all the answers you needed for the next six weeks…. But the three integers would only be useful if you were under six foot tall, over 300 pounds, and had lost an ear.

Nordic’s nRF chip, and Adafruit’s Bluefruit LE Friend module, provide the bridge between Arduino and other embedded devices that actually do things in the world, and the Apple iPhone.

By extension all mobile devices.

We don’t need displays anymore. We already have them. We don’t need remotes and controllers. We already have a phone. The high resolution touch screen display that MADE smart phones seem so smart, have progressed every year to the point that they have outpaced all other displays except for the big-screen television.

And we always have it with us. It’s already in your pocket.

So for me, the gain is huge. But to face the learning curve of programming iOS 9.3 in XCode 7.3.3 using Swift 3.whatever at age 61 is just one more looming enormous mountain before me. I would rather give myself an enema with a corkscrew as they say. Or was that a root canal… Somezheimers….

I actually hired some programmers in India that pleaded that they were accomplished iOS programmers with deep experience in Bluetooth already and could do it in a month. I thought, ok, I’ll pay them to do an application, and then I’ll have the source code and can learn from looking at that.

10 weeks later, their efforts are gorgeous, but completely crash the phone anytime it encounters a Bluetooth characteristic they didn’t foresee. And along the way, I’ve had to actually write iOS code to debug BLE transmissions to learn how the newer descriptors work by inserting a brazillian print statements and just mulishly repeating the process over and over again. Then send them the code to put in the program they were supposed to write for me so I could learn to do this….

At this writing, I’ve pretty much given up on BLEGauges ever coming to pass. As I haven’t paid 60% of it and they haven’t delivered any of it that worked, I got away cheap.

But the point ever was to develop a diagnostics tool so you could SEE what the data you thought you were encoding in Arduino using the Nordic module actually shows up like at the phone end. John Shier of CocoaHeads had done a video showing how to list peripherals and services on iOS. So starting with that, I clubbed myself in the head for a month to get the characteristics, properties, and presentation descriptors I wanted going IN one end on the GEVCU and coming OUT the other end on the phone. And of course entering data on the phone end, that came out on the GEVCU end to control things.

But it WAS ugly. Apple uses Objective C. It derived from one of the early object oriented efforts titled SmallTalk and it actually was developed for Steve Jobs NeXT computer platform – a Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) Unix variant.

There are two things I have a strong preference for in programming languages. The first is the object oriented model. You create code segments that can be accessed through just a couple or three methods or variables. Other code doesn’t need to see inside it or know how it does it. And so code can be written in very modular form and re-used a lot for a lot of different things. The objects kind of become extensions to the language. You just use them.

The second element is interrupt service routines. Real time programming is often really quite necessary, and it generally is the type of thing that will drive most people to lunacy and eventually they hang themselves. The way out of this, is interrupts. You let the world sort itself out timewise, and any time it interrupts your program, you don’t care. You write a program to take care of it. It interrupts your main program, which saves its state to the stack, and goes directly to another program you wrote to take car of that. When it finishes, the second program ends, your program fetches its state off the stack, and continues where it was. YOU don’t have to know WHEN it happened, how often it happened, or if it intends to happen again. And you don’t need to make any allowances for it in your program. You just write an interrupt service routine that does the minimum you can get away with to handle that interrupt situation.

Collin Kidder’s DUE_CAN library for Arduino Due is a superlative example of this. You set “filters” for different CAN message IDs and provide the name of the interrupt service routine you have written for EACH of those message IDs. The CAN hardware monitors the CAN bus, and IF it receives a message with an ID of interest, it processes it and passes the data on to the program along with a hardware interrupt. The CAN “frame” is passed directly to the routine, which does whatever we need to process that particular message, and then ends. There is NOTHING in the main program to deal with it at all.

And so programmatically, you write one program (method) for each message ID of interest, and do with the data what you will. It “happens” when it happens. You don’t know. You don’t care.

Objective C has both of these features. It is object oriented and interrupt driven. They call it a “protocol” and interrupt service routines are called “delegates” and I think the whole concept now has become “callbacks”. All that loose terminology muddies a pretty simple concept – interrupts. We “interrupt this program to bring you this National Weather Service Center Alert…” And when we are done, “We return you to your regularly scheduled programming….” So to speak.

So I should LOVE Objective C.

I recently sold a DC-3 aircraft with a cockpit panel so full of gages and dials and switches and knobs, 99% of them having nothing to do with flying the plane, that I used to tell people that every pilot who had ever flown it had brought his own favorite switch or dial and demanded that it be installed before he flew it.

I don’t love Objective C. It looks like the cockpit of that DC-3. Impossibly bloated, convoluted, and wordy. I could type the encyclopedia Brittanica in the number of characters it requires to say “Hello World…”

None of it is at all simple or apparent. EVERYTHING is of a stilted nonsense syntax that never makes any apparent sense at all. And Apple has had so many people doing so much “improvement” to it over the years that it is just impossible.

So what they do to overcome this is Xcode 7. Xcode has a code completion function where anytime you touch the keyboard, a list of 60 things you might be trying to say pops up on the screen. You select one, and then it prompts you to fill in the required variable data to make that work. And that’s how people program it. They know the first couple of characters of what they are trying to do, and Xcode completes every thought with SOMETHING.

This is a recipe for disastrous code. Let’s play 20 questions and include ALL the guesses in the answer. Bound to cover something.

Acknowledging that they may have hit a wall with Objective-C, Apple has announced a solution – Swift. Swift is a code wrapper for Objective-C.

It allows you to be even more vaguely wordy about what it is supposed to be, and it really calls Objective-C routines to do that.

What a vainglorious mess. And to muck it up beyond ALL belief, they take Visual Basic’s concept of filling out a form with lots of little checkboxes defining what an object is really supposed to do, in a visual “storyboard” and graciously allowing you to access that in your code if you can just figure out how.

I suppose it is all for the good. It does improve your productivity. You have no control over anything, but you don’t have to write much code to do a lot- of something.

It makes Z80 assembly language look very clean, and very simple.

Despite actually feeling “slimed” by this particular learning curve, BLE is perfect for “callbacks” and “delegates”. You call a Bluetooth routine to “scan for peripherals” and you’re done. Then you provide a delegate to handle peripheral data if it finds any. It calls it if and when it finds any. Same with services. The same with Characteristics. And oddly it does the same with charactistic Descriptors as if they were somehow different from charateristics.

So you use what you discover in your delegates to call for more scanning, which uses more delegates, in kind of a cascading waterfall fashion with no clue whether any of it will produce anything.

You collect anything it does produce in some ordered piles, and then use those in your program.

The thing that is killing my Indian programmers, and me as well except I’m so cynical at this point in life that it doesn’t actually surprise or bother me, is that Swift has extended the concept of a variable to allow for it not to every contain anything.
Rather than using 0 to represent nothing, they have invented their own nothing they call “nil”. And they make specific use of this to ALLOW variables to contain nothing or NIL. Then, if you ever attempt to “unwrap” a variable that DOES contain NIL, it fatally crashes the program. Why they would go to all this trouble to replace the 0, instead crashing the program, is a little beyond me.

So if you have a variable, that might or might not ever have anything in it, from some delegates that might or might not ever be called, you can be certain that if you open it and none of that happened, you fatally end the program…..kewelle.

I’m sure iOS programmers will go berserk at my unschooled description of their favorite environment. But I found it most distasteful after facing many many learning curves in the past. It is icky.

BLE Basics attempts to reduce all this to the minimal basics – while still handling a number of aspects of BLE 4.0 characteristics that just aren’t very commonly handled. We could find NO app that would actually deal with presentation descriptors, reliably let you subscribe to notifications and indications, and write data to simple WRITE type characteristics. Apple Developers guides DO mention them, but almost no information on how to deal with them or what they are for. You were supposed to read the 2000 pages of bluetooth.org specifications.

And to try to kick the can down the street a bit, we’ve published this on my git repositories as open source code. https.//github.com/jrickard/BLEBasics/
I’m kind of hopeful that in doing so, others can pick this up a little more quickly and with less effort than I did.

Indeed, wrriting BLE programs shouldn’t be nearly as difficult as this program makes it. We’re looking for ALL the peripherals, ALL the services, and ALL the characteristics, and ALL the descriptors. We have to be able to handle them all.

In writing a useful BLE app, you will normally be looking for a SPECIFIC peripheral, a SPECIFIC service, and a SPECIFIC characteristic, and you will already have a pretty good idea what is in it, because you either have the description of all that from the manufacturer of the device (ie Texas Instruments SensorTag) or more likely your own Arduino/RaspberryPi/Beaglebone device with the Adafruit Nordic BLE module and your own code on that end as well.

Fox News Sunday was of course on this morning while I was trying to put this video together. Guess what the topic was? Donald J. Trump. I am fascinated by Trump, but most impressed with his ability to actually change the media, who actively hate him with enthusiasm and have abandoned all objectivity to mind control the population into voting for Hillerary the Clintonite. But Trump has managed to subvert it into being a 24 hour Trump news ALL CHANNELS. You can skip randomly through cable channels and at every stop it is Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump. It never ends – 24×7 since June of 2015. Hillerary can’t get a word in edge-wise. Which is excellent because her voice is kind of like the old fingernails on the chalkboard thing.

Trust me, and this is HUGE, Hillerary cannot ever be elected President of the United States. TRUMP COULD CONCEDE and she still would not be elected. For two very serious reasons.

1. She reminds far too many men of their first wife.

2. She reminds far too many women – of their husband’s first wife.

But it strikes me that the media is on a constant quest for Trump’s “policies” and ideology on topics such as health care and immigration. They really only want these specifics so they will have something to distort, criticize, and morph into a Hillerary victory. I have explained they CANNOT HAVE ONE. It isn’t Trump. It’s Hillerary that is the problem.

But the inherent problem here is that Trump doesn’t have policies and ideologies. In fact, I think he rather eschews them as a virtue. In business, you don’t want to get too wed to your own bullshit. And so with every mission taken on, you kind of gather the smart people, gather the info, reach a decision, issue it, and follow up. It’s a process. And it must be frustrating for him to have people constantly asking how it came out, when he hasn’t been in the chair doing it yet. He hasn’t STARTED the process. He’s kind of vaguely defined the mission, which is to a great degree the job of leader. “Here’s what we want as an outcome…let’s work backwards from there. Who has some ideas?”

It’s actually a very good leadership technique and he has obviously done well with it. In this election cycle he has actually brought attention to a number of issues that were not predicted to be the important ones for this election. Immigration, terrorism, and globalism – all seemed largely ahead of their time when he first started talking about them. So as a VERY capable leader, he has early and often sensed the wind and located the important elements of a success in the future. Now they want to know what he is going to DO about them.

He doesn’t really understand the question. He’s going to DO what he always does. Handle it. He’ll gather the people, gather the info, shepherd them toward concensus, and then if push comes to shove, issue the final marching orders – for good or ill.

I’m onboard. And I think enough people are onboard that he will be elected President. Hillerary has a fractious coalition of minorities and LGBTQ and everything else probably to swamp the boat. But they are not going to show up in November. They will be so discouraged by her truly trashy and probably criminal behaviour, that they will till death continue to support her, but they ain’t standing in line to do it on a Tuesday. They’ll be with her in spirit….

A couple of examples.

During the primaries, we had 17 candidates all magpies on a wire over Obamacare and how each of them was MORE vociferous in their opposition to this despicable hateful piece of legislation. They chanted, they sang, they carried on something awful. It was never mentioned that OBamacare doesn’t need to be repealed in that it will inevitably fall to the ground in a great crash from its own ridiculous weight, probably before anyone is elected. But they are all chanting about how much they oppose it and how quickly they will repeal it with a wave of their hand. Trumps kind of standing up there looking big and looking blond and one of the moderators finally queried him. Oh yeah he was going to repeal it. It was going to be SO repealed. Trust me. It’ll be HUGE how repealed Obamacare is going to be. And then some others chanted in that it was just awful how all these people who couldn’t afford health care were getting it now at the expense of good Americans. And so in a follow up Trump was asked what he was going to do with all those who couldn’t afford insurance and so they were unable to go to the hospital and get emergency care. What? He didn’t know there was anysuch somebody.

Oh, EVERYBODY is going to get health care. We’ll see to it they get treated. No we’re not going to have any impoverished sick people unable to get health care. We’ll do something for them. We’re going to look at that.

A hush falls over the stage. Nobody even wants to take Trump on on this one. But they’re whispering among themselves – “Isn’t that what Obamacare is???”

More recent example is immigration. What will you do about the 12 million illegal immigrants who are here already? “Well they broke the law” Trump says. “They have to go. They have to be deported…”

“Twelve million of them?”

“Well yes. They broke the law. They have to go.”

“Well what about the ones that have been here 20 years, worked hard, raised their kids, who are born here and are mostly grown now? Are you going to deport grandma?”

“Well no. There are some good people among them. There are really some GREAT people among them. And we’re going to find a way to work with those….”

“What do you mean work with them? You’re not going to deport them?”

“Well not the good ones. We’ll find a way to work with them so they can stay. They WILL have to pay their taxes of course. But we’ll work something out….”

Trump had never thought much about the “good” ones. He has identified immigration as a political hot button and a real problem. But he doesn’t OWN an actual ideology about this. He really has nothing against Mexicans. Nor against people who don’t have health care. Indeed, he and Bernie would have probably done well as running mates.

I’m not saying this to be critical of him. He just isn’t very heavily invested in any particular ideology or answer. Indeed, he would see this as a sign of weakness as a leader. You’ve already put your thumb on the scale and cannot think outside the box and optimize the approach our the outcome by having too many preconcieved ideas based on too few opinions and too little information. That’s the way he thinks. We’ll deal with that. As a priority. I promise you….It’ll be HUGE.

I can buy all that. I understand that most of his supposed “misspeaks” have been very effective tools to stay the ONLY topic of conversation for 14 months now. I think he would be a great leader.

But at this time, probably not the right president. No Hillerary, who is already disqualified as I said and a non-factor in the election, would be a disaster for the United States of America. But it’s never going to happen.

Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party was on Fox News this morning.

Now hear me out. What’s wrong with Trump as President?

First, we have had 8 years with a Congress that just hated Obama and was going to work against him no matter what. So he’s been able to do nothing, making him one of the better Presidents we’ve had. He hasn’t hurt TOO much.

So we elect Trump. Now we have a Congress that almost half of them hate HIM and indeed a number of the Republicans don’t really like him either. What’s going to get done in the next eight years. I like the nothing answer. But I think the media and the democrats would make it a pretty miserable eight years pouncing on everything that comes out of his mouth, and everything that doesn’t get through Congress that probably should have.

What if we elected Gary Johnson. A libertarian. It is no secret that I DO have an ideology and that it is pronouncedly Libertarian. But I’m not of the Libertarian Party because aside from Ron Paul, they have been to a man a bunch of silly twits.

True Libertarians don’t BELONG to parties. Occasionally we host them. But we don’t belong to any. Too much power structure and authority. So the only ones who JOIN the Libertarian party, are by definition not LIbertarians at all, or they wouldn’t put up with all that party shit. Leaving us with a bunch of silly twit poseurs who THINK they are Libertarians.

But Gary Johnson was talking some interesting stuff this morning. Abolishing both the IRS and the income tax. Doing away with departments Homeland Security, NSA, Commerce, Education, HUD, and more. Relegating Marijuana laws, education, etc. to the individual states. Absolutely getting out of foreign intervention. Welcoming ALL the Mexicans. Free trade. I’m starting to feel the Bern again…. I like these ideas. Out of the box. Effective. Massive decrease in government spending. Massive increase in business activity. Millions of jobs. Hmmmm…..

So how can this happen? Well, you need 270 electoral votes to get the Presidency. Johnson/Weld are polling maybe 10% and 16% in a couple of states. So what happens if NEITHER Trump NOR Hillerary gets 270?

It goes to the House of Representatives. Talk about three monkeys trying to f**k a football on a wax tile floor – THAT would be a Texas Goat Rodeo.

The Republicans have a majority – EVEN if they lose the House. The CURRENT House would decide the election. But a lot of Republicans don’t like Trump. But NONE of them want Hillerary. She reminds most of them of their first wife….

And what would Democrats settle for? Well, Johnson ISN’T after all a true Republican. Fiscally conservative, but socially liberal. He would be better than Trump.

And from the Republican side – hell of a lot better than Hillerary.

And if he got it – what gets done gets done from consensus, not partisanship.

I already got burned once – that is how Bill Clinton got elected. Ross Perot got 19,750,000 popular votes, but NO electoral votes. But it all came out of George Bush and Clinton won.

It was the reason Kasich stayed in the Republican Primary, hoping that Trump and his little buddy would neither get the number and he would be the consolation prize. It didn’t happen either.

So it just isn’t possible…

But I have to tell you this has some attraction….

The post One More Learning Curve….Before I Sleep appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

There is technically no constitutionally protected “right” to be stupid. But there is also no element of our founding documents specifically banning it either.

So we are kind of on our own in dealing with it as a society. As George Carlin sagely noted, “If you take the intelligence of the average American, you have to understand that half the people you will meet today just ain’t that smart.”

I’m going to start this missive by coming right out and saying that there is a LOT I don’t like about the United States of America right now.

I most significantly dislike the routine misuse of governmental power in abusing small businesses and individuals.

I most especially dislike that during my lifetime we have ensconced a strangely “entitled” political class in our government that lives better than we do by selling us out to monied interests from large corporations, banks, oil companies, credit card companies etc.

I am sickened by the misguided policies of a liberal elite who don’t know and don’t know they don’t know very much about anything, but NEVER face the music of their failed policies and “unintended consequences.”

I am embarrassed by the spread of atheism and satanic influence across our increasingly Godless land.

I am humiliated that it is widely and publicly accepted in my land that mothers have the “right” to murder their offspring for convenience.

I am embarrassed at our backward approach to such basic and really pretty simple concepts such as alternative energy, technology, and our economy given proven and obvious alternatives that have already been demonstrated to work.

And believe it or not, I am personally offended and have direct and personal knowledge of the widespread abuse of power and trust by MANY, not a tiny minority but MANY trusted law enforcement professionals on a daily basis ALL OVER THE COUNTRY. And I am PERSONNALLY offended at the particular issue of men paid for by us and entrusted by us to provide for civil peace and order who DO murder young black men for “Walking While Black” and “Driving While Black.”. Trust me, it HAPPENS and it happens much more than most American’s would believe.

I am one of those bizarre rascist, mysogenist, homophobic, deplorables that Hillerary so deplores, as indeed I deplore her, that truly believes our country is going in the “wrong” direction. And not on a few issues. On a lot of issues.

The “women’s” movement has given us an incredible divorce rate, basically the destruction of the American family, and the utterly discouraging fact that over half of our offspring that are NOT murdered and are allowed to live are fatherless bastards without benefit of clergy or a male figure in their homes.

And I’m further humiliated that the average college student in the United States now can’t multiply 6 by 9 and get the answer correct given three guesses.

I could go on for days about all I’m unhappy about with the America we have today. And as I said, I am SPECIFICALLY ENRAGED that law enforcement professionals ROUTINELY murder people = not just blacks but probably disproportionately including them. Make no mistake, it happens and it is the heart of evil. I would gladly line up every police officer in the country and personally shoot every tenth man, Roman fashion, to make the decimation point.

But I had a recent conversation with a close personal friend. He is 75 years old, a respected and educated professional, and a superb bridge player. He has an amazing intellect. But he said to me that if Hillary Clinton was elected President of the United States, he was seriously considering emigrating to another land, perhaps Costa Rica.

I was dumbfounded. Actually stunned into silence for a few moments. I asked him, “Have you any idea what you are saying?”

And it struck me that there is just a huge gulf between myself and many of my friends, based solely on my history of being OUTSIDE the United States routinely, and theirs where their only glimpse of other countries is from the deck of a cruise ship.

Mine of course was from the deck of an aircraft carrier. But there is a slight but important difference.

As a young man, I joined the United States Navy at the tender age of 18. I didn’t really want to. I was talked into it by a very close friend of mine, who wanted me to join with him. And ironically he wound up not going. But that’s another story.

I DID get to travel and see the world. In fact, I got to go be in a war. How exciting is that? And not being one of George Carlin’s lesser half, I paid close attention. Indeed, I married a girl from the Philippine Islands and visited many countries throughout Asia as well as the Middle East and Africa. I was overseas for 44 months of my six years in the Canoe Club. And I absorbed with keen attention, anything I could learn of these foreign peoples, in a very deliberate and studied fashion. On my return, I keenly focused on a delightful opportunity to see my land through the eyes of my young bride. And NONE of it escaped me. I carefully observed this AGAIN when her sister arrived in the U.S. and ultimately married a man who I started the first grade with.

On returning to the U.S., I quickly learned that many of my peers, having never left Southeast Missouri, nonetheless had very strong opinions about the world, the United States, and politics of course. And I quickly learned, as many many U.S. servicemen do I have to tell you, that there are just some conversations you can’t have with your friends. They don’t get it. And they aren’t going to get it. And there is nothing you can say to give it to them. So just shut up.

It’s like explaining marital relations to a cat. First, the cat doesn’t care about human marital relations. But if it DID care, it is devilishly difficult to put into terms a cat would understand. Marital relations have nothing to do with how it smells given a keen sense of smell, or barely what it looks like under low light conditions. It is not prey. And it won’t make kittens. So it’s just not something you can share with your cat.

We DO rail against the rather obvious corruption and “pay for play” illustrated so clearly by Bill and Hillerary Clinton. We are OFFENDED by it. We are ALARMED by it. And we are DISGUSTED by it. It is wrong. It in unAmerican. Many of us consider it treason.

But understand this. In MOST countries in the world, it isn’t uncommon. Understand further that indeed, in most countries of the world, bribery and corruption are not even considered evil. They are how things work. And they are how things are EXPECTED to work. If you go to the Philippines, or Korea, or Thailand, or really almost anywhere in Asia or Africa or South America, as a MISSIONARY bringing food and money and building schools and churches. You HAVE to pay off the local police constabulary REGULARLY, along with the Mayor, perhaps the Governor, and scores of other public officials as a routine matter of business. IT IS HOW IT WORKS. And the population living there ACCEPTS it as how it works. And it works like that every day. Americans are all initially offended by this. But you can either accept it and go along or be very very unhappy there, that’s just the way it is. And it is TOP to BOTTOM and there is nothing to report. And no one to report it to. THat’s how they LIVE. It is their way of life.

And children die in the streets in front of you from diseases we don’t even think of as diseases any more. Who dies of measles??? Influenza? Whooping cough? My little buddy Ugbert, rest in peace.

Well if you have absolutely no access to even the most rudimentary medical care and are so impoverished you can’t even pay the local quack doctor, you do. I’m told there is real poverty in America. By Americans. Who have never SEEN poverty. Who cannot imagine it. Who I can’t explain it to.

And poverty so deeply entrenched and profound that you want to fix it. Because you CAN fix it for just a couple bucks. Well the one in front of you. For the moment. And when you raise your eyes and see the scope of 30 million of them, or more, your testicles shrivel up into your stomach at the utter futility of trying to do anything. It is just unimaginably big. It’s huge. It’s unimaginably unfair. And there’s not a goddamn thing you can do about it.

Clean drinking water. A fifth of the population of the planet right NOW has no access to it at all. For many others, it’s a daily two hour round trip hike.

We run it out on the driveway from the garden hose while we hand wash our cars and let it run down the street. Clean, crystal clear, cool, water.

My own son was shot and killed a little over a month ago in Olongapo City Philippines by local police while in possession of less than a quarter ounce of Marijuana. They’ve killed 1800 in the past few months in a nationwide crackdown on drugs. Jack Gertolfo was 40 years old and had six children all under the age of 12. Bahala’na. In that land, it is considered the will of God.

The United States of America is blessed by God with a stunning cornucopia of riches, not because we particularly deserve it, but specifically to serve as an example of how to live as a people. An example to the rest of the world. We are indeed the light of the world and the shining city on a hill that Ronald Reagan so astutely understood. A land of FREEDOM. And individual LIBERTY. Where corruption and governmental malfeasance and corporate greed are considered to be WRONG. Where the populace is actually indignant where and when they occur.

And America does benefit from immigration. ALL the lazy, sick, and satisfied stay home. ONLY the ambitious, the bright, the healthy, the people who dream and want and strive for a better life are willing to endure the inconvenience, the discomfort, the pain and the humiliation of traveling to a land where they know no one and cannot even speak the language. Leaving behind family and friends and their dog. All that is familiar and comforting to them and that for many they will never see again. To go to a strange land of strangers. In the hopes for a better life. And cummulatively that is who we ARE. The genetic best of all the tribes of the earth who come here and then cross breed into a land of genetic supermen.

And every one with a different opinion. And a different agenda. And a different list of all the things that are wrong with America and should indeed be fixed.

The vast majority of Americans, and indeed the vast majority of white Americans, have nothing against you being black or being here. Historically, at 12% of the population, you would have been eradicated hundreds of years ago and we would have picked our own damn cotton. While there are a few nutcases in every box of cracker jack’s, most Americans wish you well and many have been active in doing so. The first statewide convention that formed a platform and nominated candidates under the name “Republican” was held near Jackson, Michigan on July 6, 1854. It declared their new party opposed to the expansion of slavery into new territories and selected a statewide slate of candidates. Republicans were the FIRST political party in America formed specifically to oppose slavery.

Six years later, Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States representing that party. And he did eliminate slavery in this land by presidential decree with an emancipation proclamation. And at no small cost. Some 550,000 American men died in the ensuing melee discussing the situation, barely 6000 of whom were actually black. They bled and died in agony in one of the most brutal wars if its age. American against American. In some cases brother against brother. And when the smoke cleared, you were no longer legally entitled to slavery.

The subsequent hundred years have indeed been a messy, ugly adjustment to this new status. And I would not claim it has been easy or nice for anyone involved. But it has proceeded, and more or less directly. But do not fail to miss the point, HUNDREDS of thousands of white men gave their LIVES so you could be free. You did not earn your freedom. You did not fight for your freedom. It was paid for with the blood and entrails of white men who believed you were being done wrong.

We have a small group of Chinese students who attend the local university come to our home each Sunday for dinner. They are far from home and have no family here and have been drawn to our tradition of a large family dinner around this huge round table in my dining room that seats 13. I grew quite fond of one particularly bright and articulate young man named Sun Jialu who graduated “cum laude” here last year. He confided that his dream was to find a way to stay in the United States and live here. I was a bit surprised as I knew he was close to his father and family in China and so I kind of grilled him about it. But it was clear that he was intense on this dream of finding a way to stay here after his Master’s program in California. Oh, and a Tesla. And a tall blonde wife with big hooters.

I told him that there are 375,000 Chinese nationals attending university here and asked him to estimate what percentage of them felt as he did. He looked at me deadly serious and told me “All of them Jack. Don’t listen to anything they might say. ALL Chinese students in their hearts want to live in America.”

And I reflected on what I had seen in Japan, and the Philippines, and Viet Name and Laos and Thailand, and Pakistan and Iran and in Mombassa Kenya. And in all of those places, in ways subtle and not so subtle, the prevailing and indeed nearly unanimous view was that America was somehow better and indeed anything fROM America was better. All are proud of their land and their people. But at the bottom of the conversation, America is better and would indeed be better for them if a choice were made.

And I would draw from that that with the exception of a few privileged people in a very few European countries, if you stripped away all the bluster and all the bullshit, everyone in Russia, and everyone in China, and everyone in most of the countries of the earth, if they thought they could have it, would choose to be an American.

Our blessings are eggregious. Understand that the United States of America sports 4.4% of the population of the world, and owns about 1/3 of all wealth and worldly goods IN that world.

And so my response to this bright educated man considering a life in Costa Rica was “Do you have any idea what you are saying?” America is a light unto the world, blessed by God and ordained to be so, and it IS worth fighting for. WHATEVER HAPPENS. If Hillerary the Godless heathen hussy felon is elected President of the United States, then she is MY President – of MY land. And I will stay and do whatever I can to have her replaced by someone pure and true and brave and honest, WORTHY to be the leader of the greatest nation in the history of the world. Assuming I can find someone like that of course – the hunt for one good man. John Wayne being deceased at the moment. BECAUSE AMERICA IS WORTH FIGHTING FOR!

I was in a military. And I was in a war. And I did come home. And I married and I had children and I became a millionaire. But you know, some guys I knew pretty well and actually grew to love as companions and teammates didn’t make the trip. I guess I was lucky. Lucky me. They did not return home. THey did not marry. They had no children. No successful career. They are dead. The young. And the dead.

And in this broad land of many peoples, blessed with abundance and freedom and actually created to serve as an embarrassment and reminder to the world of how they OUGHT to live, we have one moment in time, where we set aside our different opinions and our different agendas, and our different criticisms, and our protests. And we sing a stupid song that was stolen from a British drinking club. And with the words of Francis Scott Key we note that no matter how beset we are by the bombs and rockets of our enemies, more POWERFUL enemies in that particular instance, no matter how outnumbered, and no matter how great the odds against us, that we will unite and we will prevail and we will stand up and endure AS the land of the FREE and the home of the BRAVE. And that we, ALL OF US, would fight and die to preserve that. And that we stand and recognize and revere those who have already done so.

And no matter HOW BADLY the celebrity du jour, or the team owners niece, mangles that impossible to sing song, at the end we all stand and cheer like mad as if they had sung it very very well.

And how am I to react if a young person, who has grown up in that land, and whom we gathered together our resources to pay for his College education via a scholarship, which then led to his being drafted by the National Football League and eventually a $30 million dollar contract to PLAY FREAKING FOOTBALL ON TV ON SUNDAY, which is not precisely shoveling gravel for a living, wants to INTERRUPT that moment of almost prayerful observance with some kind of LOOK AT ME – I’VE GOT AN ISSUE HERE ALL ABOUT ME THAT I WANT PEOPLE TO PAY ATTENTION TO ME” shit. All about ME. And he is going to actually use the PRIVILEGED status and stage of the event to make this statement – during this national anthem.

They apparently DO lack a father figure and are unawares of their desperate need for a public spanking. They are ignorant, stupid children of unfathomable selfishness who truly believe the sun rises and sets in their own assholes. And most of all they are apparently TOTALLY UNAWARE of the statement they really ARE making. Oblivious to it. For those of them who DO have fathers, my heart goes out to you – the fathers. Your humiliation is heart rending, but I would say you should have done a better job of backhanding the little bastard when it was yours to do.

I do not think I am alone in my feelings for the land of my people and this shared moment of observance of common cause. And note that I do not advocate the following prediction. The coaches and the NFL leadership have abdicated their leadership role and all common sense in the usual cowardly nod to political correctness and thereby are simply going to have to suffer the consequences. I would predict that should the entire Miami Dolphins team and the entire Seattle Seahawks team put the finger to the National Anthem Sunday in the manner they plan, that the seats will empty onto the field in the most awful melee ever witnessed on live television. There will be hundreds of injuries and potentially the end of American football as we know it. And the crowd will exercise THEIR freedom of speech in a way that will not please anyone in the end. Yes, the players have the RIGHT to express themselves. That does not mean it is appropriate or that anyone else has to put up with it.

And for the football players to all squeal like little girls for the police to help and protect them from the crowds isn’t going to go over very well either.

Pray for our Land. Pray for our People.

Jack Rickard

Two Presidents:

The post A Moment of Silence in Prayer for the Stupid appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

Albert Einstein is widely recognized as the premier “genius” of the twentieth century. He died the year I was born, 1955. In 1905 he published his Special Theory of Relativity and in 1915 his “Theory of General Relativity” describing the geometric theory of gravitation. Essentially, what is gravity and how does it work. The predictions of general relativity have been confirmed by all observations and experiments conducted on the subject since.

Part of Einstein’s theoretical work was a concept of mass-energy equivalence that explains the relationship between mass and energy.  E=mc² 

I actually like to think of it as m=E/c² and I think it will soon become apparent why.

Most of us are familiar with this equation as the basis for nuclear weapons. We believe that we can then take a mass of plutonium and convert it into this energy releasing it explosively as the most terrible weapon ever conceived of by man. And indeed it is. But it is actually not very efficient.

By splitting the atom with neutrons, which then release neutrons to split other atoms, a nuclear chain reaction is created to release the energy in the mass of the nuclear “bomb”. But that’s not precisely what happens.

The chain reaction isn’t very stable. And as it releases energy, it blows the mass apart and the chain reaction in the parts dies. And so it releases a huge cloud of “dust” that is radioactive. You might think of these as unexploded “cinders” that didn’t entirely convert to energy. And indeed only a tiny fraction of the original mass of the bomb is converted to energy at all.

Somewhat more efficient is the process of nuclear fusion. Let’s again revisit our sun. The sun is by far the most important source of energy for life on Earth. Its diameter is about 109 times that of Earth, and its mass is about 330,000 times that of Earth, accounting for about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System. About three quarters of the Sun’s mass consists of hydrogen; the rest is mostly helium, with relatively tiny quantities of heavier elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon, and iron.

The Sun is roughly middle-aged: it has not changed dramatically for more than four billion years, and will remain fairly stable for more than another five billion years. And note that 74.9% of the sun is composed of the lightest element in the universe in terms of mass – hydrogen.

Each second, more than four million tons of hydrogen are converted into energy within the Sun’s core, by FUSING two atoms of hydrogen together to form a new single atom of helium. And in so doing, it again is only converting a small part of the mass into energy. At this rate, the Sun has so far converted around 100 times the mass of Earth from hydrogen to helium. And so it easily has sufficient hydrogen to burn for another 5 to 6 billion years.

.

I’m sorry, the numbers to convert four MILLION TONS of mass into energy are beyond my abilities. It is an immense amount of energy. I can tell you that while it is radiated in all directions equally, at a distance of one astronomical unit – the distance of the earth to the sun, a single square meter of surface would receive a continuous stream of 1346 watts of energy. That’s a pretty narrow angle at 93 million miles to a meter square surface, and an impressive amount of energy then.

In neither case, nuclear weapons or solar fusion, have we completely converted mass into energy.

E is the symbol for energy. The m indicates mass. And c² is a constant and a rather hugish one – the speed of light squared.

The equation is not precisely dependent on the units of measure. But using the International System of Units (SI), we would express energy (E) in joules. Mass would be expressed in kilograms. And the speed of light would be given in meters per second.

And so the speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second. If we square this value, we get 89,875,517,873,681,764. Let’s round that off to 89.9. And so we see that we are talking about 89.9 TERAJOULES of energy in a kilogram of mass (at rest).

E/m=c² = (299,792,458 m/s)² = 89,875,517,873,681,764 Joules per kilogram

Most of us conceptualize energy best as electrical energy measured in watts. A joule is simply one watt in one second

Our monthly bill for electricity is measured in kilowatt-hours (kWh) and this is the number of watts used by our house over the period of an hour divided by 1000. So if you use 1000 watts of electricity to light ten 100 watt light bulbs for an hour, you have used 1 kWh of electricity. The average price of electricity at retail in the United States currently is about 11.75 cents per kilowatt hour.

89.9 PETAJOULES (10¹⁵) is the equivalent of 25 million kWh. Or about $2,937,500 dollars worth of electricity.

The average American home uses 970 kWh of electricity in a month or 11,640 kWh per year at a cost of $1,368

Your mileage may vary. But to put this in perspective, the amount of energy contained in 1 kilogram of dirt, would power 2,148 American homes for an entire year.

All of this describes the usual perspective of converting MASS into ENERGY. But let’s reverse all this thinking and view it from a different perspective. If you were CREATING a universe and you started with a massive explosion of ENERGY, how much energy would you need to produce a given amount of matter – solid matter? Because that is how it started. A huge explosion of energy and no matter at all. Matter would appear to have been conjured up from nothing. But it isn’t so. It was a huge amount of energy that was converted to a very small amount of matter to create a universe.

But I can’t comprehend a universe very well. So let’s take you. We don’t want to take me because I’m over 300 lbs. But the average American male, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, is 170 lbs. Due to supersizing at MacDonalds, we all know this isn’t true, but it’s a handy size to use for the mass of a “person.” And it works for the airlines. So close enough for government work.

170 lbs is just slightly over 77 kilograms. And so returning to our equation, recall that 1 kilogram resulted in 25 million kilowatt-hours of energy, the typical American male, as defined by the FAA, would then need 1,925,000,000 kilowatt-hours of energy to be converted into mass such that they could exist.

And if one kilogram produces enough energy to power 2,148 homes for a year, then one person contains enough energy to light 165,396 homes for a year. Or by another measure, you are worth about $ 226,187,500 worth of energy at today’s retail prices.

I do not believe that any but a tiny handful of seven billion humanoids on planet earth, are even mildly cognizant as to the true cost to the universe in terms of energy required to put them here.

Somebody must REALLY love you to have invested all that for you to be here at all.

And he does.

You are an EXTREMELY valuable investment of time, energy, and work for you to be here on planet earth. You have a valuable mission in being here in this life on earth. Apparently a VERY valuable one.

A couple of questions.

What have you done with it thus far?

And how are you treating others brought here at such huge cost?

Me? I’ve got to be pushing a half billion dollars in energy with my clothes off.

Here are ten other things Einstein actually said:

1. “Religion and science go together. As I’ve said before, science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind. They are interdependent and have a common goal—the search for truth.”
(from a 1948 interview)

2. “I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”
(from “Self-Portrait,” 1936)

3. “If A is success in life, then A = x + y + z. Work is x, play is y and z is keeping your mouth shut.”
(said to Samuel Woolf, 1929)

4. “Truth is what stands the test of experience.”
(from “The Laws of Science and the Laws of Ethics,” 1950)

5. “The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.”
(quoted in the New York Times, 1921)

6. “I believe in one thing—that only a life lived for others is a life worth living.”
(from a 1948 interview)

7. “The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.” 
(from a tribute to Pablo Casals, 1953)

8. “Why does this magnificent applied science which saves work and makes life easier bring us so little happiness? The simple answer runs: Because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it.” 
(from a speech to students at the California Institute of Technology, 1931)

9. “Study and, in general, the pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.” 
(from a letter to Adrianna Enriques, 1921)

10. “Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.” 
(from The World As I See It, 1949)

The post E=mc2 and the $200 Million Dollar Man appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

The heart of the issue of electric automobiles has always been the energy storage cell or battery and it remains ever so today and into the future. Moving from the crude lead acid batteries, the limitation on electric cars has always been the weight and size of the battery necessary to power it to any specific distance.

No, this is a new blog, not a repeat of the last one. But the battery thing remains true.

I am forced to recall a conversation from 2009. I was asked if the earlyish LiFePo4 cells of the day could be “improved”. There being some sense that we had reached some sort of limit. I know, sounds quaint. But the question was quite serious. Would batteries get better as we went forward with electric vehicles?

My reply was of course yes. I believe that ALL technological innovation is possible given a wide enough human desire for a particular result. But I was forced to point out that the desire wasn’t very wide. At the time, there were no OEM electric cars being built. Tesla was in the very early days of delivery of the Roadster. And so I posed the following question.

“If I had a battery the size of my pack of Camel Non-Filter cigarettes here, and it would power a car for a distance of 1000 miles, what do you imagine we would do with it?”

The answer was of course that we would sell it and people could make fantastic electric cars. Well let’s suppose it costs $27,000 each. Who are we going to sell it to?

And how do we make it? It will cost $40 million to outfit a fairly modest prototype production facility.

Well we could get some venture capitalists to back us? (This seems to be the answer to all problems in technology).

Ok. SO here’s our pitch: In a world where lead acid batteries are cheaply available with two main manufacturers splitting up an industry that enjoys margins of about 6%, we have an idea for a new battery that costs $22,000 to produce. And we need $40 million to build a pilot plant to run off a few to show around….

Since then one of the two manufacturers has actually gone bankrupt…(Exide).

The point being that in 2009, for all I knew there were dozens of battery technologies laying about in filing cabinets across the land. Who was going to productize them? For what demonstrated market? Literally if you had a battery the size of a pack of cigarettes that would power a car 1000 miles, WHO specifically are you going to SELL this thing to? Like ONE of them in a row?

And note that a central theme of EVTV from the beginning is that you don’t need a venture capitalist and you don’t need a government. One guy getting off his ass on the couch and going to work on something is an ENORMOUSLY powerful act that modifies the future for billions of other humanoids. I asked for 100,000 of you to do that, on the theory that in all that manure, bucking and whinnying and dust, there has to be a pony in there somewhere.

As it turns out, Elon Musk is a stallion. It amazes me to watch the world of trolls and haters and wannabe investor geniuses constantly harp on this guy. It’s not so much how WELL the bear dances, it’s that you taught a bear to dance at all.

His small team pretty much singlehandedly designed and built the best car in the world, and it is electric. It is a marvel. And all the Leaf’s and Volts and Bolts to kingdom come would not have been built at all were it not for the threat of the Tesla Electric Car.

But his vision quite exceeds that. He has purchased Solar City, a company he was allied with anyway, and raised billions to build a battery factory in the Nevada dessert that essentially doubles the worlds lithium battery production. And the significance of all that is that it removes the question of market and sales and potential. Battery researchers worldwide can now expend effort on battery improvements in the certain knowledge of untold riches for success. Investors are piled up ontop of themselves looking for the next breakthrough. The monster is off the chain. The outcome is now inevitable.

In this episode, we note the magic of Dr. John Goodenough and his development of the lithium anode solid state battery. Goodenough is the chair of the Cockrell School of Engineering at University of Texas at Austin. He also invented the lithium ion battery and more recently, the lithium iron phosphate LiFePO4 battery.

He had been threatening this for several years. Glass electrolyte/dialectric material seems to be the solution he was seeking. And I cannot persuade what an enormous breakthrough development this is. Only time will convince you. But the genie is out of the bottle.

As it turns out, he’s not alone. Plastic can ALSO be used as both an electrolyte and dialectric in a battery… Dr. Mike Zimmerman is a professor of materials science at Tufts University. He has been working on a plastic polymer electrolyte/dialectric and enduring some success as well.

Our previous episode announced that due to some unfortunate events among EV builders, our attention is rather forced to the Tesla Battery system. Individuals are turning to used batteries out of wrecked Tesla’s and as always, their sense of a value proposition is unerring. The individual battery cells, without the package, just the 18650 cells, currently go on eBay for about $5.60 in quantities of 100. That means that an 85kWh Tesla battery pack has $39,711.36 in battery cells alone. Yet you can pick these Tesla packs up for a scant $15,000. And if you remove the 16 modules and sell them on eBay at $1299 each, you can get about $20,784 for them. That’s a quick $5784 for about two hours work to disassemble the pack. If you do a lot of that, less than an hour.

Even then, the 444 cells per module would go for $2486.40 new – and that’s without the package holding them together rather nicely. Ok, so they are used. One guy wrecked a P100D less than an hour after picking up the car and it had 44 miles on it when it sold at salvage. Many wrecked Tesla’s have 50 to 100 cycles on them.

The problem is of course that the chemistry of the cells is a safety horror. They are basically firecrackers looking for a BIC lighter. They will burn your car/shop/house down in a New York Minute at the slightest provocation.

Tesla uses them because of very high energy density, the capacity to weight ratio. And the fact that they are manufactured in the brazillions and there is hope for economies of scale.

They survive this using extreme measures of battery management. They actively cool AND heat the battery packs with a 6kw system that circulates coolant past every single one of the 7,104 18650 cells in the pack.

They individually fuse link EACH and every cell in the pack so if it shorts, it will immediately remove itself electrically from the charge or discharge path.

They also carefully monitor the precise voltage of every 74 cell segment and monitor the temperature of BOTH ends of the 444 cell module. And they enclose all in a 250 lb hermetically sealed aluminum box and put a TITANIUM strike shield to guard THAT.

And if ANYTHING is in the slightest remiss, the system automatically and instantly opens two contactors disconnecting the pack from the car entirely and you roll to a stop. While charging, if ANY cell simply gets a tad higher than the others, it STOPS charging and opens the contactors automatically.

With THAT, they have still had explosive and incendiary fires while rolling and even while sitting still charging. But due to these extreme management measures, these incidents have been very very few given the number of cars out there.

The problem of course being that our erstwhile viewers, ever on the alert for a seam in the zone and a bargain, are buying these modules as is, and having no clue how the BMS works, they are using them without the cooling and heating and without the constant monitoring of voltage and temperature – to predictable results. Tragedy.

It’s true that some are attempting a homebrew battery management system. I can assure all of you that don’t know and don’t know you don’t know that EVTV’s stance against battery management systems derives from our early attempts to purchase one and later attempts to design one. And yes, I am aware that each of you is an undiscovered and poorly appreciated electronic engineering genius of the highest education and genetically disposed toward both brilliance and genius. And it IS further true that I am a doddering old man with early onset Alzheimers who has no clue what he’s talking about despite 40 years now of random tinkering and blowing shit up. But I would caution that BMS design is not precisely as it first appears, and there be dragons beyond these waters… We’ve actually seen more cars burned to the ground by well intended battery management systems than we have by batteries, and specifically in the LiFePo4 chemistries.

And the Tesla battery modules are very specifically NOT LiFePo4. They are VERY different. And as we learn more about them, a fright. For those with an ear to hear, these batteries WILL hurt you. It has nothing to do with whether. It’s all about when.

The cooling and heating is not very hard to reproduce, and probably not necessary. If you are willing to shut down the pack on a temperature anomaly, you don’t really need to cool and heat. But you do need to be aware that CHARGING of these cells below 0C freezing causes irreversible lithium plating of the anode and can result in destruction later when you charge normally.

And so the important part is to monitor both voltage and temperature every few milliseconds and DISCONNECT the pack from charging or discharging if anything is out of bounds. And that means relatively. It’s probably ok for these cells to be tiny bit over 4.2v as long as ALL of them are. The problem is if you have one at 4.25 while the rest are at 3.85. It’s ok for them to be warmish, say 45C as long as ALL of them are 45C. If you have one temp sensor at 45C and the rest at 33C it’s a problem. Potentially a big problem.

In the previous episode, I announced we were going to take a look at reverse engineering both the Tesla battery pack as a whole and the individual modules as well. I think most people focus on the individual modules. I feel safer treating it as the pack Tesla designed in the first place in its entirety. But we decided to attack both. The value proposition is an attractive nuisance and without action is going to hurt somebody. Actually, we’re too late. It already has.

We also created a blog entry with a general call for assistance on the topic of batteries. And we called out a moribund Hackaday project by Jarrod Tuma There had been no further postings on this since April 16 and Jarrod appeared stymied. But he had been doing some very interesting work on the little BMS boards on the individual modules and had identified the Texas Instruments BMS chip being used.

He also identified a fascinating RF isolator chip and a TTL serial bus operating at a very unusual 612.5 kbps that links all the individual modules to the battery pack master BMS board.
He was re-enthused by our video and blog and he, and Collin and a couple of others began the arduous task of disassembling the 8051 assembly language program that runs these boards to try to figure out how to communicate with it.

This microcontroller talks to the Texas Instruments BMS chip over a Serial Peripherals Interface (SPI) bus. All the commands to set configuration and read individual cell voltages and temperatures are defined in the Texas Instruments data sheet and so of course very public knowledge. But what did Tesla use to talk to the Microcontroller through this RF isolation chip and serial bus?

While they strove heroically to decipher the assembly language code, I offered a different approach. I could probably wire up to interface with the serial bus and capture some of that and maybe we would get lucky.
I never got around to it.

My next thought, which I shared with our by now ad hoc hack team, was that if I were designing it, I get the isolated serial bus concept. But why reinvent the wheel? I would have just used precisely the same register reads and commands that were defined for the Texas Instruments BLQ76 BMS chip in the data sheet over the isolated bus as well. The 8051 would just pass them on to the BLQ and then pass the replies back to the bus.

I was assured by all and by consensus that there was just far too much code in the 8051 firmware for it to be that simple. But Jarrod subsequently decided to try it anyway and wired up to a board and sent it a few trial commands.

Batta Boom Batta Bing. As we always say at EVTV, it is simply better to be lucky than good. Collin immediately sketched out some software to do this on an EVTVDue board as well as a Teensy 3.6. It takes a tiny bit of additional hardware with the EVTVDue but we are working on a shield that will let it control a couple of contactors as well. It does no good to monitor this thing if you can’t automatically and instantaneously disconnect it.

Here in the shop, we turned to the battery pack itself. A year ago I had written a program for our Tesla CAN monitor device to decode the 6F2 CAN messages from the battery pack. This message iterates in a sequence providing the cell voltages of each of the 96 cells, along with the temperatures of each of the 14 or 16 modules with two sensors in each module. So we figured out the pinout of the X035 and X036 connectors and could apply the 12v needed to power the contactors and get the pack talking CAN and giving us that data. But we were struggling to figure out the magic sequence to close the contactors. And without closing them, you can’t use the battery pack for much.

All suggestions centered on the High Voltage Interlock Loop. I checked it a dozen times. It can be 120 ohms or 180 ohms but those really are the two possibilities depending on the car. We were lucky to figure out that there was a loop in the high voltage connector to the pack and a single small pin in the connector is inserted into the pack bridging two contact rings that close that connection. But we still couldn’t seem to get it.

A helpful if expensive gentleman from Krasnau Lithuania offered some help. As it turns out, you have to have the output also connected – and it has to have a very specific amount of capacitance. This of course is because the battery pack does a precharge before actually closing the contactors.

We ourselves do this all the time on our vehicles. We put a 300 ohm 500 watt resistor across the terminals of the positive contatactor. Then we close the NEGATIVE contactor. This completes the circuit through the precharge resistor. After some brief time period, the capacitors in our chargers, dc-dc converters, and motor inverters charge to the pack value but the input current is limited by the 300 ohm resistor to an amp and a half or thereabouts. Then we close the POSITIVE contactor to allow full current flow.

Tesla does the same thing. But instead of a fixed time period, they measure the actual time it takes to reach full voltage, and if that time is not within a certain narrow window, it aborts the process. They aren’t doing ALL electric vehicles. They are just doing the Tesla Model S and so they know what the capacitance is of their system. So they time it.

Bottom line is that we can now close the contactors, charge the battery pack, use the pack to drive our UQM Powerphase 100 test bench which happens to be a few feet away, and generally use the entire Tesla battery pack as we will. But have also developed software to monitor the voltages and temperatures and operate two MORE contactors. You see, now that we know how to turn on the internal contactors, we are kidn of forced to simulate the Tesla with a capacitor, and then operate our own contactors and precharge resistor to do an effective precharge on OUR car or solar system. So we wind up with TWO sets of contactors. One inside the battery and one outside.

But if any voltage or temperature is noted outside our own selected range, we can disconnect the pack automatically and instantaneously.

The software will let you enter limits for high cell voltage, low cell voltage, high temperature, and low temperatures. As long as everything stays within the window you prescribe, good to go. Anything falls out of those limits, it disconnects the pack.

Bill Bayer is building me a prototype box. We are NOT going to sell the batteries but we will sell this controller. The issue is the high voltage connector. We don’t know where to get them. ANd if we did we would expect them to be prohibitively expensive. So using some 1/4 copper bar stock and some copper rod, Bill is incorporating the connector into the box itself so it plugs directly into the pack receptacle and eliminates the need to source the connector itself.

Collin Kidder is joining us with a trip down to Cape Girardeau from his home in Sparta Michigan next week. We will film both the module control and the pack control then and it promises to be a fascinating episode.
We had planned this trip to help me get some of this decoded. It is now shaping up as a victory lap on both the modules and pack. So it should make good video.

Meanwhile the full import of all of this had apparently escaped me. Robert Coyne of Colorado Springs called me with some excitement. He was actually a Boardwatch Magazine reader going back into the 1980’s and also a friend of my buddy Cowboy Dave Hughes of Colorado Springs. Dave was a big advocate for the Internet in the earliest days.

Robert called to assure me I have no clue of the import of what I am doing. He was quite excited. He noted there are MANY more people working on off-grid home solar than are working on electric vehicles and they are desperate for battery storage. They have already discovered the Tesla battery packs and are all too familiar with the shortcomings – numerous clumsy BMS design attempts in progress. So the idea of actually being able to use Tesla’s packs with Tesla’s BMS for DIY home powerwall designs is much more attractive than I know. Or so he assures me.

Actually I am not ENTIRELY clueless on the topic of home solar. I built a 15kw solar array at my home in Denver in 1998. 50kWh of batteries. At the time it was the largest residential photovoltaic array in the world at a cost of $270,000. Still operating. My son lives there now.

It also featured the TALLEST lighthouse in the world and it remains so today. It uses a five foot diameter four foot tall buoy light from the English channel in a sixteen foot diamater cab. . Brass, with bullet dents from the second world war. Clear polycarbonate floors on two levels and polycarbonate stairs look like crystal stairs. Quite a magic design if I do say so myself.

But he was correct in that I have heard from several DIY home powerwall guys. Most notably Joe Sidebottom. Joe’s dog doesn’t like shovels. And therein lies a tale.

Joe actually works for a solar installation company. He and three of his co-workers purchased a 20 acre piece of land ill served by a utility company. And they split it into four plots and are ALL doing off-grid home solar using left over bits and pieces and lightning strikes from work.

As our own Bill Bayer is currently shopping for 5 acres of dream homestead here in Missouri, with an eye toward off grid tiny house good eats combining everything he knows about cable tv, they hit it right off.

Joe has actually parted out SEVERAL Teslas in a quest for a whopping 140 kWh of solar battery. This will be enough to provide electricity until the Zombie Apocalypse. He’s following our progress rather closely.

He also has little use for drive units in his solar scheme. So we have hopefully scored some good ones. Thank you Joe.

He also notes that Outback has finally put together the solar guy’s dream box. It will do high voltage. It will both charge and invert. It will swing grid-tie. It will swing off-grid. It will use generators. And batteries. It appears they have finally pulled all the pieces together into a single unit that does what I’ve always wanted to do in solar. Of course, unobtainium but rumored to be available mid-year.

In any event, we are having a victory lap party next week with arrival of Collin Kidder. It is my intention to produce video of both a string of modules under full operational control as well as a Tesla battery pack charging and driving a UQM Powerphase 100.

Jack Rickard

The post Tesla Batteries…Better to be Lucky than Good…. appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

The heart of the issue of electric automobiles has always been the energy storage cell or battery and it remains ever so today and into the future. Moving from the crude lead acid batteries, the limitation on electric cars has always been the weight and size of the battery necessary to power it to any specific distance.

No, this is a new blog, not a repeat of the last two. But the battery thing remains true.

And we were pleased this week to announce a victory lap in the matter of effectively using Tesla’s onboard Battery Management System circuitry to monitor and control packs. Indeed, we have accomplished interface with both the individual modules of the battery removed from the pack, and/or the entire battery pack as a whole. It is my belief that your best shot at success in using these batteries is to make maximum use of the BMS circuitry Tesla has designed and built for that purpose. And various DIY strategies circumventing that are probably inherently dangerous with these none-too-stable cells.

I had envisioned this as a project that would take a few months to attack and with varied expectations of success. Indeed at some level we seemed to face the grueling ignomy of hand decoding binary 8051 machine code.

Instead, due to a fortuitous leap of insight, it was about 3 weeks and success appears pretty much total and all encompassing. Some days you are the windshield and some days you are the bug, but these were good days for me personally. I go home many evenings feeling as if I have just had my ass kicked. But some days end well. It is good to be the King.

My disparagement of these cells is not meant as an attack on Tesla, nor for self-aggrandizement. Our viewership is simply very accustomed to relatively benign LiFePo4 cell chemistries and these are NOT the same. Indeed dissimilar.

I found an interesting case of an innocent at the hands of laptop batteries, very similar if not precisely identical to the Tesla cells. And it includes a revisit to our old friend, that master of disaster and the only EV guy I know who actually eschews technical knowledge in favor of good old common “Lil Mexican” sense and know how – Jehu Garcia. It’s always better to have a theory than actual information I always say. And where better to make one up than Jehu’s shop.

These poor innocent assclowns actually added a lithium battery and solar panel to their vehicle AND HOME using Jehu’s profoundly deep-knowledge techniques and expert professional assistance. Fortunately there were no fatalities. But I thought it illustrates the hazards of dealing with these cells on even a small scale. If you are tossing around 85kWh of it, understand what you are getting into.

Despite a small number of vehicle fires of impressive energy and display, Tesla’s car I view as essentially safe. But they have gone to extreme measures to achieve that with this cell chemistry in a design tradeoff for maximum energy density. This makes sense as energy density is what electric vehicles are all about. But I view it as imperative to employ those safety measures in any application using their batteries gleaned from the vicissitudes of the undivided attention of very poor or very unfortunate drivers.

In other words, there is currently no better design to safety Tesla’s batteries than that designed by Tesla. And nothing you or I (or Jehu) is going to come up with will match it. So if something else “seems like a good idea” abandon that thought promptly and with some enthusiasm.

That is not to say don’t use them or “leave it to us experts.” You are going to have your hands full designing and crafting enclosures for these modules, developing heating and cooling strategies, and marrying it all in to your system and your designs. And I would urge care and attention to detail there. Plenty of work to do in the DIY realm. But at least for the basics, monitoring voltages and temperatures accurately, we can get you there using Tesla’s very effective circuitry.

Our own Collin Kidder made the trip from Sparta Michigan to our facility here in Cape Girardeau, and indeed brought his father and others with him for the adventure. His father Tim, and sidekick Steve the Oreo man have a LOT of energy. They kind of wear me out. They immediately set out on a fix and repair mission digging up all sorts of things I didn’t even know I owned and making repairs to them.

Collin and Bill Bayer and Dylan Fizer attacked the already disassembled 60 kW pack and removed all 14 modules. And then wired them up using the very unique daisy chain serial bus Tesla used to interconnect them. They then connected one of our EVTVDue boards, kind of an Arduino Due clone but with only one USB port, and featuring the addition of both an EEPROM to store persistent configuration variables and a single CAN transceiver giving us an operational CAN port.

< We use this little board to create all sorts of CAN controllers for Delphi DC-DC converters, Chevrolet Volt Chargers, etc. Collin had been hard at work on a prototype shield for this board to accomplish a couple of things. First, we have to provide power for the isolated side of each of the Tesla module BMS boards. Then, we have to communicate with it at 612,500 bps. And finally, it is a 5v transistor-to-transistor (TTL) bus. Arduino is 3.3v. And so he needed to add some device for shifting the 3.3v Arduino levels to the buss's 5v levels. Indeed 5v TTL signals will destroy the Arduino Due if directly connected. He chose to use some AND gates for this and they worked very well. We wanted him to add some MOSFET outputs to this so we could control external contactors based on what was found on the module voltages and temperatures. The Arduino can put out about 50ma of current at 3.3v and this is of course some short of the 12vdc coil voltage of our typical high current DC contactor. Those contactors can take 5 or 6 amps of current initially to close although very briefly and typically have a holding current somewhere around 350ma max. So we have to use the Arduino digital outputs to switch a MOSFET that can do 30v and 20 amps peak. We also MIGHT want to provide outputs to engage external heating or cooling based on detected module temperatures. SO we built four outputs, two for contactors and two others and they can be configured to put out 12v active high or a switched ground active low. And finally, we wanted to be able to accept four digital inputs. Why? I guess because we can. I'm not sure what we'll use them for in this application, but I see this shield as perhaps being useful for other applications as well.

In any event, we added some of Mr. Kidder’s magic sauce software using what we learned earlier and presto chango batta boom batta bing…..nothing…..

Further investigation indicated that the cyclic redundancy check we were making according to the manufacturer’s data sheet had a wee bug in it and there were indeed some other anomalies. But Collin got it all worked out. I asked him to add display of ALL the voltages and temperatures. With the help of a heat gun, we learned that the temperature sensors for each module are actually located on the positive and negative connection terminals of the modules.

And so as you see in the video, we can read and display all module terminal temperatures and each individual cell voltage within the module. Perhaps glossed over in the video, we could conceivably change the voltage at which Tesla goes into active “balancing” between the cells.

The Texas Instrument chip actually has a feature to bleed current around high cells while charging and so to actively top balance the individual cells. They are a little bit conflicted with all this. They set it to a very high value like 4.15 volts. Then they advise you not to charge your car to 100% for maximum cell life. If you never charge 100%, the cells never get to 4.15v and it is unclear just when balancing might be performed.

Similarly, there does not appear to be ANY provisions for balancing between modules. You can only balance between cells within a module. But in any event, we do have the ability to write into a chip register what voltage threshold we want to use to initiate this.

A very nice feature Collin and I discussed and he WAS able to implement – self addressing. The modules are addressable individually with an ID. But you might have modules from anywhere and so have random IDs or even conflicting IDs.

As it turns out, you can simply broadcast a command for all modules to assume ID 00. Modules with ID 00 are then able to accept address assignment commands. And we are just the guys to issue them. But then why don’t ALL the modules with address 00 then go to the new address, and accept no further assignments?

The answer is related to the way the bus is wired.

The Tesla module BMS board communicates through a Silicon Labs 8642ED RF isolator chip. This is the key to keeping the modules isolated from each other and from our controller board. This chip RECEIVES serial data on channel 2 and transmits it on channel 3 – two separate channels that are not actually connected to each other. So any data intended for the entire system goes to the first module, which then RETRANSMITS out channel 3 to the channel 2 input RX on the NEXT module.

A command to assume address 0 is passed automatically to all modules down the chain.

But an ID assignment is not. So the assignment goes to the first board, which assumes the new address (01 for the sake of argument) and does NOT pass this assignment on. Rather it passes an ACCEPTANCE down the chain which is passed eventually back to the controller.

The next assignment only applies to modules with address 00. So the first board in the series passes it on down the bus. The SECOND module seizes it, assumes the new address (02 for example) and does NOT pass it on, just as the first did. But it does issue an acceptance which IS passed down the chain.

This continues until NO module issues an acceptance.

So by iteration, we can issue addresses and note their acceptance until we issue an address and do not get an acceptance. And in this way, we can assign addresses serially on the bus for any number of modules up to 62. And so you can build a pack with any number of modules 1 to 62 and it will automatically address them. In Collin’s software, we do this a lot. And so you can remove a module. Replace it with two. In any combination. And the software will always know what module is where and what it’s temperatures and voltages are on the bus. Tres cool.

Note that this has NOTHING to do with the configuration of your pack. All modules COULD be wired in series or all modules could be connected electrically in parallel. Or any combination in between. The controller simply masters a serial bus of consecutive modules and cares not at all what the actual configuration is.

The weakness of this architecture is that a bad module board breaks the chain. Indeed a connector with no module board on it breaks the chain. And so we have had to devise a DONGLE with the mating receptacle from a board, wired to jumper the pins and pass all signals and voltages, in order to take out a module and still operate.

And so we can safely announce victory over the use of individual Tesla battery modules. But this is kind of like our celebration of getting the Tesla drive unit to turn. It has been nearly two years since we demonstrated this and I haven’t actually announced a product as yet, although we do have about six of these in beta testing with various users around the country. It not only takes a lot of time to productize something when you get it working. It actually in this case takes a lot of time for users to install it in a build and get back to us on how it went….

And so while victory is in front of us, having a product available for you to use is not. And I weaken in the knees and sprout a faint sweat across the forehead at the thought of what must be done here. It’s not a drive unit. But we have to have PCB’s made, contactors added, enclosures sourced, much improvement on the software, and figure out how to supply connectors and harnesses and pins and dongles in some rational combination to users with an unknown number of modules they want to control. So we are still looking at a month or more even on this relatively simple product.

The end product for the modules will look remarkably like the box we built in addressing the battery pack as a whole. We had to house two contactors, two relays, provide a switch to turn it on, indicator LED’s for the contactor states, and a controller. Cable glands for cables in and out, and of course a wiring harness to plug into the control connectors on the battery. In the case of the battery, we replaced the expensive and impossible to source high voltage connector with some 1″ x 0.25 copper bar and dealt with the HVIL pin using a piece of heavy copper wire basically.

For the whole battery controller we used a GEVCU hardware to control all of it. This is a bit of overkill under the circumstances. AN EVTVDue with Collin’s shield would work much less expensively in our final design but we needed to be able to control contactors now.

The reason for this was not immediately apparent. The Tesla battery HAS a pair of perfectly serviceable contactors inside of it. Indeed, our problem has never been monitoring the voltages and temperatures. We had a Tesla monitor program for over a year that reads the 6F2 CAN message and derives the cell and module voltages and module temperatures. But we couldn’t get the battery BMS board to close the contactors inside and connect us to the battery.

The issue was precharge. Almost everything you connnect a high voltage battery to features an input capacitor to smooth out the incoming voltage. Some of them are quite large. Inverters, DC-DC inverters, even the chargers have capacitors. If you connect a high voltage battery to one of these simply by closing the contactor you have most usually destroyed the contactor. The application of 350v to an empty capacitor causes an immediate increase in current to essentially infinity, albeit for an infinitely small period of time. It is almost always enough time to arc weld your contactor contacts and thereafter you cannot open them. They are welded shut.

The answer to this is to precharge. Rather than connect the 350vdc directly to the circuit, you connnect it through some resistance to limit the initial current – say 500 ohms. A 500 ohm resistor will limit the current from a 350v source to 350/500 or 0.7 amperes – 700 milliamperes. This doesn’t sound like much, but in four or five seconds it will get those capacitors up to 200 or 300 volts. At that point, the initial surge current would be limited to 30 amps or so. The energy stored in the capacitor then acts as a limit on the current. And it quickly fills to match the battery voltage.

So we typically put a resistor across the terminals of the positive contactor. Then we engage the NEGATIVE contactor. This completes the circuit, but the capacitor has to charge through the resistor at 700 milliamps.

Once the precharge is complete, we THEN close the positive contactor, bypassing the resistor entirely.

We’re kind of cavalier about all that. Four seconds. Seven seconds. What’s the diff.

Tesla not so much so. They actually use a little different approach. They close the negative contactor and actually MEASURE the voltage on the output terminals of the contactor. If the voltage immediately jumps to pack voltage without any ramp up, they know that they have NOTHING connected to the output pins and since there SHOULD be an inverter connected to it, they abort the procedure entirely and refuse to close the contactors.

Similarly, if it takes too LONG to ramp up to voltage, they detect this as a fault and again abort the procedure. So not matter how correct our High Voltage Interlock HVIL simulation was, we could NOT get it to close the contactors.

The solution was to randomly connect capacitors across the output terminals of the battery until the proper value was employed that the ramp up fell within Tesla’s acceptable window of time. And if it is at the same time connected to any other equipment it will fail.

But that leaves us with a bit of an embarrassing problem. We still don’t have a precharge. Now we have two live terminals at 350v, but anything we connect that to will blow up from surge current. And so we are forced the embarrassment of ANOTHER set of contactors and another precharge resistor that we can indeed control.

Ultimately, you want to have a box/connector for the battery that you can press a button, and the precharge happens automatically, and indicator LED’s will show you your contactor state. No laptop needed to monitor it. And the controller will have software to detect anomalies of voltage or temperature and DISCONNECT the entire thing from your house/car/airplane/other circuitry in the event of a problem automatically and while you sleep. You’ll need a laptop to set this up and define your precharge time, temperature limits, voltage limits etc. But unless you just like sitting and looking at 96 voltages and 32 temperatures, that would be a relatively rare event.

All of that said, I HAVE been working quite a bit on decoding all these other CAN messages from the battery BMS and have found some interesting things. For example, it tracks total lifetime charge and discharge. State of charge. And some other interesting things. I’ve been spending the last week adding such things to our software interface. And I added a CELLDEV limit for cell deviation. We can get the average cell voltage and then detect any cells that vary from that average by more than a few millivolts in all operating regimes. That can be an early warning of trouble. I don’t know what is appropriate, but we immediately disconnected from the UQM Powerphase 100 test bench at 200 millivolts but it seems perfectly happy with 400 millivolts for example.

Again, this will take some time to productize and unfortunately, some assembly here to produce. I just don’t see any way around it. But again, hopefully within a month Elon Musk time or two months Julian calendar.

Again our thanks to Arthur Hebert who indicated the way originally with the 6F2 as Rosetta Stone CAN message ID of Tesla Batteries, Jarrod Thuma for his early work on the Module BMS boards, and of course Collin for pulling it all into operation. Suggestions along the way too numerous to mention individually but nonetheless valuable. This has been an exhilerating and engaging adventure in reverse engineering and right to repair.

There is currently a Supreme Court decision pending on the control patent owners can assert over products once a first sale transaction has been completed. The correct theory is that once you have accepted money for a product, it belongs to the purchaser who may do as he likes with it going back to Lord Coke in the fifteenth century. But believe it or not, some corporations are taking the position that the stuff still belongs to THEM after they sell it and they want to tell you what they will allow you to do with it.

The case in point is between Lexmark and Impression Products Inc and you can find the written arguments in it HERE.
Lexmark argues that by putting a sticker on the printer cartridge, the end user agrees that they are already getting a discount on the printer cartridge (right) in exchange for agreeing not to ever resell or refill it. That Impression Products, Inc. a small firm with 25 employees has heroically gone all the way to the Supreme Court while many others have simply agreed to desist rather than face the legal expenses is amazing. They never agreed to anything and are simply refilling cartridges, but our legal system is its own reward as you can see in the text of the arguments. Common sense or good policy having no place in the discussion. It’s all about the money and the ONLY people with no voice in it whatsoever are the people PAYING the money. The scramble for filthy eucher by the undeserving is vomit inducing to behold.

But the implication is that nothing is to be repaired, reused, or worn out. It should all be immediately replaced with brand new, at heroic expense, because we can vote to empty your pockets at whim. We have the power.

You do have….right up until the moment we take it away….traditionally with a noose.

John Deere has essentially declared war on farmers over the same issue and they are now using Hungarian hackware to repair their tractors.

While I am incensed at the nature of all this, I’m also lambasted by the insanity of it. After alienating all farmers worldwide, who does John Deere imagine they are going to sell their tractors to? Does Lexmark imagine no other printer will do? I would look askance at the concept of mutually assured destruction as a strategy when dealing with your customer base. Long term, it is so idiotic it makes me wonder if American companies DESERVE to have jobs.

Popular and enduring products are those that were used and reused and had a purpose that got repurposed. If you look at the VW Beetle, Volkswagen lost much in third party parts and sales. None of it detectable with modern financial instruments. But they gained much more in brand recognition and good will for the quality and durability of their product line, which never was of particularly high quality nor particularly durable.
Its simply that everyone could work on them and parts were easy and cheap to obtain and it has become an automotive icon of unparalleled stature because of this. Why is this simple but emphatic lesson completely lost on the management of so many large firms.?????

They can’t read? They don’t KNOW about Volkswagen Beetles? Buses? If Lil Jehu can grasp this while randomly burning down everything within range, why can’t Lexmark, John Deere, and the United States Supreme court?????

Imagine a world where the makers of duct tape and WD-40 wanted to be paid extra and again if you actually used the product to do something important or valuable? Or heaven forefend a purpose not envisoned at the time?

Tesla has asserted they will not enforce patents. But with a couple dozen pages of provisos. I think they should just publisher their CAN .dbc file and anything else they can do to make the Tesla THE most open, repairable, reusable car ever built. The million mile car. But Elon never called and asked…so….

But it sure gives me something to do on winter afternoon since they appear disinclined to do so.

Jack Rickard

The post Tesla Battery Victory Lap appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

The Tesla Drive Unit continues to shock and awe – at least us in the shop. And of course, no sooner had we posted the last video than our “Jack Rickard wannabes” sprang to action to note METOO so it is genuinely an area of interest.

We did learn a bit in dismantling the drive unit quite beyond what we’ve done before. Frankly, I was treating it as a black box. Doug Yipp kind of drew us into an examination of the differential. His interest was racing performance and ours more safety. Let me again reiterate that if you DO get a drive unit working, stepping on 350kw at 35 miles per hour with the open differential in the drive unit IS going to result in a launch from pavement into wooded glenn rather inevitably. We have NOT tested this but it is my belief that the Quaiffe Automatic Torque Biasing Differential will address this in Bristol fashion.

The growl has drawn us in a bit further. Jarrod Tuma and a few others have correctly corrected my explanation of the voltage differential between the rotor and frame causing current leaks in the bearings. IF I understand this correctly, it is more a capacitive issue between the common mode voltage on the stator and the rotor – resulting in a signficant difference in potential between the rotor and ground. And as the only connection between rotor and ground is the bearings, there you have it. The brush bearing does indeed appear to be there for grounding purposes. Yet we growl.

Jehu Garcia posted a marvelous video announcing EVWEST’s initiative to develop their own open source controller board for the Tesla Drive Unit. Wouldn’t that be marvelous? As always, Jehu is a little in the weeds technically and factually. It APPEARS that this is Michal ELias long awaited Universal Motor Controller board, thus far NOT open source. And of course EVWEST is developing nothing. But this may be a California alt-left libtard thing that I just don’t understand. Elon Musk seems to subscribe to it. If somebody DOES develop something interesting, and you buy it and incorporate it, then in some sense YOU developed it having had the astute sense to incorporate it. I get it. Cool.

Mr. Elias actually promised us almost immediate delivery of the UMC three years ago. So his timeline management isn’t even as good as Elons, which is famously poor. And even there, the self aggrandizing “I invented a sensorless Universal Motor Controller board is slightly overwrought as well. Texas Instruments introduced a chipset and a reference design to do just that, which appears to be mostly what the UMC is.

All that said, I personally think it’s a great idea. Actually I thought so three years ago But in this application, perhaps more so. Actually what he is talking about now is a little different. A simple CAN controller much like ours but instead of delivering drive units, he flashes the memory of the existing Tesla inverter control board with a known compatible firmware version. In this way, changes to the firmware cannot effectively disable the CAN control or require rework of it.

Most of these FLASH memory controller chips have some sort of “fuse” that can be blown once it is flashed. This is deliberate to prevent people from downloading the firmware in the chip. But it is always optional. And it appears Tesla elected not to set it. Of course once it is set, you also cannot reflash it, and so it is actually pretty common not to set it.

Without doubt, Tesla has the ability to replace the firmware in the drive unit control board via CAN. And indeed there is a bootrom in the multicontroller on the Tesla inverter control board. SO my first choice would be to be able to flash the drive unit over CAN.

Jason Hughes and Michal Elias are rather desperate for us to be stuck in LIMP mode. Indeed, they are telling anyone who will listen that we ARE stuck in limp mode, having no information on what we are doing at all other than what they see in the videos. Their motive here does not seem to be furthering electric vehicles but again – self aggrandizement without apology. They have offered no solutions. Simply accusations based on fantasy.

But we did come across a more recently manufactured drive unit version that indeed would go into drive and reverse and neutral but did not develop any power to speak of when we put on the throttle. It was really lame. And so I assume similarly “limp”. And that was the drive unit we swapped the DOKA inverter into, leaving the remaining DOKA drive unit as the one we disassembled to find the growl – and as it happens in this video to diagram the cooling system.

But that also leaves us with the more recent inverter which we do show in this video. Curious, we took it completely apart. I should have shot video of this. But it started at taking a peek with a couple of screws and we just sort of accidentally kept at it until it was all in pieces. Opportunity missed I guess. Some photos.

One surprise that wasn’t really a surprise, but is surprising is that the power switching electronics eschews the current fashion in largish very integrated modules such as SkiM in favor of the very common TO247 transistor package. Of course that then requires a number of them for each phase. Again, I have to admire Tesla’s engineering. The TO247 allows them to array the switches along the length of the designed coolant tubes in very Bristol fashion. And so coolant flow per unit of package heat sink area is really quite well optimized in a still very compact package. Comparing the size of this inverter to the DMOC645 or UQM’s behemoth it is a marvel. But three coolant flows going both directions through the heart of the package. Really quite cunning.

The current sensor is also very interesting. They have copper bars as current carriers befitting the high current levels (up to 1350 amps in some of the later models) required for each phase. Two of the phases have current measurement devices. But again, a little designed circuit bridging a manganin metal bridge in the copper bar performs the necessary current sensor duties.

And of course the most interesting part is of course the control board. All the external communications and throttle signals and encoder signals come through the AMPSEAL connector directly to this board, which then drives the power switching circuitry. The brains of the operation.

The task of figuring out the CAN bootloader is a little ambitious. But the multicontrollers on the board feature two 14-pin JTAG connectors. JTAG is the Joint Action Task Group and many years ago came up with this shortcut connector to directly access pins on a chip for programming purposes.

And so, after examining the pile, we sacked it all up and shipped it to Collin Kidder in Sparta Michigan. The mission is to see if we can download the firmware from these chips, and subsequently reflash it onto these chips. If so, we could download one from one of our working drives, and reflash this later manufacturer “limp” inverter back into useful duty.

Actually, Collin has test benches in Sparta and of course has Siemens motors there. The common Siemens motor we have sold for years out of the Azure Dynamics bankruptcy is actually a pretty sturdy 100kW AC induction motor. And so I’m thinking this inverter could be resurrected, connected to the Siemens, and perhaps with a bit of encoder modification, be made to serve as a Tesla test bench without the Tesla motor.

The actual chips used on the Tesla inverter control board are heavily ensconced in a protective conformal coating. This inures it to the vagaries of weather but also has the added feature of totally obscuring the part numbers on the chips. But Collin has already dug into the board and identified the rather expensive Texas Instruments chipset used.

Note that one of the three chips identified thus far is the MicroSemi ProASIC3 A3P125. FPGA’s are Field Programmable Gate Arrays. Early computers were basically logic devices based on AND gates and OR gates and NAND gates and NOR gates and logic inverters etc. I guess modern computers are as well deep in the die. These chips provide massive numbers of them and allow you to write code to configure them in various ways. Picture a hardwired application specific computer. The advantage is that it is lightning fast at performing very defined logic and switching tasks. Tasks such as desaturation detection mayhaps?

The Texas Instruments chip set consists of the TMS320F2811PBQ Digital Signal Processor and the TMS320F280PAGQ Piccolo Microcontroller. Each are gratefully equipped with 14-pin JTAG connectors. We are more likely to find the code of interest of course in the Piccolo Microcontroller – the smaller of the three chips. This is the brains with the DSP and FPGA providing the brawn of the design. (I’m making all of this up, but I’m pretty good at it. Better to baffle you with bullshit than try to dazzle you with brilliance).

Recall if you will our battery work of just a few weeks ago. Jarrod Tuma had a kind of stalled out HACKADAY project to reverse engineer the BMS boards on the individual battery modules of the Tesla. On our announcement of our project, which referenced his earlier work, he was reinvigorated on the project and so we collaborated with him on this project.

Not certain what eventually comes of that, but for the present, seeing this video Tuma contacted us to note that he actually works in Oregon for a company doing Inverter design work. I think we even gave a shout out to the company in our battery coverage. He further noted that IF a junk inverter was to be found at EVTV, he would graciously accede to receive it and store it properly in his garage.

While Tesla drive units don’t quite grow on trees around here. As it so happens, I did get taken on a drive unit that had obviously been flooded and apparently blown up as well. SOmetimes good things come from bad behavior and experience. I’m personally wounded that anyone would be so dishonest as to deliberately sell me a damaged inverter and gleefully take off with the money, on the other hand…. We learned a lot from THAT mess as well. And so we have shipped the inverter to Mr. Tuma.

In all honesty I expected the battery project to go on for months. And indeed, properly putting together an actual device you can use is going to take a few weeks. But the reverse engineering fell into place with almost alarming speed. And so I agreed to forward the inverter in exchange for Mr. Tuma’s continued collaboration on the drive unit. The inverter is a mess. But the control board is likely operational, if a tad encrusted with crap. He is busy with the conversion of a 95 Mitsubishi Eclipse and is reverse engineering the Zytek drive train out of Daimler’s SMART ED. Our buddies at Illuminati Motor Werks are involved in that project as well. Indeed, I think EVWEST sent me one of those and I sold it to Nate and Kevin. Or maybe gave it to em. I disrecall. I personally think it’s a dead end. But at $400 a drive unit, an inexpensive one.

In any event, we are hopeful of his participation at least at the kibitz level with our firmware flashing project. And we may have hidden ambitions regarding a perhaps slow and laborious disassembly of the firmware code itself.

Jehu Garcia is all butt hurt at our characterization of his battery bomb in the Kombi van. In fact, the video embedded in the last blog explaining all about that was hastily removed. Unfortunately not quickly enough. Apparently he had a sekert contract going with a large company to do a battery makeover of HIS Samba. Subsequent to our blog, like the same day almost, his contract was cancelled. He bitterly characterizes me as a “senile old man”.

While his intentions are poor, I fear he may be onto something. My energy level wanes. My forgetfulness increases. He may have hit a nerve here.

Disassembly of the firmware in the inverter control board is non-trivial. This is not 8051 code. Indeed it is one of the most advanced embedded processors out there, and pricey at that. I think they’re about $32 each in single quantities. But there are those that like to do disassembly as an exercise. Having done some, I’m not one of them. But if you are, we’d be pleased to add you to the hack team. I probably am old and senile at this point, but if I can enable some young tech stallions to carry on the work, might be good things to come of it for all.

If you are all into self aggrandizement and overawing the aborigines with your hacker magic, posing as an expert and one upping anyone you can find in a forum to listen, you probably won’t be happy with us. But if you sincerely want to further the EV and custom EV DIY end of the world, and enjoy the process and learning along the way, do contact me. No Tesla employees please.

Similarly, in this episode I introduce the Tesla charger. We have for several years done a brisk trade in Chevy Volt chargers. This is actually a charger made by Lear and it was used in the Coda automobile. We obtained some after their bankruptcy. With different firmware it was also used in the Chevy Volt. We decoded the CAN messages needed to set the termination voltage and current. Actually the bare minimum required.
And have then sold them as an inexpensive but very high quality and durable 3.3kw charger – slightly more powerful than the Brusa we had sold and somewhat less expensively.

We have accumulated 10 of the Tesla Chargers intending to do the same but have never really had time to fool with them. I guess we still don’t. But I have one wired up and I’m playing with the CAN and the startup sequence of what has to be hooked up first and before the other thing, which then enables the third thing etc. etc. I get these chargers for $400 or $500 because they are totally useless boat anchors. Nobody has made one work that I know of. It is only rarely they show up. Generally they get SHREDDED with the rest of the car that can’t be sold off in the salvage parts market. Which is a crying shame. It’s a GREAT charger, 11kw in a very efficient and compact package. While I don’t know the current architecture, in the early Tesla Supercharger stations they simply had a dozen of these things stacked up inside running on 3phase.

It’s actually very versatile, effectively working on any wall power commonly available in the world. I suspect it would work on a DC input as well up to a point. It’s 336% more powerful than the Volt charger. And so it would charge any EV from 50 to 430 volts in less than 1/3 the time.

But like everything in the Tesla, it is very tightly integrated with the MCU gateway, the BMS, and even the EVSE on the wall. And as always, so many projects, so little time. Plenty of bizarrely bad advice, and so little actual help. I actually had a man comment on this video offering us the condescending and very knowledgable expert advice on what kind of LIGHT BULB to put in our drop light. Thank you. I didn’t know any of that. Look at me.

I shouldn’t complain. Actually many viewers are quite generous and much more knowledgeable than I. We recently hosted a visit from Randy Lee of Toronto. Randy has a CNC machine shop there and built us 3 sets of stub axles with VW flanges for the DOKA. Very high quality. And so Bill Bayer, in this episode, installs the Tesla Drive Unit and axles into the DOKA using Randy’s pieces.. A very different kind of build with no transmission.

Some yet to go I guess. But I heard an airplane roaring under the DOKA this week and I can only assume a cooling system is going and that indeed the radiator fan in the DOKA is a monster. Even using the wrong drop light configuration, this build is getting very close.

I will be pleased to show you in the next episode our new SPEEDHUT gages. Bill built me a little panel for the Tesla drive unit bench with the DOKA gages and we got them working very productively. The Tesla control unit now drives these gages perfectly to provide MPH, RPM, AMPERES, SOC, INVERTER TEMP, and VOLTAGE. Actually the voltage is currently our 12v. But since I informed Bill that in no way would he ever get these back for the DOKA, order new ones, he has conferred and confabbed with SpeedHut. They actually want us to act as a reseller for these and have agreed to some custom printing so we can use the 12v for 400v, more realistic inverter temperatures, BATTERY instead of FUEL LEVEL, and we intend to make the tachometer do double duty as an analog current display as well as RPM. They are large, easy to read, and eerily backlit.

Yes, I like the 7 inch EVIC display. It looks Tesla. It has all the information. It has a touch screen. But even on the Tesla with a 17 inch screen, I cannot reliably hit the CENTER button on my garage door opener on the screen AT DRIVEWAY SPEEDS. It’s just hard and clumsy to hit. Large automotive gages will be a delightful addition to the DOKA. These new LEGEND CAN SERIES gages from Speedhut finally solves our instrument cluster woes on converted vehicles. Yank the instrument cluster entirely and replace it with these gages.

Jack Rickard

The post A Target Rich Environment – Tesla Reverse Engineering appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

EVTV celebrates eight years of publication this month. Our first video was published May 22, 2009 and we have just uploaded video number 312 – two hours, nineteen minutes, 50 seconds. When we began this journey, there were ZERO electric cars available for purchase anywhere in the world – Tesla Roadster being much talked about but unobtainium at the time. We’ve averaged 39 videos per year. GAV’s EV series being at an end, we were the only savage on the buffalo hunt and indeed I was early advised that no one would have any interest in a two hour video but in any event no one could view it in what was then considered high definition of 1280×720. The bandwidth didn’t support it but many older PC’s wouldn’t even play it.

Today it is rare for anyone to convert a vehicle to electric drive without doing a video series on it and 4k is the new high water mark in resolution. There are today essentially ZERO OEM’s who do not offer some version of an electric vehicle. In many ways, we have outlived our purpose and become an anachronism. And we’ve managed the entire cycle with sufficient ineptitude to have never actually suffered a profit financially.

We have always hosted the videos on Amazon’s AWS cloud service and less than 10% of EVTV viewers watch it on the ever annoying YouTube. But for those watching a two hour video on a cell phone, they still prefer it there. And actually for some months it has been easier to include the Youtube version in the blog than to deal with the vagaries of a now very aging version of JW Player.

ALong the way, an odd thing has happened. While our very first EV, the 1967 Porsche Speedster, is here in the front window of the shop and still runs, we do less conversions as time progresses and maintain the others poorly. The Cadillac Escalade gave up its transmission for the second time and I just have no interest in dealing further with automatic transmissions. They have proven a poor choice for electric vehicle use. I still love the Escalade, and we may rebuild it with a Tesla rear end or something. But as stated in an earlier blog, I am feeling overwhelmed by a target rich environment.

And the target seems ever further removed from cars. OEM cars have come online with very advanced drive and battery systems, making our early efforts with fork lift motors and basic PWM controllers seem quaint at this point. Most of the players in the 2008/2009 space are long gone. And we’ve moved more toward adapting these OEM components for use in electric car and boat builds.

This has had the effect of sucking us down a wormhole of every more technical investigation into CAN and circuit board design and software development, and ever further from actually building a car.

The attraction of course is vastly better components and engineering ever more available from a vast pile of wrecked low-mile manufactured electric vehicles. But the manufacturers treat every aspect of their operation as some sort of sacred state secret, and so we have to dig harder and harder to make use of them. And as such their utility is dramatically limited. A battery or motor or controller is readily available because nobody knows how to make it work, the market for replacement/repair parts is ridiculously limited, and so they have essentially zero value. Until or unless someone makes them actually do something.

That Tesla would invest over $20,000 in each drive unit, and in the end, with 10,000 miles on it and in perfect operating condition, it is too often scrapped for the weight and value of the metals in it seems vaguely criminal.

But everyone falls into the game.

Speedhut has announced a series of customizable dash gages that use the J1979 OBDII protocol for light passenger vehicles. Yes, in the video I refer to it as J1939 repeatedly and in error. J1939 is similar but for trucks and heavy equipment. Take a look at their TOTAL documentation for these gages. Two pages that describe NOTHING of its operation. It is laughable. They assume you are going to plug these into an existing car through the OBDII port. If you have an existing car with ECU and OBDII port, doesn’t it already HAVE gages? But their product offering is heavily skewed to that scenario. And they provide actually ZERO information on how they work. And using standard published specification PIDS, kind of imply it’s a state secret.

IN a separate error I noted that they don’t actually comply with J1979 as they don’t send PID requests. Their technical guy insisted they DID send PID requests. Turns out it was kind of a point of view thing.

The gages actually send out ONE PID request. That is for PID 0. PID 0 is a request for a list of which of the first 32 standard PID codes is supported by the vehicle ECU. The gages send this 0x7DF request ONE TIME IN A ROW. And if it doesn’t receive the list, it assumes it is NOT connected to a viable CAN bus, and never sends anything at all again. If it DOES receive the reply message, it happily starts spewing PID requests for data in a fairly vigorous fashion.

There is a lot wrong with this. CAN is a more noise resistant serial network but it is still operating in a noisy environment. So there is no assurance that a single message will get through. So every device on the bus tends to blast CAN messages all over the place in kind of a broadcast mode hoping something will get through. And a very crude bus arbitration scheme settle all disputes in favor of the LOWER number message IDs. 0x7DF is one of the HIGHEST or LEAST PRIORITY messages you can send, 0x7EF and 0x7FF being the only thing it has priority over.

Unfortunately, the gages come up and issue this request before our controller gets through its setup routines. So by the time we are ready to respond, the gages have already shut down, never to try again. Unless we recycle power to them of course.

Actually Speedhut has been very helpful on the phone and using Collin’s SavvyCAN we have worked out just how they work and how we can incorporate this with the Tesla Drive Unit. But in writing the seven page document addendum to our ALSET controller kit, it occurs to me that this is really pretty involved on a very technical level to get 5 gages to display Speed, RPM, Voltage, Temperature and state of charge. And it appears I must write the documentation for their product, with their technical representative a little unschooled on just how the things DO work?

It is a herd mentality run amuck. I’m reminded of when MacDonalds introduced their breakfast menu, but had a sharp turnover from breakfast to hamburgers at precisely 10:30 each morning. There were of course operational reasons for doing so. But it doesn’t explain why restaurants and fast food places across the entire country suddenly decided that they would end breakfast promptly at 10:30 when previously they would of course serve you breakfast at any time of the day or night. But within days of MacDonalds announcement, you couldn’t buy an egg for love or money after 10:29.29 AM anywhere.

I actually went into our restaurant at the Cape Girardeau airport one morning about 10:40. This poor girl was trying to make a living running a restaurant at an airport that had a few airplanes, but no people there most of the time. There wouldn’t be 8 guys at the airport most days all day. I ordered breakfast and she looked at me and very firmly informed me they didn’t serve breakfast after 10:30. I looked around the restaurant at all the other tables and chairs in amazement. She and I were the only people IN THE BUILDING. And she was chanting to me some nonsense about being 10 minutes too late to order an egg WHILE she is slowly going bankrupt in front of me. And there’s not even another humanoid in the place to witness this. But she had gotten this from a MacDonalds operation that had entirely different reasons for the policy. So it made perfect sense to her.

It is no secret I’m a huge Tesla fanboyz and indeed, at this point I think they are so far ahead of the game that General Motors, Ford, and BMW, Volkswagen et al really don’t even matter. They have so much blue sky opportunity in front of them, with an 85 billion automotive market before them, offering totally disruptive change, that it is a huge technology party.

I was touched by Elon Musk during a very recent TedTalk interview. You have to kind of wade through to the end at 39:40 to hear it. The interviewer is sucking and stroking so hard it is even embarrassing for Musk. He finally states “I’m not trying to be anyone’s savior….I just want to find ways to think about the future without being sad.” Probably the best Elon Musk quote of all time and I think very truthful.

The closest thing to criticism came with an actual accusation that he was somehow betraying the faith TALKING to President Trump about climate change. This was pathetic. He is kind of dependent on government for many of his SpaceX plans, so certainly doesn’t need any enemies in the white house. And if he doesn’t show up to talk about it, how is Trump ever going to hear it?

I’ve actually heard Musk on the topic before. He is truly a bright guy and I would claim him in my camp. X=don’t know. Climate is a much more complex and variable system than most of the denialist denyers (denialist squared???)quite grasp. But Musk is a risk/benefit statistical probability guy. The risks are high – we have one planet and if we screw it up we’re hosed. And the benefit very low – we keep using fossil fuels and what? As Shah Agassi said, we didn’t leave the stone age for lack of stones. What’s the benefit to driving around like Jed CLampett in an ancient oil burner with Granny tied on back in a rocking chair?

So you factor it out. Put global warming on both sides of the equation and it cancels out. Leaving you with the solution – electric cars and solar energy. Why are you rooting through the temperature data and arguing about it so much? With a clear solution available, why all the heat and stress over what the problem really is? The solution carries so many OTHER benefits it really doesn’t matter. We should do it. We are going to do it. And we’re working on doing it now.

In any event, Tesla’s stock is now trading for ten times its value shortly after IPO. And I think we are looking at another 10x in valuation over the next five years. Tesla’s actual financial performance actually doesn’t matter. They have the ability to raise unlimited funds. And they are a technology growth company, not an automobile manufacturer.

Back to earth here at EVTV, we are in an ever tightening downward spiral going ever deeper in the technical aspects of Inverters and motors and batteries and more pointedly, the electronics used to control them and our designs of software and hardware to control THAT. I have a drive unit test bench, a charger test bench, and two battery test benches all mostly about laptop computers, CAN serial communications, and how to simulate a 20ma current flow into a single obscure connector pin to allow full power out of the drive unit. That’s where we were this week.

And I’m writing software to display CAN message bit fields that can’t actually BE reverse engineered – each bit representing some random made up error fault code. But there are up to 64 different errors represented in one CAN message, repeated and updated every 100 milliseconds.

All this to say that the history of automobiles and the rich tradition of reusing used parts and third party products and so forth is basically being nullified by proprietary technologies. In examining a later model inverter and comparing it to an early model inverter we discovered Tesla has actually gone to a serious inconvenience for themselves and locked down the code in the inverter firmware using the Code Protection Scheme provided by Texas Instruments. This further complicates the reuse of future Tesla components with no discernible advantage to Tesla whatsoever that I can fathom. It just IS 10:30 and I’m sorry sir. No breakfast.

That is not to say that it is some vast Tesla conspiracy to end automotive repair. As I told Collin Kidder and Jarrod Tuma, who are working on these Inverter controller boards, there is no Tesla. It is now a large organization, a corporation. And within Tesla, there aren’t four guys with the knowledge and ability to do what you two are doing, or even to know what you are talking about. But a game has been launched by the self aggrandizing self promoting wannabee “hackers” to find holes in the Tesla system. And Tesla now has people dedicated to plugging the holes. It’s a bit mindless, if damaging to our efforts. They innovate continously. And we have to do the same. It is what it is.

But it is expensive. And it has taken us far afield from our original raison d’etre in an ever tightening spiral of ever more specialized electronic and software work. We’ve come a long way from picking up for GAV’s EV. I don’t see any future where this focus again widens. And it will be interesting to see where this wormhole spits us out in the future.

The DOKA is nearing completion. Bill had a wiring harness in. I don’t know if the axles will hold, and I don’t know our little Influenza battery will hold up if they do. But we should be rolling in a week or so with a Tesla Drive Unit powering it.

There were some design flaws in our first prototype run of Tesla battery module controller boards. We have had to go for a second round of battery module interface boards for the TEsla Battery Module Controller so that will be another 3 weeks delay. And so it goes…

Jack Rickard

PS. I recently posted a missive on Facebook offering what comfort I could to some friends suffering losses with some grief. It was well received there.
I’ll pad this blog out with it even though it has nothing to do with EVS.

WHY BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE

Facebook offers a microcosm of life. A kind of terse summary of what is important to us. Striking is the almost incessant litany of people who are losing loved ones to various diseases, fighting cancer, or suffering the loss of a beloved friend or spouse or dog or…..

The pain is inarguable and it is not my purpose to disenfranchise those suffering the loss from their inalienable right to agony. Your loss is real. Your pain is real. And neither I or anyone else fancies that they can change that to the least degree. You are “entitled” to it.

But I would like to offer a slightly different perspective.

Many offer proclamations of deep faith in religion and specifically Christianity. As a lifelong cultural Catholic, having studied scripture somewhat more than casually, I’m sympathetic to this point of view.

But in understanding, I think perhaps it suffers from omitting a few practical answers to some fairly all encompassing questions. Most notably:

1. Why are we here?
2. Why does a loving active God allow bad things to happen to good people.

They are of course interrelated questions, but I would like to focus primarily on question 2. It comes up a lot. And every answer I’ve read or heard was precociously unsatisfying, indeed often absurd.

A survey of several hundred Near Death Experience videos returns us a very different point of view.

TRAGEDY EXCEPTIONALISM

Human beings are of fairly consistent design and exhibit fairly consistent responses to the same stimuli. One of the more curious responses, in my opinion, is the nature of tragic exceptionalism. We treat every outcome that we dislike as a huge exception. An unexplained and unique event.

Death itself is the most defining of these. We all agree it’s terrible. Yet in all of human history there has not been a recorded instance of escaping it. Nobody gets off the planet alive.

Yes, I know you believe that Christ arose on the third day. That was after he DIED on what is euphimistically referred to now as a somehow GOOD Friday.

And with each death, the exhibited reaction seems to be surprise, alarm, and great protest. As if it were the first such incident in recorded history.

Wars. There have been less than 20 generations of world wide peace in the recordings of the last 13,000 years of human history. Hundreds, then thousands, and today we routinely have wars where millions of individual humans are slaughtered, butchered mercilessly and often burned alive. Each treated as a unique and unheard of event.

Yet we universally abhor war. It demonstrably ends millions of lives and forces relocations and dislocations of millions more. The universal suffering is wide spread and long enduring. We treat each as a surprising new exceptional event, and strive mightily to “end the war.” For what? To immediately commence the next war?

Rape. The rape of children even. By the thousands. The hundreds of thousands. Worldwide by the millions. A horror. Ruins lives forever. In every case, it is as if this has never happened before. True, they quickly recover from any physical effects. But are focused on the unique HORROR of it happening at all for decades – fully reinforced in how horrible it IS by all around them. Until the horror becomes horrible and kind of self perpetuating in and of itself. A humiliating indignity mutates from a minor inconvenience to lifelong psychiatric problems by focusing on it and reliving it over and over because it is such a terrible exception, only occurring to about half the women and indeed some of the men on the planet.

Cancer. AIDS. Heart disease. Each affecting MILLIONS of humanoids, yet for each, it is greeted as a truly EXCEPTIONAL event, a surprising event, an apparently unheard of tragedy.

And why me? Actually, more appropriately, why not me?

And so we see what we deem as horrible things happening to good people. Often they are perpetuated by those we deem evil people.

The loss of a spouse. A unique and exceptional event causing great sorrow. How can our mate and daily companion of 7, ten, twenty, thirty, or fifty years simply be gone. Lost to us forever? The grief is very real.

In stark reality, let’s get real here. HALF of the spouses ANYONE has had in all of human history have died while married. And precisely 50% of all spouses in all of human history have been left behind as widows or widowers. It’s a pretty equal distribution all things considered. And unless you both go together in a single car wreck, which would be an unique and exceptional tragedy, one will inevitably precede the other. I’m sorry. It’s not that it happens. It happens to ALL of us. You are in group A or in group B. It is essentially inescapable if you marry at all.

My point is, and I can hardly entertain counteraguments, war, murder, rape, pillage, plunder, disease, widowhood, physical injury and death are NOT exceptional events. Indeed they are universal and ongoing as part of the human condition and experience. And yes YOU are going to die, YOU have a 50% chance of losing a spouse, and YOU will most likely lose parents, brothers, sisters, and even in many cases children who unfortunately DIE but often after long suffering the indignities of disease, or war, or rape, or torture.

I know. Kind of depressing. Or is it?

MUTUAL OF OMAHA’S WILD KINGDOM.

While my peers howled through episodes of “I Love Lucy” I actually loved Marlin. Marlin Perkins was Director of the St. Louis zoo and had developed a television documentary series entitled Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Mutual of Omaha was not really very wild. They were an insurance company. But they funded the show, and so some cache of wild accrued to their brand.

About the same time, Sir David Frederick Attenborough began a career with BBC2 in the United Kingdom. He actually came eventually to run the network but didn’t like administrivia. He liked producing documentaries and in 1972 left management to produce documentary series on natural science. His international hit “Life On Earth “ began in 1976 and was available to U.S. audiences as it was co-sponsored by Turner Broadcasting

And so for the past 40 years, I have commenced some 3000 afternoon naps with the droning desultory tones of David Attenborough’s effectively British whisper in the background while viewing gorgeous greenscapes of the African savannah and the Sarrenghetti plain. I’ve personally watched this plain dry out so many times I believe I could phone it in from Missouri myself and do it without a script.

Today, his latest work is the sequel to the 2001 series, “The Blue Planet” with “The Blue Planet II”. The advances in videography from 2001 to 2017 are stunning and if you haven’t seen The Blue Planet II you must. It is simply gorgeous high resolution cinematography.

So why bring this into the discussion?

As humans, we are rather myopically focused on ourselves. Kind of a pronounced naval gazing fixation knowing no bounds. But the orb on which we reside is largely unaware of our existence, or we of its. There are millions and millions of species of animals, plants, insects, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and well, just life beyond comprehension. We have not even completed our task of NAMING all the higher order animals and it is unlikely that we have SEEN more than half the insect species.

Blue Planet II presents some astoundingly detailed glimpses of life as a Cheetah, a Gazelle, a Wasp, or a Tree Frog. They are extraordinarily detailed, and bring to life the profound drama of an ongoing struggle for survival by every living entity on the planet.

Here is a mother Cheetah and her three cubs. She has to somehow trick the lions into NOT discovering and killing her cubs. But more importantly, she HAS to find food to feed them and herself or they will simply die of starvation before week’s end. And while she has immense skills as a hunter/predator, in reality 9 out of 10 “hunts” where prey is located and pursued simply end in ignomious and embarrassing failure. While her cubs look hungrily on, she misses again and again and again.

And here is the gazelle mother, carefully guarding and teaching her baby gazelle the rules of survival. Where to find to eat. And how to escape and avoid becoming prey.

And suddenly the race is on with the Mother cheetah running at top speed trying to run down the baby gazelle, and it of course running as fast as a gazelle can to escape – running for its life literally.

To the cheetah, it is a very BAD thing to miss and suffer the ongoing pangs of hunger while watching her cubs starve. And to the gazelle, baby and mother, it is a very BAD thing to be caught and brutally literally torn to pieces by a pack of ravening cheetahs.

On the other hand if the cheetah catches the gazelle, great joy and feasting among the cheetahs. And sorrow and despair if they miss.

The takeaway here is good and bad are neither good nor bad in and of themselves. It’s pretty much a point of view.

And the series drills this in with tree frogs guarding their eggs, and mother wasps in a desperate search to find them. Of great white sharks and seals. Orcas eating a baby sperm whale while its mother looks on helpessly. And this competition repeated on large scale and small across literally millions of species carpeting the surface of the earth and seas.

Humanoids, the few there are, huddle in concrete urban islands unaffected by all of this and largely UNNOTICED by all of this activity.

The point we must drive home, is that the good and bad are not only entirely random in their assignment, and based on point of view, but may be based on an entirely false premise from inception.

And indeed the animals do not seem to apply these labels. The mother gazelle is sorrowful for a few minutes, and moves on. On loss of a cub to the lion, the mother cheetah is furious for an hour. And resumes the task of caring for and feeding the remaining two. Mother whale resumes her transit north.

The premise is that death is final. And once you are dead you are simply dead. In that world, truly it is tragic and “bad” to be the devoured baby gazelle.

On the other hand, if the baby gazelle could simply shout ALLIE ALLIE OUTS IN FREE and end the game, it would seem to be more of a joyful competition. If at the final moment of drama, it simply turned a corner and dived into another adjoining room, where all the other dead gazelles were happily playing and communing with each other, the entire drama truly does lose the good, the bad, and the horror.

And so the labels for good and bad are almost entirely human inventions, and appear to be based on a singular belief in death that it is the end of existence. If death is simply a sidestep into another dimension, and a familiar one at that, the assigned value labels look pretty lame.

What if cancer is neither good nor bad? And death is neither good nor bad? Then war becomes neither good nor bad. And murder is neither good nor bad. And rape is neither good nor bad. Or theft. Or jaywalking. Or lack of license and registration. They are simply occurrences – events in a series.

The good and the bad are contrived in the human mind and applied as labels in an almost violent fashion and without a great deal of rhyme or reason.

And this reduces the question of why a loving God allows bad things to happen to good people to why does a loving God allow THINGS to happen to people.

What he allows is for LIFE to happen to people.

LIFE EXCEPTIONALISM

Over 127% of American adults now profess belief in intelligent life on other planets. Having no persuasive evidence to present for intelligent life right here on planet Earth, I find this an amazing leap of faith – a particular oddity among self-professed atheists who ostensibly have no faith.

It could certainly be the case that there are an infinite number of intelligent civilizations among the stars and I am all too aware of Carl Sagan’s assertion that were it not so, it would be a stunning waste of space.

But thus far, and to date, without any singular or even outlier exceptions, we have found not only no evidence of life on any planet or cosmic body beyond earth, but have basically found no ENVIRONMENTS that could POSSIBLY allow life as we know it to endure at all for even a brief few milliseconds. The 800 F sulfuric acid rains of Venus certainly don’t. The incredible temperature swings of an airless Mercury do not. The sterile thin cold atmosphere of Mars does not. The crushing pressures and temperatures of the gas giants make even the concept of a surface unlikely.

Every place we look we see cold sterile rock impossibly hostile to the tiniest trace of microbial life. Rivers of liquid methane and mountains of ammonia ice. Life so rare it basically does not exist anywhere we have looked.

And yet, here on Planet Earth, we have a 10-mile-thick layer of life so abundant, it is actually in perpetual and very active motion in an all-day, all-night, never-ending competition with the OTHER life that is here, simply for survival. To gain access to the rays of the sun, the moisture of the skies, the air to breathe and the food necessary to survive, and to escape falling prey as food ourselves, is a second-by-second, minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour mortal life and death struggle of furious proportions.

We are somewhat inured to this battle as humanoids largely due to our success at the top of the food chain. Yet we too are beset by disease carrying mosquitoes, our world encroached on by constantly growing weeds, and indeed our bodies entirely encrusted with trillions of viruses and bacteria and cells each avidly seeking to reproduce and use us as a host and if we resist, or not, to often kill us in the process. Indeed they compete with and eat each other using our very skin as a fertile plain and battlefield.

It is UNIVERSAL competition and LIFE MORE ABUNDANT than we know or can imagine. A 10 mile thick skin of roiling bubbling life stew. And viewed from space, it is strikingly beautiful to behold to boot.

THE ITALIAN STALLION – ROCKY BALBOA

So walk with me on a random thought experiment. There is no GOOD life events, nor BAD life events, there is only life, and it is ordered in events. We can each affect almost all of this series of events by our decisions and our choices, but we cannot escape that there ARE events as long as we remain alive.

Do not miss that our choices often dictate WHICH events occur, in combination with a certain random element of the universe. But in the end, life happens.

So why? Let’s accept for the moment that life does not “end” in death but merely transitions to another immediate existence where are still precisely who we always were, just not here and not bound by the rules of existence that are here. That kind of disables the BAD label we universally apply to anything remotely connected with death.

IF you accept an afterlife, you HAVE to give up on the tragic horror of death. It’s a binary choice. You cannot have eternal life and still cling to the label that death is a horrible horrible tragedy. So for the sake of argument, give it up right here.

But that again brings us back to the why of things.

In 1976 Sylvester Stallone wrote a film play titled “Rocky” and obtained financing of less than $350,000 to produce it, which he wrote, produced, and starred in.
I cry every time I watch it.

The film was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay nominations for Stallone. The film went on to win the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Directing and Best Film Editing. It grossed over $200 million, and was followed by SEVEN sequels to the film. As such, I would have to say it was the most successful movie ever filmed, by any measure you care to apply. It may not have been the BEST movie every made. But it was certainly the most successful in money made, awards received, longevity, number of successful sequels and international distribution.

And why that? Robert Rocky Balboa, the principle character in the film, purports to be a boxer. But in the opening fight scene in the film, he loses the fight BADLY to a nobody boxer at the lowest rungs in the fighting hierarchy.

Rocky has ZERO talent at boxing, slow, awkward, and artless. But he makes up for it by being curiously unattractive in appearance, seriously deficient in intellect to the point of high-function mental retardation, and comes from no family with no resources. He lives in a ghetto in Philadelphia. And has only occasional employment as muscle for the local mafia who barely tolerate him as a charity case.

He is accepted by no one. He owns nothing. He has zero talent by any estimation. The man virtually requires that the word LOSER be redefined using three L’s.

The movie synopsis kindly refers to him as an “everyman” character. He doesn’t even qualify for that. Nobody is that much underwater anywhere. The man could not get a date in a PET STORE!!! He can barely utter his 125 word vocabulary – slurring both consonants and vowels artlessly and at random. He’s actually thrown out of his ghetto boxing gym for being a loser – a bum.

By way of a random fluke, a joke really and promotional concept, he is given a shot at the title for Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the world because of his STAGE name – The Italian Stallion. And not being any smarter than Buttkiss, the aptly named dog he bought in the HOPES of getting a date at a pet store, he accepts the challenge.

The sudden press attention this brings causes the has-been boxing coach Mick to reconsider his decision to evict Rocky from the gym he trains at. And the two embark on a bizarre and torrid exercise to train Rocky for this fight in a series of processes that simply do not support the willing suspension of disbelief.

Let’s take a look at what this involved.

ROCKY GULPS DOWN ICED TEA GLASS FULL OF RAW EGGS.

It’s a little unclear what this precisely does. But would you consider gulping down an enormous glass of raw eggs a GOOD thing or a BAD thing. Would it be pleasant to do this?

ROCKY GETS UP AT OH-DARK THIRTY.

Rocky rises each morning before the sun. Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. It is unclear what it does for fighters. Is this a GOOD thing or a BAD thing? In any event, he starts his training before dawn each day.

ROCKY FORGOES ALL SEX

Which is good because the enchantress of Pet City, Adrian, still hasn’t agreed to actually go out on a date with him, despite his purchase of the dog.

ROCKY RUNS FOR MILES IN THE FROSTY COLD STREETS OF PHILADELPHIA.

On the occasion of his early rising, and completion of his glass full of raw eggs, Rocky celebrates by running for miles through ice cold weather in Philadelphia, not on a proper track with a proper surface, but over broken concrete, dodging crates of chickens and vegetables, and greeting all other early risers with an unintelligible grunted greeting of good morning I think. Something like YO but with less letters.

He does not JOG this. He runs. And as he runs, he ACCELERATES the pace, and he runs until he is totally exhausted. This causes PAIN. And fatigue. Is this GOOD or is it BAD?

ROCKY RUNS UP THE STEPS TO THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM.

At the end of his run, he heroically hobbles/crawls up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum. And of course, in the initial scenes of this, he collapses in a heap of quivering exhaustion there. By the end of his training he has increased his stamina to the point where he runs up the steps and then dances as if he’d already won something.

ROCKY DOES SITUPS

Only the way Rocky does them, he hangs upside down from a roof rafter, and sits up UP while hanging upside DOWN. And he does THOUSANDS OF THEM. Would these be painful situps? Wouldn’t they cause pain? Exhaustion? Fatigue? Muscle soreness.? Can he spell BENGAY? No.

ROCKY DOES PUSHUPS

Only Rocky does them with one hand. And he does them with his left hand. And then he does them with his right hand. And then he goes back to his left hand. And he does THOUSANDS of them. Shaking and trembling and sweating with his teeth clenched and his eyes turned toward heaven. His mouth twisted in a grimace of pain and agony. GOOD? Or BAD? Painful? Joyful?

ROCKY WORKS ON HIS PUNCH

Rocky hits the heavy bag about 10,000 times. Then he goes to the light bag and hits that about 10,000 times, although it keeps swinging back on the rope and hitting him in the head.

After a visit to his friend Paulie’s job at a frozen meat distribution center, he whacks a hanging full butchered steer in the ribs with his ungloved hand. Feels kind of like human ribs. So he whacks it again. And again.

And so his daily workout now features a trip to the meat locker, to beat some defensless heifer into brutal submission breaking every rib in the carcass with his bloodied bruised hand in a furious flurry of emotion driven anger and despair because he is SUCH a loser and KNOWS he’s such a loser and KNOWS he is going to be beaten like a red-headed step child by Apollo Creed ON NATIONAL TELEVISION.
Good? Bad?

AND THE BIG FIGHT

Few Rocky fans actually recall that Rocky LOST his fight. We all think he WON it? Why?

Because he survived it. He was slow. He was stupid. He had no boxing skill. And indeed it appeared throughout the match, that his main strategy was to lead with his face until his opponent was exhausted by the effort. Apollo Creed dutifully beat that face until it became one of the most gut-wrenchingly revolting gore scenes ever to appear on film in the history of cinematography.

And it almost never ended. Round after round after round Creed beat on Rocky’s face until Mick the trainer had to have Rockies EYES CUT WITH A RAZOR to let the blood out, and reduce the swelling to the point he could SEE the opponent and continue the fight. (Good job Mick. What a heart, eh). In his defense, Rocky actually requested this impromptu surgical procedure.

Yet along the way, fighting the very best fighter in all the world, Rocky did deliver a number of staggering blows to the rib cage of his opponent. And you could see him pale and stagger. And you could see that Rocky didn’t know the fight was a joke. And that no matter how many times Creed beat his face to death, he wouldn’t actually fall down and stay down. He kept coming and kept fighting back.

And Rocky’s deeply seated resentment at being poor, and being stupid, and being ugly, and having nothing, and having no one believe in him, and having no hope of anything ever being different for him, kept him coming back over and over, round after round, being clubbed down again and again, by a bigger, stronger, more intelligent, more agile, vastly more skilled opponent, who simply could not believe that Rocky was continuing to act as the AGGRESSOR in a fight that simply made no sense at all and had lost all the comic relief value it had been designed so carefully to deliver.

And so I cried. And you cried. And we all cried. Why?

Because we universally recognized that Rocky Balboa had actually gone through the brutalizing training without complaint and without ever letting up for a second in giving 110% even to the fight itself, enduring inconceivable hardship in training and more in the fight until he became such a pinnacle of undaunted courage and physical stamina and endurance in the face of overwhelming odds that even his victor, the support staff on all sides, the entire crowd, and over a billion Rocky viewers since ALL recognized him as an INDOMITABLE SPIRIT OF UNLIMITED POWER.

You see the fight didn’t matter. The outcome didn’t matter. To everyone involved, including Apollo Creed, Rocky won the fight. In the face of all evidence to the contrary. Apollo Creed retained the heavyweight crown. But it didn’t matter. Rocky Balboa, nobody loser extraordinaire, had just gone 15 FULL ROUNDS with the heavyweight champion of the world, who was now desperately trying to cough up a lung in celebration of his purported victory.

Creed well knew he had met the better man in the ring and found his measure. He knew. And the fight organizers knew as they awarded the belt, that he had been privileged to be in the ring with a winner. And it wasn’t him. It was Rocky. The loser.

How can all this be? And of course it led to six sequels. There is actually a larger than life statue of Rocky Balboa at the Philadelphia museum today. Understand, Rocky Balboa was an entirely fictional character…. They DO know that in Philadelphia, do they not?

What happened?

AND THE ENVELOPE PLEASE….

So why does God let BAD things happen to GOOD people?

The answer is he does not. He loves you and wants nothing but the best for you.

And THE VERY BEST is that he has granted you LIFE MOST ABUNDANT and ALL that goes with it. And what you think is GOOD or BAD or otherwise is the uninformed point of view of children who don’t know any better. None of this is good. Nor is any of it bad. It is just LIFE. And the things you so keenly label as GOOD or BAD are in truth NEITHER. They are just THINGS. Events in the course of a life. It is a perfect plan for a perfect life in perfect order and as planned.

And before you lie three score and ten, and another ten if able. And do with it what you will. And at the end, the question is only this…

”What did you do with the life I provided you?”

It is not an accusation. It is not a reproach. It is a question. A genuine and sincere and loving question YOU are going to have to answer. And the question isn’t what you actually did. That is readily apparent. The question is what do YOU think you actually did.

After the extraordinary and unimaginable expense God and heaven went to in order to enable you to come live this life, what did you get out of it? What did you learn in this land of Oz Dorothy Gale?

And now let’s revisit Rocky Balboa.

In the movie, wouldn’t it have made perfect sense for Rocky to say “I hate raw eggs. I need somebody in here to prepare a proper Eggs Benedict – with some of that Canadian bacon and hollandaise sauce, on an English Muffin.” Did he say that in the movie?

As to the time of arising. Really 4:30AM, 5:30 AM, 6:30 AM, 9:00AM what’s the difference? The man is unemployed. Did you hear Rocky advising Mick that 5:30 AM was good enough on weekdays, but he had to sleep in on Saturday mornings and he would just be all out of sorts if not?

Situps? 1000 Mick?, he whines. 35 should do it. And how about a proper athletic bench over here so I don’t have to hang from the ceiling. I know, we’ll do ten sets of ten, and the check the heart rate and see where we are at.

Pushups. Pushups are done with TWO hands and again 10 sets of 10 with a rest and some water in between would be good enough don’t you think Mick?

Run. Sure I’ll run. But three miles a day is plenty and what’s with the steps? What’s that going to do for me in the ring? Indeed the steps were ROCKY’S idea. Technically there are not stairs inside a boxing ring.

Sundays of course I take Adrien to church so we can both pray for Butkiss the dog. No training on Sundays.

There was none of that in the film. There are no champions whining and negotiating with the trainer to try to AVOID PAIN and AVOID fatigue, which are of course BAD, and limit the amount of training required so it doesn’t interfere with family obligations. Had Rocky Balboa approached training with that attitude, how long do you think he would have lasted in the ring?

So it is in our lives. Events are placed there for us to face, endure, deal with, and suffer – even enjoy to some degree. Have you ever noticed that just when you have everything going your way in life, suddenly it changes and you have something ELSE to deal with? The next training exercise.

Indeed. And the question is how do you react to it.

Life is often described as a TEST. It is not a test. And there are no grades.

Life is often described as a school. A learning experience. Perhaps. It has some aspects of that. But I do not believe the analogy is sufficient.

I believe our life here is TRAINING. Like athletic training. It is designed to harden us, to refine us, to purify us, and to make us grow into ENORMOUSLY POWERFUL SPIRITS more HOLY than we entered this life. We are enduring training. And our sorrows and deepest hurts, are not only good for us, but they allow us to TRULY feel and experience the contrast with human JOY in a way that cannot be experienced in the next life.

That can be the joy of watching your newborn child enter this world to begin THEIR journey and training. It can be the feeling of love and connectedness we have with our spouse, our children, our dog, and Rocky Balboa.

Sunrises, sunsets, a glorious bounty and beauty of our training facility, planet earth. And the feeling of accomplishment in the little wins we get along the way. Promotions and graduations and weddings and awards and so on. The contrast of joy and despair, of deep pain and of deep love. Of loves found. And of loves lost. Mistakes made. And the hard work of recovering from them.

And we can CHOOSE to great each training event with 110% effort as Rocky Balboa did, or we can whine, complain, bargain, pray, and negotiate.

We can anesthetize ourself against these things with drugs or alcohol. We can comfort ourselves with food or we can cower in fear and anxiety all day long. We get to choose what we do with this life. Complete freedom of choice.

Of course we are all interconnected in a vast tapestry of one human to another and even to the animals and plants on the planet. Every breath you take is reflected like ripples in the pond of humanity and all of THEIR choices affect you. It is a perfect circle of life.

THE ROLE OF PRAYER

As always, and as admonished, thy will be done is the first tenet of prayer. This is recognition that Mick has been training fighters for a VERY long time, and has trained many many champions. Indeed he’s so old he didn’t actually make it through all six sequels.

Good communication between the athlete and the coach is IMPERATIVE if they are to form a winning team and achieve success in the ring.

And Mick loves to talk to Rocky because it gives him an accurate sense of where he’s at and how he’s feeling and what they should focus on next. Indeed, ALL of the moving dialoge in Rocky is between Rocky and Mick. And if Rocky DOES ask him to knock off on the situps this afternoon because he just isnt’ up to it until Adrien agrees to go ice skating with him, which neither of them can do in the least, Mick might just adjust the schedule to allow for it. Because that MIGHT have a good effect on Rocky’s mental outlook in the ring. He’s constantly gaging the training program, applying everything he knows to achieve success, and he has to know where Rocky is at physically, emotionally, and intellectually.

And so he observes Rocky carefully, tuning and adjusting the training to get just the right output at just the peak moment which ideally will coincide with the night of the actual fight.

That does not mean in the end he’s going to do it Rocky’s way. He is the adult in the room and has to judge what will be the best outcome all the way around. But he certainly listens. And is inclined to acquiesce if it fits in the plan.

So pray all the time. Make YOUR needs and wants and desires of your heart known to God and anyone who will listen. You don’t ask, you don’t get.

But understand in the end, God knows every moment of everything in your life. And you simply don’t. Our powers to predict the future are lame.

Stamping your little foot or threatening to hold your breath until you turn blue didn’t work with Mom and Dad, though it WAS cute by all accounts. And it is not going to be effective with God either.

Then too, you don’t have to pray at all. The gym is full of fighters. And some get more of Mick’s attention than others. It depends on their prospects, their heart, how motivated they are, how badly they want it, and if they actually request help and put any advice given into effect willingly and gratefully.

Some show up two days a week. Some show up four. Some come every day. Some have winning attitudes and some have losing attitudes. Some quit coming at all. They just don’t believe in fighting anymore…

Mick hopes for good things from and for all of them. But he knows only a few will go onto the big show in the big ring. But all will benefit from the training if they stick with it.

We are here to be strengthened and hardened, purified and refined and made holy in spirit by the fires of a life lived well, acting as co-creators with our God and maker in the act of creation of a beautiful garden. Every experience we receive is a gift of inestimable value, neither good nor bad in and of themselves. Some bring joy. Some bring sorrow. And both the joys and the sorrows are gifts as well.

Those moments when we have given love and been loved, helped and been helped, will be treasured and admired in the life to come because of the wave of effect they caused across the garden and even into the heavens themselves.

And there really is only one training rule on the wall:

LOVE ONE ANOTHER AS I HAVE LOVED YOU.

If everyone did that, of course all the training could proceed with a bit less intensity and terror.

But it would still be life.

The post Sucked Down the Wormhole appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

Electric vehicle design has advanced rapidly in the eight years this month that we’ve been doing EVTV. Our first build used a forklift motor and a Chinese pulse-width modulated controller. Today, OEMs almost universally use 3 phase AC motors that are liquid cooled and use an advanced Field Oriented Control algorithm to control torque and speed. These are much more efficient in their use of electricity, and for vehicle purposes much easier to cool.

One of the ironies along the way is that electric vehicles did not need the radiators and fans and pumps of the ICE engine. Turns out they still do.

No AC drive unit exceeds that in the Tesla Model S, in my unqualified but nonetheless strongly held opinion. The AC Induction motor is the simplest – requiring no rare earth metals. And the package Tesla devised incorporating the inverter, the motor, and the 9.73:1 single speed gearbox is simply beautiful. It also decreases the space required in a car for those components enormously. And the 350kw power is just overkill for any reasonable vehicle.

Along with these dramatic improvements in drive train technology we get complexity. And this exhibits mostly as the electronic control required via Controller Area Network.

For the past two years, we have been sucked down the maw of this monster to the point that 100% of my time is focused on software and wiring issues to make Tesla components useable in other vehicles. As a result, we have easily repairable electric builds from the past sitting around with no attention to them whatsoever. And a build schedule of newer vehicles slowed, not to a standstill, but seemingly to reverse.

As a result I’ve been snapping and grouching in all directions. And my staff are too often reduced to doing things to assist that appear to involve a LOT of work for very little visible gain. Often they have no idea what we are doing or why, and are reluctant even to ask. I always answer. But often the explanations are unsatisfying to them. (Blah, blah, blah, big word, big word, blah, blah, blah).

But Bill Bayer has worked quietly away at the current flagship, a 1990 Volkswagen Type II Transporter (T3) Doppelkabine or DOKA as we call it. This is actually the LEAST likely vehicle on the planet for a Tesla Model S drive unit transplant, which is precisely why it suits my sense of whimsey. Others are of course trying to do the same thing with Lotus Evora’s, AC Cobra’s, and all manner of sexy two-seat sports cars intent on developing the fastest electric race car imaginable. EVTV not so much. A plodding top heavy awkward combination of bus and pickup truck, painted dayglow yellow.

In this episode, we achieve a milestone. The first wheelspin. It’s not quite a first drive. But we actually have most of the components mounted in the vehicle. We are able to charge the battery system and produce 12v for the normal vehicle lights/horn, etc. And we can control the drive unit and make the wheels spin forward and in reverse.

In the week since filming this, we have indeed actually driven the vehicle and I hope to post some detailed videos of all of that in another week.

But the salient point is that each of us took a turn driving it, and were somehow reinvigorated and renewed. It can often be the case that you are so up to your ass in alligators that you forget you were there to drain the swamp as the saying goes. We’ve been fighting connectors and software and wiring and software and connectors for so long we had almost forgotten it is all about electric vehicles. As all of us drive them daily, that’s kind of hard to believe. But the central core issue is not efficiency, it isn’t avoiding paying for gasoline, and it isn’t to save the planet. Electric cars are simply a better and more enjoyable drive than ICE cars. And none of us ever quite get over it.

That said, we have never driven anything like the DOKA before, except a Tesla Model S. And while I don’t know what I expected, incredibly the DOKA drives a LOT like a Tesla Model S. And I somehow did NOT expect that.

And as each of us took a turn on the road with the thing, we all came back almost silently in awe. Then bursting with excitement. And I have to say, that is with almost EVERYTHING on the vehicle wrong, and not operating correctly.

First, in mounting the drive unit in the vehicle, SOMEBODY developed some theory that it should be mounted EXACTLY 1 inch right of center. We don’t know where this came from. Bill very carefully built a jig, suspended it in the vehicle, and welded up mounts for it precisely. But today, the drive unit is firmly mounted 1 inch to the right.

Second, we also precisely measured the distance between the drive plates of the VW transmission. And we actually fabricated a specific jig to measure the distance between the two plates. And we had axle stubs custom fabricated to ensure they presented exactly the same distance. But the result was exactly 3/4 inch short on both sides. No idea how it happened.

In any event, the first drive by Bill Bayer resulted in the walk of shame. He made it less than a block and the left axle appeared to break leaving the vehicle sitting stranded on the side of the road. We drug it back and examined it.

As it turns out the axle wasn’t broken at all. The inner CV joint had given up the ghost but wasn’t actually damaged. The axle had been stretched to the point that the little balls in the CV joint just popped out of the joint and it was fairly trivial to reassemble it no harm done. But what had caused them to pop out?

And that was when we discovered the measurement problems. One viewer of this weeks’ episode actually inquired whether the axles were moving back and forth axially. The answer is “yes”. Good eye.

So we fabricated a 1/2 inch adapter plate to insert between the drive axle and the axle stub in the Tesla drive unit.

That seemed to cure the problem for a day or two. Until once more, the left CV joint gave way and a call to the flatbed tow truck was in order. We subsequently persuaded Cape Precision Machine to make us a little bit more artful version an inch thick.

And so far (fingers crossed) it seems to hold. I did six miles yesterday with the parking brake on to test that (525 Wh per mile) and then another 14 miles with the parking brake OFF to compare it (345 Wh/mile) and I’m pleased to report that the vehicle runs MUCH better with the parking brake off. Also that the Alzheimers thing may be deteriorating.

I had purchased some very expensive Vanagon wheels from GoWesty a year or so ago. But Bill wanted to use the wheels off a wrecked Tesla we purchased. And I must say, they look FABULOUS on the vehicle.

But on sharp turns or with a load of people, they rub on the rear part of the opening in the body for them. So we’ve ordered a set of 1.5 inch lift coilovers from GoWesty and will attempt to remedy by jacking the vehicle up by an inch and a half. Failing in that, we have to work out some sort of flair on the body.

The Tesla Drive Unit features a charger interlock signal to pin 5 of the X939 connector on the drive unit. I KNOW Mark Weisheimer and I worked this out two years ago. That pin shows 3.3v from an internal pullup and you HAVE to apply a ground to it to make it go. But today, two years later, I can’t tell it has any effect at all. Both on the DOKA and on the Test bench it works fine with ground or without. As we have the charge port on the far side of the car from the driver, and as I have ALREADY demonstrated that you can pull a J1772 EVSE right off the wall AND tear the inlet out of the car in one smooth move with the yellow THING, we HAVE to have a charge interlock. So I’m adding a feature to the software and a little harness rewiring so Bill’s wireup with a relay to do so will actually work.

The DOKA has a paint job that to put it kindly was “unusual”. It took three tries. But we finally got it covered in day-glow yellow Plasti-Dip. This is the stuff you dip plier handles in to give them a rubber insulating grip. We dipped the entire car.

Subsequently the DOKA survived an intense battery fire in the shop rather well – except that it was covered in black soot. We managed to add to that with greasy pawprints as we worked on the car until it actually looked horrible. You can see this in our current episode. I decided it must be a feature and we refer to it as neo-steampunk-ratrod.

While we were standing around the DOKA in the shop, I asked QingFeng Liu to get me a rag and a can of Scrubbin Bubbles. If you don’t know about DOW’s bathroom cleaner “Scrubbin Bubbles” I have used it on everything from multimillion dollar aircraft to indeed toilet seats and I’m always amazed. Kind of a foaming combination of bleach and a very light abrasive, it is my favorite cleaning product after Clorox. (Don’t mix them and no, don’t ask).

In any event, I sprayed a small area of the sideboard with this and gave it a quick rub with a microfiber towel. To my amazement, all the grime came off in my hand in an instant. It turns out this Plasti-Dip simply doesn’t present much of a surface for dirt, despite it’s kind of rough surface. It was like cleaning plastic, predictably enough.

We all grabbed rags and within an hour the DOKA literally glowed in the dark.

I had adopted this strategy, curiously enough, after seeing a guy with a Tesla Model S who painted the ENTIRE CAR with stealth black plasti-dip. It looked deadly. But I asked him about ruining the paint job on a perfectly new car. His answer was intriguing. He intended it to completely PROTECT the paint job on the car, and told me he had done this to other cars and the plasti-dip is quite easily removable later, revealing a showroom new paint job underneath.

So we tried it on the DOKA. Incredibly, it makes it EASIER to clean than a normal paint job.

So the usual things after a first drive. Stereo. Sun visors. Seat issues. Center console. We await our lift springs AND the custom set of Speedhut gages that now work with the Alset controller.

Predictably enough, the 7-inch EVIC screen is a delight to use – as long as you are parked. Also as I DID predict, it is almost totally useless when in motion. If you study it carefully, you will raise your eyes inevitably to see the rear end of an 18-wheeler appearing to plow TOWARD you as you brake in a panic.

But the PKP2400 CAN key set is a Godsend. It makes it very easy to put the thing in DRIVE or PARK or REVERSE, and the response is instant.

We have a very early drive unit on the test bench and CREEP doesn’t appear to work. I had thought I might have messed up my software somewhere with the recent changes but on the DOKA it works perfectly. Actually it works even BETTER than perfectly with the parking brake off.

And REGEN is actually better than on my Tesla Model S. On the Tesla, you have two levels of regen to pick from. But this is actually effected by a single CAN message with an 8-bit integer offering 255 levels of regen. We convert that to a somewhat more understandable PERCENTAGE on the display, and we have an up and down arrow. I think a 3% bump on up and a 2% decrease on down allowing you to do almost anything 0-100%. The higher regen selectable in a Tesla is 63%. I currently have the DOKA set at 81% and it is incredible. True one pedal control of the vehicle. But you can tune it as desired with the up or down key on the PKP2400 on the fly. I thought this would be cool. It is much cooler than I thought.

When we first started doing conversions, we naturally wanted to conserve battery energy anywhere we could. We knew there would BE LED headlights, but they really didn’t have them yet. So we used HIDS instead and LEDs, which WERE available for the tail lights, the turn signals, the reverse lights, etc. Trucklite came out with a pair of garish round headlights that were about $750 per pair and we used them successfully on the THINGS.

Well a lot has changed. Most modern cars use headlight “fixtures” with replaceable bulb units in them now. And indeed, LED versions of this bulbs have become available in a profusion of confusion over bulb numbers, wattage, color in degrees Kelvin, and so forth.

We found some on Amazon.com for the DOKA and we are indeed blown away by them. The DOKA had outside lights for normal, and another pair inside for high beam. Bill got a bulb for the outside that features high AND low beam, and a yellow pair on the inside that come on only in high beam. They are EXTREMELY bright. And also extremely efficient using maybe 5 amps of 12v to run the entire rig. We have come a very long way on LED lights. I just received an LED lightbulb from AMAZON for a ceiling light, that I can get an app for my iPhone to set it’s color and brightness, AND it incorporates a Bluetooth speaker to play iTunes from the phone remotely. What will they think of next. Alexa, use the dishwasher to do my laundry.

The takeaway I suppose is that things HAVE become more complicated. But we are somewhat delighting in it. We find a problem or a nice-to-have new feature, and we wheel a little cart with laptop up to the vehicle and plug in a USB cable. I spend twenty minutes adding some code, and ask Bill to hook up a wire between this connector and pin and that connector and pin. Now try it. And batta boom batta bing. With the complexity, wish lists are just easy.

The DOKA has a monster fan on the radiator. We don’t want it on all the time, but we want it if the motor gets hot. On the test bench, we thought inverter temperature would be the critical item. But running actual current through it to move a 3530 pound vehicle (up from 3430 original) we quickly learned that it is MotorStatorTemperature that does the climbing. So we revised the software to display that on the Speedhut gages, and added a use for one of our unused outputs on the controller. Now you can set the COOLON temperature and the COOLOFF temperature from a menu. And when it reaches the COOLON temperature that output pin switches to ground, which is used to turn on a relay applying 12v to the fan. If temperature reduces to COOLOFF, it goes to an open, deenergizing the relay and turning off the fan. We could use the same output to light a dash LED if we wanted – either instead of or in addition to.

This was all added in 45 minutes.

I don’t want anyone to miss the larger point. There is life in reusing salvage electric vehicle components to make new types of unusual electric vehicles. And this points to something that goes entirely beyond right to repair. It is to the public good in fostering innovation. While you may want to focus on “security” issues, this mostly shows a lack of comprehension on what security means and what security is possible. Elon Musk himself has said it is simply an exercise in futility to try to secure a computer someone has PHYSICAL access to. Focus on network security.

Some in Tesla seem to not quite GET that very important point. Further, and perhaps more importantly, it actually accrues directly and massively to the equity in their brand, if their vehicles are easily repairable, become a platform for modification and innovation, and if the parts are reusable for entirely unimagined and unforeseen purposes. They should by all rights be PUBLISHING what we are working so painfully to eek out CAN message by CAN message, byte by byte, and even bit by bit one day at a time.

This is not a guess or a theory. Volkswagen was, until just a few months ago, the LARGEST and most successful automobile manufacturer in THE WORLD period. I can easily make the case that the iconic VW Beetle and VW bus are what got them there. And it was about a PLATFORM that simply cut so many ways with so many people doing so many things with it that VW long ago lost all control of it. Leading to massive sales of NEW vehicles that had nothing to do with that – apparently. None of it disproved any law of cause and effect whatsoever. There are no coincidences at work here.

With the car sitting in front of us physically, a car I might point out that I OWN front decal to rear bumper, given enough serial days in a lifetime, we are GOING to win on this one anyway. It’s the 100 monkeys on 100 typewriters for 100 years thing. As I claimed two years ago, the EVTV Hack Team not only CAN – we WILL. But Tesla needs to revisit the signal announcement by their own CEO regarding patents and open source. They have backpedaled on this furiously ever since, but it was true then and remains truer today. And parsing all the legal and other considerations ad infinitum doesn’t change a thing. Tesla should open up this car.

In the meantime, I am secretly very very pleased with any number of things over the past eight years. I just heard from yet ANOTHER EVTV viewer who is going to work for Tesla. Chad Olivieri has been an accomplished engineer for many years, but still credits EVTV with simply rolling through the interview at Tesla like a boss. I cannot reveal how MANY EVTV viewers have gone on to careers at Tesla. And we basically simply cease all communications with them once they do to prevent conflicts or even the appearance of such. And we not only do not solicit, but will not accept any inside information from anyone there for the same reason.
Beyond that, it has become apparent in a number of interesting ways, how many people within Tesla have watched us for years – going to some pretty upper reaches of the management of the company.

Tesla currently faces some enormous challenges that require throwing warm bodies at them in great huddles hoping for good outcomes in batteries, solar issues, and electric vehicles. So if you do want to play a part, understand that as an EVTV viewer you are already more knowledgeable than most of the people they hear from. I doubt it will do you any good, and might do harm to mention EVTV directly. But just the background knowledge you already have regarding EV operation and design issues and tradeoffs, as well as familiarity with Tesla itself and a sense of common mission, kind of makes many of you the warm meat they have to have to win. I would not live in California under federal order and being sent to a concentration camp there myself. Just mow me down with the machine gun. But if you don’t mind working overseas in a country like California, go for it. They need you. And so does the world. You’re still in Jack’s 100k army. Just TDY Tesla.

We are camera-ing up in an attempt to show you. I don’t know if it is going to work. But if you can believe it, I’m driving a VW Vanagon Pickup, that has MORE acceleration than my Tesla Model S, more DECELERATION through regen than my Tesla Model S, and while it kind of rolls around like a whale in a bathtub compared to the Model S in corners, it is the most unbelievable ride we’ve ever cobbled together. It is just SHOCKING.
Sadly, it is even HARDER for me to squirt my 300 lbs of joy into than the Tesla Model S. Oh well…can’t have everything…

In converting a car to electric drive, we are all familiar with the phenomenon of the “EV grin”. This is one of the best we’ve ever had in that respect and it reminds us pointedly why we do what we do.

Jack Rickard

The post DOKA Tesla Model S – Brightly. appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

I’ve been obsessing on a new controller design for the Tesla Model S battery modules to such a degree the past two weeks that I’ve rather failed to do a video, or even blog our last one.

Which is remarkable in that in the May 26 video, actually published on May 24, I’ve not only lost complete reference to the calendar, but we’ve reached a new Milestone several different ways.

First, as of May we have been in continuous publication for eight years. We should probably be enjoying greater success by now. But I’m older and slower and we publish less often and indeed I forgot to blog this video frankly. The upside is I get to meet so many new people each day.

We have driven a lot of electric cars in this period. None really approaches the Tesla Model S – a remarkable feat of engineering and I’m reminded of it daily. For a little over two years, I’ve been focused on reverse engineering the Tesla Model S drive unit, and the 1990 Volkswagen Type II T3 Vanagon Doppelkabine is the driving test bed for that drive train. I don’t know what I expected, but a pickup truck that drives like a Tesla Model S was not it.

There were indeed some corrections to the controller software once we had it in a rolling vehicle. But I’m actually stunned by how few there were. We found out the hardware charge enable really doesn’t work and indeed Tesla has replaced it with a charger CAN message instead. A couple of our Speedhut gage scalars were hosed up. And we got into kind of a circular hardware reference between the brake light output and the brake input due to some wiring comedy. Some axle measurements were off requiring a 1-inch spacer to keep the CV joints from coming apart. But in less than two days it was all worked out and rolling. The many months of bench testing and many iterations of the wiring harness payed off big time.

The result is a 480 horsepower VW pickup truck with very positive traction from the Quaife automatic torque biasing differential and you can see the results in the latest video. Over and over actually.

But beyond that, I was kind of shocked and disappointed to get in my beloved Siemens 115kW 154 HP Yellow Thing. After driving the DOKA, it seemed lame, clumsy, and underpowered. Actually, I drove it yesterday quite a bit and it wasn’t long before I was enjoying it again. But when I first got in, the comparison with the DOKA was stark. For a big, too tall pickup truck with goofy suspension, the yellow rubber DOKA is just a scream to drive.

Further testing revealed about a 325 wH per mile burn rate which was encouraging and very much in line with our 10:1 rule with a total vehicle weight of 3530 lbs. But the aging Better Place Renault Fluenze battery pack isn’t really cutting it. It produces enough power apparently. But we are barely getting 49 ampere-hours out of the Nissan Leaf battery cells in it that started life claiming 62.5 Ah. Bill crept the last few hundred yards from a car show in Jackson yesterday after barely 50 miles.

Originally, we used to design our cars for a minimum 100 mile range as that was the number everyone wanted to hear in the early days of EVTV. But after numerous builds, we noticed that in this small town, barely four miles on a side, we were charging about twice a week. And a visit from Damien Maguire of Ireland drove this home. We were driving down the road in the Escalade when he asked when the last time I charged it was. Frankly, I couldn’t remember. And that makes sense because we didn’t make it back to the shop and had to call the flat bed.

Would you believe that if you have TOO much range, you simply quit bothering the eight seconds it takes to plug in in the garage each night? And so four the last couple of years we’ve targeted a more sedate 60 mile range, which we did not precisely achieve with the DOKA it would appear.

So we face a dilemma. Go with what we’ve got or enhance?

On the one hand, I like what I’ve got and Bill did a great job hiding three 128vdc segments from the massively over-engineered Better Place pack. One on each side of the Treasure Chest underneath the pickup, on slides actually, and one under the back seat. The result is you truly cannot tell this is a conversion without a very close inspection.

Of course we have about an acre in back. Which seems a lot for carrying groceries and/or lawn chairs. We could add a second Better Place pack in parallel in the back of the vehicle. I can see getting my buddy Dan Todt down at Southeast Fabricating to gen us up an aluminum box for them, spraying it with bed liner, and mounting it right beneath the rear window. We’d have a kind of “hump back” looking Doka then. But paint it black and it disappears, right?

Of course, we also have a couple of full Tesla batteries lying around for our work on the battery controllers. But the full slab would actually have to hang out the back a foot.

That said, it IS a pickup. If we removed the individual six-cell modules, we could kind of stack em in back and wind up with a much smaller or at least shorter package. The cell voltages are actually pretty compatible with the Nissan Leaf cells which are actually a different chemistry but feature the same nominal and charging voltages of 3.6v and 4.2v. So I could see putting them in parallel, and well, hold my beer let’s see what happens.

But it is kind of going from one extreme to another. The problem with the Tesla modules is that they are not very granular. You can’t really subdivide them. They are 235 Ah and you need all sixteen to get to the same voltage. That’s 893 lbs of battery in the back of a half-ton pickup truck. We probably have about 17 kWh of storage now, and with 85kWh from the Tesla modules, that would bring it well up over 100kWh. Even if it bumps our weight to 4500 and our burn rate to 450, that’s a 226 mile range. For what? The thing doesn’t even have air conditioning… And it certainly wouldn’t be as spry as it is now with 1000lbs in it. Tough enough with 300lbs of Jackmeat onboard.

Range wise the second Better Place pack would make more sense, bringing us up over 100 miles. But when and in what sort of vehicle would I EVER get a chance to actually use a full Tesla Model S battery pack in a build?

Well one candidate would be the 2008 Cadillac Escalade. Recall we spent 2010-2012 on this build with our first run, sans front hood, in July 2012. I am chagrined to report that it has burned up it’s SECOND six-speed automatic transmission, or third, I forget. Our experiment at marrying electric motors to automatic transmissions appeared to initially be a success. But if you have to change the transmission every two years, I guess I would mark that down as a FAIL over time. Durability is a desirable trait and the marriage of electric motors with existing transmissions has simply been fraught. I’m not alone here. Even manual transmissions have been smoked across the land by the much faster application of torque the electric motor provides.

A couple of months back we received a kind of all-day visit from Mark Buttgereit of Impatient Creations in Alabaster Alabama. It’s a custom car shop and one of many “West Coast Creations” type operations. He wanted to get into electric vehicles and specifically muscle cars using a Tesla Model S drive train. I attempted to explain the vagaries of fabricating a means to implant a full Tesla Model S independent rear suspension subclip in an existing vehicle, but he assured me he knew all about it and he started describing how to take it all apart, cut it into pieces, weld them all back up, and make the 75 inch track shorter and get it all to hang together. I was genuinely horrified by what he described.

But also reassured that he seemed to know what he was talking about and certainly unafraid of unusual builds. He was a bit daunted by the pricing of the components and has been studying on that for several months.

So when the L6 transmission went out AGAIN, I had kind of had it with the DC motor, low voltages, and transmission problems of the Escalade. But I really like the truck. It is just very comfortable for me to get into and out of, great visibility, and great roadability. It just glides down the road. Good air conditioning and heat, which were the main build objectives at the time.

Subsequent to the very good outcome on the DOKA, I’m again enthused to spend a stupid amount of money on a build I’ve already done once. And I called Mark and he was glad to give me an estimate for a stupid amount of money to transplant a Tesla Model S full subclip into the ass end of my Escalade. Indeed, he’ll pick it up, take it to Alabama, engineer the transplant, and deliver it all for barely the cost of a used Leaf.

The aging 400Ah Thundersky cells in it barely make 200v, totally appropriate for a dual Netgain 11inch with dual Solitons, but totally useless for a Tesla drive unit. We’ve already removed them from the car. But I believe I can get all 16 Tesla battery modules into the same space. Picture an Escalade with 85kWh battery pack and 480hp Tesla Drive Unit. That actually DROPS the battery weight from 1620 lbs down to 893 – nearly in half.

One of the ongoing problems on the Escalade that I meant to address is the airbag suspension. Touted as just the thing by Cadillac, it has proven to be just the thing NOT. The onboard air compressor does indeed level the ride automatically, but they leak. We had them replaced once and it was good for a month or two. Then they started leaking again. Turns out ALL Escalades have leaking airbag suspension and there is a cottage industry into converting it to Silverado coilovers. We just never quite did it. Mark and I have discussed how the Tesla implant will NOT feature those monsters in the design.

We will complete the build here. There will be plenty for Bill to wrestle with in installing our Tesla controls and without the front motor, driving the hydraulic steering and brakes and the A/C compressor.

Which brings me back to our latest project, or again latest project. Recall that with the assistance or leadership of Collin Kidder and Jarrod Tuma, we had kind of decoded the vagaries of the BMS boards on the Tesla Battery Modules. Well, that’s all good. But it doesn’t precisely do very much. You need to actually couple that with hardware and software to control contactors and disconnect the battery if any of the voltages or temperatures or cell imbalance etc and you need to be able to configure all that in a variety of ways.
We’ve been working on a device and software to do that with two or four modules for a 48v home solar “Powerwall” I suppose. But it could easily be adapted for vehicle use. And without it I wouldn’t even load the Tesla modules into a vehicle for transport. They are simply horrifying compared to the LiFePo4 cells we are accustomed to using – at least in terms of safety.

The project is not completed. I just sent off for our third (or maybe its fourth) set of prototype boards for this. But I have done some very PRELIMINARY work on the manual. It rather illustrates how easily an apparently simple concept quickly gets off into the weeds. It’s over 50 pages and not DONE yet.

But it will also give you an idea of the capabilities and possibilities. SOME level of safety can be achieved using Tesla’s own BMS boards and some aggressive monitoring to shut things down if there is any sign of distress. And I think I could ultimately integrate this into the Tesla Drive Unit software such that we would have a pretty tight system between the drive unit and batteries. The Escalade is probably where we should experiment with this->.

And now a word on maintenance free electric vehicles NOT. The Tacoma had an ancient PWM controller termed a RAPTOR. I hated the Raptor. Actually it worked admirably as a controller but it used some sort of inductive slug throttle mechanism that was entirely too amptly named. It was like stepping on a pickle. Mushy. It finally blew. Bill and Dylan worked all week to install a Soliton on the little ADC8 motor and did a yeoman’s job of it I might add. Dylan drove the truck Saturday and ran completely out of juice ostensibly at 79Ah from the 200Ah cells. Kind of hard for me to picture. And I find reports of when things are charged and when meters are reset curiously unreliable around these parts. But this pack has been run to zero so many times I think its’ starting to LIKE operating below 100v and indeed we’ve replaced a few ancient Thundersky 200’s, which are of course no longer available, with CALB 180’s, which do run about 200Ah, so we have a mixed pack of old and new, different chemistries, just a mess really. But it is a small Toyoto Tacoma truck that Mr. Botteron of Heber Springs Arkansas converted as a brand new truck and it is itself in great shape.

And Saturday, I drove my beloved yellow 1974 VW THING to the shop and it died right there. When I turned it back on and attempted to back out of the shop it was completely dead. Incredibly, a GEVCU. The only known failure of one of these units. We’ve never replaced one from the field. They just work. But this one died rather totally. So we had to install another one and of course the hard part was to find the settings we had used to configure it. It runs again.

Bill had done his Ford Ranger and watched carefully as we described the necessity of having the flywheel and clutch and pressure plate balanced. But he was in New Jersey at the time and after calling around couldn’t find anyone who even knew what he was talking about. Here they do them at NAPA down the street. But the “buzz” finally got to him so he pulled his motor to have it balanced. Again, the culprit was the DOKA. The “buzz” was fine until he drove the DOKA a day or two and then it was unbearable in contrast.

So some days it seems it is raining failed electric car parts. If ANYONE tells you that electric cars are maintenance free, run, don’t walk. They live a life REMARKABLY like every car I’ve ever owned. But cleaner and with less greasy grime and odors. And actually I find them much easier to troubleshoot and repair. But that could be my background.

I know that all sounds whiney and you should all feel sorry for the wretched life I lead. But I have to tell you that I can’t wait to get out of bed each morning to live it. Thomas Edison was purported to have said that all you needed to invent was a good imagination and a pile of junk. I have 14,500 square feet just piled full of junk – and I know how to use it. My main problem is people keep coming in wanting to clean it all up for me…

The post Burnout…Here, hold my beer. appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

Our news media once held promise to be the common campfire that bound us as a community to discuss the important issues of our time. It could have continued to evolve in that mission, but for various reasons has abandoned it in favor of entertaining us with inexpensive talking heads on the dubious assumption that “opinions” are somehow important. They are at least saleable apparently and so television has largely devolved to selling products using the conflict of argument as an attractant.

Leaving many many important issues of our time entirely unnoticed. Health and health care is among them. But also employment – what is the mass of humanoids to DO once we have identified “employees” as a major impediment to profit and a cause of jurisprudence, and we have turned the machine of producing technology toward eliminating employees? What is the rest of humanity to do with their time and how will they gain the resources to eat, and sleep in safety, and pursue their interests?

Largely ignored, the overwhelmingly and often instantly addicting nature of synthetic opiods offered by Big Pharma have essentially murdered thousands of our children, but adults as well. It is occasionally mentioned with no real information or inquiry by the media. It has grown to pandemic proportions across the land with only an occasional mention. An entire TOWN in Kentucky was found to be addicted to Oxycontin. Ohio is a wasteland of grieving parents. Maine is on its knees. The state of Missouri just filed a $100 million lawsuit against three opiod manufacturers.

Similarly we are simply missing the evolution of miracles in our age. They are barely mentioned. But I believe that the development of the photovoltaic cell and the lithium ion battery are nearly enough miraculous, and are harbingers of a tsunamic change in life on earth – a historic inflection point. I really cannot describe how very much this will change life in the coming decades and it is mentioned only in passing and then with no real insight into what it means.

I could easily cast the Internet and mobile communications in the same vein. They allow humanoids to group and share information on a global scale but at a micro level in ways that were simply not possible prior. Our “campfire” would have us believe that this is simply an evil attractant and communications drug enslaving our children. That the masses of humanoids use this communication medium for idiotic applications rather misses the point. Things like ancestry.com and the International Association of Near Death Experiences, illustrate new forms of human organic growth. Contributions from many individuals can be pooled to form new data sources previously impossible. As individuals contribute findings on their ancestral lineage, the binary number system nature of having two parents causes those contributions to congeal into an increasingly complete picture of lineage for us all.

But beyond communications, we are rapidly entering a new age of energy. Energy to power our lives and enable us to do incredible things. And we face a quieter, greener, cleaner future of unlimited energy at very low cost.

The concept of using the sun to power activity on earth is not really earth shaking. The sun has always powered ALL of it. Our ability to bend those forces to our will, individually or collectively, have been crude. We spent much of civilization burning trees to gain access to the stored power of the sun and more recently have developed means to access “fossil fuels” or sunlight stored in mineral deposits in more efficient means of accessing the power of the sun. Eventually we will learn that the “fossils” are more fossilized microbial life than dinosaurs and plants, but it is the same concept, deposits of sunlight.

The “great leap” is the concept of converting sunlight into energy for our use directly. And the photovoltaic cell is a kind of “magic rock” that can turn the direct blows of photons from the sun into electricity, a fungible energy resource that can be applied to almost anything we want to do. From heating our houses to turning a shaft to do work, to making light in the darkness of night. The harnessing of electricity over the past two centuries has been a marvel. But now to convert sunlight DIRECTLY into electricity is just a miracle.

That the photovoltaic cell will do this with no moving parts, no emissions of any gasses whatsoever, no noise of any kind, no friction, no heat, no other actions at all make it a magic rock. An inert, motionless device that simply receives photons and produces electron flow. It really doesn’t even “wear” in the normal sense, although the output will decrease over a 20 year lifespan. The advances in efficiency and cost so far always make photovoltaics obsolete long before they wear out.

Some view sunlight as energy source as somewhat variable and unreliable. Actually, that is a purely local perspective. Wherever it is night, it is elsewhere day. And wherever it is cloudy, it is elsewhere clear. With an efficient and global grid, electricity can be easily ported about the planet to wherever it is needed, with more than adequate energy available where sunshine falls.

The most recent satellite measurements indicate about 1361 watts per square meter assuming a plane facing the sun at earth orbit. What actually reaches the ground is roughly calculated as about 1120 watts per square meter at its zenith. The average American home now uses about 935 kWh of electricity per month or 31kWh per day.

If we average the sunlight from sunrise to sunset it of course varies from Zenith but we can come up with a rough average and for most of the U.S. you can calculate about 4.5 hours per day at this level. And so an output of 6888 watts over that 4.5 hours would give us our 31000 watt hours needed for a day. At 1120 watts per meter, that’s a little more than 6 square meters. And so an area of about 8 feet long and 8 feet wide receives enough sunlight to power your average home.

Of course our magic rocks are not 100% efficient. Indeed they are not very efficient at all and the best solar panels currently available will do about 22% efficiency. But even then, we are talking about 30 square meters of panel. And so an area 18 feet by 18 feet of photovoltaic cell.

So as a practical matter, every roof in America probably has more than sufficient area to capture and convert all the energy needed to power the building. Indeed Elon Musk is again correct that the proper evolution is to simply replace existing roofing materials with materials that generate electricity from the sun. Twenty years hence, it will not occur to anyone to put a roof on a building that does not inherently harvest sunlight in the form of electricity. Why would you?

But again, the sun doesn’t shine at night, and into each life a little rain must fall.

Bringing us to our other “magic rock” lithium ion batteries.

And again, there are no moving parts. No noises. No friction. Entirely inert blocks of metal and carbon and lithium and other compounds. It is disappointing to disassemble a lithium ion battery. Internally it looks more like a book than a miracle. Alternate pages of copper and aluminum foil, with black ink printed on both sides, and a plastic trash bag between each page. Wow. Little heat, no noise, no moving parts – it is a magic rock. And you can put electricity IN, and you can take it back OUT later. And you can do so thousands of times before it “wears out.”

And so I am captivated by these two magic rocks. One converts sunlight to electricity. The other stores electricity and produces it on demand. And to watch them in action is a thing to behold. Actually it is NOTHING to behold. Nothing moves. Nothing makes any noise. Nothing is emitted. They are entirely silent, dead rocks. You can’t tell they are doing anything by looking at them. No humanly observable activity of any kind. No blinking lights. No buzzers. Nothing. Totally inert.

But together, they can power every conceivable human activity. Including personal transportation at speeds and accelerations we can barely withstand and the traffic won’t allow anyway.

The costs of all this have been heretofore heroic. But they have come down by two orders of magnitude and are now only painful. And so if you can take the pain, you can have the gain. It is just NOW feasible to power your life individually using sunlight directly.

At the request of many, I ATTEMPT in this episode to explain and describe the process of converting sunlight to electricity. This is a bit difficult. We have theories, and they become so familiar many actually think they know how electricity and photovoltaics work. As it happens at the quantum level, in truth we do NOT actually know. And so explaining what we don’t know, referring to theories that appear to more or less “work” is a little awkward. Understanding that some of our viewers have Phd’s and are actively working in this field, while others can’t put two batteries in a flashlight and get it right before the third try, makes this a challenge subject to criticism by all parties. Some will find it ponderous and others probably won’t believe it. But miraculously, I’m pleased to report that on continuous testing from 1954 to 2017, it does indeed work.

After the two magic rocks, it is merely and simply a matter of ordinary electrical equipment to make all this happen. In this weeks episode we demonstrate a device, Morningstar TS-MPPT-60-600V-48-DB TriStar 600V Solar Charge Controller, that can take the power from our 13.4 kW test array of photovoltaics, and very efficiently use it to charge a 20 kWh group of four Tesla Model S battery modules. And we are playing with a couple of devices that can take the 48vdc power from that battery and make the standard 60Hz 120vac and 240vac that all of our devices already use.

The Morning Star can deal with a wide range of photovoltaic voltages from 100 to 600 volts. It can charge a 48v battery at up to 60 amps. A little less than 3kW. Use as many as you like to charge the battery.

The interesting thing about the Morning Star is its wide range. Most 48v charge controllers are limited to 100 or 150 volts on the photovoltaic side. This one can do 100 to 600v which allows us to use our 460v test array directly.

Further, the output range of most of such controllers is limited. This one does 18 to 72 volts which is the widest output we’ve found.

The Magnum Energy MagnaSine MS4448P can do 240vac OR 120vac at up to 4400 watts continuous power and up to 8500 watts for five seconds if you need to startup an air conditioner or something similar. You can of course use more than one in parallel and the battery is quite capable of well over 50,000 watts for brief periods.

The Sunny Island 6048 is for some odd reason limited to 120vac and you need two of them to do 240vac. But it is a bit stronger at 5750 watts and can do 11000 watts for 3 seconds. And so two of the Sunny Island units could do over 11,000 watts continuous at 240vac.

Outback Power is actually the 800 lb gorilla in this space. They had announced a new device termed the “Skybox” by quarter 2 of this year. They missed that deadline. Now they are talking about a 48v version by the end of the year and a high voltage version sometime thereafter. It will combine the charge controller, the inverter, battery communications, and advanced grid interface management into a single box.

Ultimately, it IS about higher DC voltages. The cabling becomes much more manageable for one thing. But what we are doing in this episode is kind of central. There will be MANY more electric cars. And they are routinely wrecked. And their batteries diminish to the point where they are not very effective at driving a car, but still have MORE than adequate life left to power a house. Houses have much lower peak power demands than cars do and the “capacity” or “range” just isn’t nearly as important.

The Tesla car needs 350 kW of power. 20kW PEAK for a house would be absurdly high and that is more than an order of magnitude less.

Similarly an 85kWh Tesla pack would be considered “finished” at 80% or 68kWh. You just would not tolerate that in a car and would replace the battery. But 68kWh is an immense amount of storage for a house. Two days and nights of operation in one battery and there is absolutely nothing in this world preventing the use of two Tesla packs.

And so I would advocate sizing the equipment to use the vehicle batteries at their native voltage and form to provide the storage for the houses. It is precisely where vehicle batteries should go to die. And there will be sufficient electric cars built and wrecked that a brand new battery for home storage of electricity doesn’t even make sense.

How, when and why these outputs coordinate with the 240vac input to your house is a bit of a minefield and potentially a battlefield. The utility companies at this point for some reason would just as soon it go away. But as the prices drop for all this, increasingly what they want will be immaterial. The existing grid would be ideal for sharing this power around efficiently, but it really is not ultimately necessary and if they become too annoying, I would see increasing numbers of individuals simply cutting the tie and avoiding them altogether. Natural gas is cheap and efficient for heating and cooking, but is ultimately obsolete as well. All that can be done by electricity – given enough of it.

I believe that timing is everything. And at this MOMENT we are on the cusp of a violently disruptive revolution. I think the existing utility companies WILL do exactly what large corporations always do, behave badly and not even in their own interests. It remains ridiculously expensive to build your own power plant using batteries and equipment and photovoltaics, but it is now only painfully expensive. Some (like me) will be sufficiently enraged by utility company misbehavior to do it anyway. Costs will continue to drop as individuals choose to adopt this anyway, which will lead to more individuals making the same choice in a cascade effect just as all technologies are wont to do.

My observation is that all of this typically takes decades of grueling effort and ridiculous expenditures by the adventurous, followed by a sudden hockey-stick upturn in the adoption curve by all. This lunge will finally and inevitably occur within the next 10 short years. Ultimately, even the utility companies will adopt photovoltaics as their main source of electricity – assuming they even survive at all as we know them.

And so yes, I’m a little giddy this week with a deep joy as I see all of this laid out on a wooden table in front of me in my shop. The charge controller, the batteries, the battery controller we are working on, and a couple of examples of AC inverters. Really trivial work when you think about it in accessing Tesla’s BMS boards and communicating with the Inverters by CAN to glue these existing bits together. And of course, you can charge an electric car with it as well.

As Bill says, Driving on Sunshine….

This then is the future. It is as inevitable as rain.

Perhaps, just perhaps, this will illuminate some of our following and viewers on the apparently puzzling enigma of Jack and the Global Warming fracas. I THINK it is probably nonsense perpetuated by morons. But it doesn’t matter and it never did. We don’t need to save the planet, and we never did. We need MORE EFFICIENT AND ELEGANT technologies to deal with energy and empower our freedom of movement and all our OTHER activities on the planet, and we always did. Magic rocks are the answer. But what precisely was the question?

I can easily observe that every building fire occurring in the City of Cape Girardeau has been accompanied by the presence of a large, expensive, red firetruck. So should I focus on eliminating firetrucks? Would that bring down the statistical incidence of building fires in the city? Could I unite all the citizens of Cape Girardeau against firetrucks if I could seize control of the media and all studies of firetrucks? How about dealing with it indirectly? Could we just tax firetrucks? Or perhaps pass a tax on everyone who SAW a firetruck? Driving firetrucks into hiding by the force of our numbers?

The miracle of the last 10 years is that now ALL the pieces are available for sale off the shelf to anyone willing to pay the price. And the economics will follow as water downhill. And the act of pumping and spewing shit into the atmosphere never DID make any sense, and no matter what the impact, unless you are among the minority who LIKE suck-starting an Oldsmobile through the exhaust pipe, you all knew this all along.

Environmentalism always seems to be about a small minority leveraging the government into forcing the majority at gunpoint to spend their money and resources doing something the minority THINKS will be a good thing. These people never DO anything. They “advocate” that YOU do something at the point of a gun. They always have good intentions. But despite their fawning affectations, their intellectual and technical chops are actually very poor. As a result, their outcomes are poor and their “unintended consequences” legion and too often, tragic.

The difference between communist/totalitarian regimes and the libertarian philosophy is I will spend MY money to demonstrate a way that you can SEE will work or not work, and show you how to do the same thing. If enough of us demonstrate conclusively that it DOES work, then as the solution is refined and costs come down others will follow as well. And if it works on a small scale, it will work better on a large one, all other things being equal.

For me, it has always been about empowering INDIVIDUALS at the expense of corporations and governments. Wresting control away from those who would enslave us for money. That’s what the Internet thing was all about. It’s what the EV thing is all about. It’s what the energy thing is all about. That is what Jack is all about.

Or as Elon Musk so awkwardly, but oddly at the same time eloquently put it:
“It is about finding ways to think about the future that don’t make us sad….”

And he didn’t build an advocacy group.

He built a car…

By way of update to the graph, as of the end of 2016 the current estimate is 302 GW of photovoltaic capacity worldwide.

BTW: Checkout viewer Ben Stewart’s build video below. Just a great build all around….

The post Finding Ways to Think About the Future… appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

And I’m working at it. Older, and between naps. But I’m hard at work.

At 10:28 CST this morning, December 21, we will enter a new era – the winter solstice. This is the shortest day of the year here in Cape Girardeau Missouri, a little over ten hours of daylight. And after a fierce dawn, we are settling into a soft gloomy cloud cover this morning.

While dabbling in solar, you develop a new way of grading days into “good” solar days and the not so good. And December is generally poor fare all around. But as of this morning, each new day will be a little longer and a little brighter than the one before. I like that imagery.

Yesterday afternoon I connected one 70% SOC 377.47vdc Tesla Battery to one 40% SOC 350vdc battery with a single stroke and sat back to watch the fur and feathers fly in the ensuing fight. As expected, it was underwhelming though impressive. I don’t have an actual current logging device connected and am simply recording what the Tesla BMS sends me over the CAN bus. I think I probably need to connect an IVT Current Sensor and measure it more quickly as I have to be missing something. But what my current software did measure was a peak of 169.75 amps at a negotiated settlement of 363 volts or about 62kW – slightly above CHAdeMO power levels but below Tesla’s Supercharger. It lasted for a minute or so, but within five minutes it was down to 135 amps and within 10 minutes it was below 100 amps. So 2/0 cables handled it rather easily as they were only four or five feet long.

So current levels between two large batteries at different states of charge are impressive, but not alarmingly so. I would expect it to be more of an issue at 80% and 20% and perhaps a little more so at 10% and 90%. We’ll have to see what transpires.

We are of course trying to get a little closer to what our viewers have been singularly clear minded about – they want to charge their cars from sunshine and the more directly the better.  That means connecting the CAR to the home solar battery and photovoltaics – and charging it.  OR it might also mean connecting the car and getting energy FROM it.

When I first encountered this sentiment, I saw a task before me. Explain it to em. If you make electricity from sun, and feed it into the grid, and you take the same amount of energy out of the grid, and charge your car, you are driving on sunshine. So what’s to do?

Our viewers expressed a different task for me. Make it so they could charge on sunshine.  They don’t want to convert it to AC and put it into the grid.  They don’t want to take energy from the grid and use it to charge the car.  They want to charge on sunshine.  Directly.  You know.  From the sun.

Ok. I get it…. Charge…. On sunshine.

I was delighted to watch Tesla’s category 8 truck announcement. Elon Musk certainly knows better. But he has apparently gotten the word too. As so he specifically made a point to mention that you would DRIVE on SUNSHINE and the new MegaCharger Network for commercial trucks would be entirely solar powered battery banks capable of putting 400 miles worth of energy into a truck in half an hour. He also guaranteed them a 7 cent per kWh rate for that sunshine for the life of the truck. Velly intellesting…

I did twelve years as editor and publisher of Boardwatch Magazine and near enough nine years with EVTV. The lions part of the success of both was just a very good sense of what will be important and develop in technology in the future. I just can see it. And rarely miss. I don’t need to mention it. People who follow, and some have made both rodeos, already know about this and so they read/listen/view a bit differently from the more casual. But I’m going to share my proprietary IP here. It’s a trick. A cheap parlor trick.

You see, decades ago I noticed that technology does not evolve randomly or from what is possible or by standing on the shoulders of giants and being enabled by previous technologies or any of that. You can POINT to that, but you’re missing the trick. It evolves almost entirely based on focused intent.

Basically, if enough people want a technology to exist, that is DESIRE it, others will build it and hand it to them for a price. I noticed this and kind of back checked a few dozen notable inventions and found it is 100%.  In every case, no matter how serendipitous it appears in the telling, a very STRONG DESIRE preceded it.

If nobody wants it and nobody will pay for it, it could be a Star Trek transporter and it just isn’t going to make it. I’ve seen hundreds of excellent solutions in search of a problem. And similarly hundreds of seemingly intractable problems eventually solved. It is driven entirely by human desire and driven faster in consensus. It takes very literally Napoleon Hill’s maxim: “If you can conceive it and can believe it you can achieve it.”  But he references it as an individual aspiration.  Picture a crowd based conceive and believe as being MUCH more powerful.

Dropping the other shoe should land the qualifying proviso here. But there isn’t one. IF enough of you can be gathered to want a thing, it will come to pass. Which takes me into a realm most mystical, that the universe is subject to the will and the whim of enormously powerful spirit beings. And you are them.

All of this by way of explanation that if you want to drive on sunshine, that IS the future. And Messrs Musk and Rickard can explain a thing to death without quite ever changing any of that. Which is why we don’t spend much time on the attempt.

And nine years and 321 videos later, you may now return to the first EVTV video where I called for a 100,000-man army to build electric cars. I knew it mattered little how many actually built electric cars or what the cars looked like or worked like. I never said you had to start a car factory or become an OEM. I wanted an electric car. And I was vaguely aware that others wanted electric cars too. And if I could somehow act as a lens to focus the intent of 100,000 people, a tiny tiny percentage of the world, to REALLY want electric cars and to come out of the closet and admit they had been pondering this, in many cases for decades, and publicly DESIRE electric cars, and tinker and innovate and blow things up – electric vehicles WOULD come to pass. And notice I spent zero effort raising venture capital, building factories, or trying to be General Motors – or the Callistoga Wagon Company for that matter.

I did’t want another million dollars or so. And unlike Barrack Obomination, I didn’t want each household to change one lightbulb. I wanted to change the whole world. And was actually at a point in life where I knew how to do it.

Do NOT misunderstand. I don’t claim authorship of the idea. Most of you have known what kind of car you wanted since you were eight years old. We had slot cars in those days. They were electric. They were quiet. They were despicably quick. And they were a shit pot full of fun. Any eight year old could look out the window at Mom’s Impala, and down at the table in front of them with a Porsche, a Ferrari and a Batmobile vying heroically for the lead, and tell that there was something badly amiss in the world. That gallon gulping piston chugging shit spewer just wasn’t right. And Batman wouldn’t be caught dead in an Impala.

But you needed permission to dream, validation for what you wanted, and someone to say it was all right to want it in a world full of people telling you what was possible, what was practical, and what you should settle for – mostly including just get used to the idea of higher gasoline prices.

I am not REALLY premature here.  The outcome is now apparent and the reality of converting ALL of the existing vehicle fleet to electric is simply displaced in time and space by the standard Everett Rogers adoption curve.

But whenever you do GET what you desire, that allows you further view of further horizons and so with it further desires. So now you want to drive on sunshine. Not my job to fix you. We’ll drive on sunshine. Batta boom batta bing.

FREE LITHIUM BATTERIES – MUST PICK UP.

In this video I referred to the dramatic increase in price in the price of salvaged EV batteries now that they are somewhat useful and were being discovered by the solar enthusiasts. I did note this would be temporary and with a number of entrants in the salvaging battery goldmine, prices would quickly collapse. I didn’t expect it in three days.

Actually I just kind of missed something happening sort of as we speak. Collin wants to do a semitruck now and asked me to send him a drive unit and a charger. But before I could reply to the e-mail he sent me another noting that I should never mind – he would just buy a wreck and part it out himself, noting the sudden collapse of price in Tesla wrecks. ?????  What price collapse?

Turns out another whimsical story. The Tesla salvage market has now been FLOODED so to speak with ruined Tesla’s from Houston, Texas. Apparently they literally got flooded in the flood. Goodnight Irene. What I can’t quite put together is how so MANY Teslas were parked IN Houston in the first place. Isn’t Houston the worldwide capital of all gasoline refining everywhere? Kind of the main drag of the oil industry? Why were so many driving Tesla’s in Houston?

Understand you probably do NOT want a battery from a flooded Houston Tesla. While these batteries seem well sealed, in practice we’ve seen a number of badly corroded and damaged batteries from floods. But it doesn’t matter. The low prices of the Houston Tesla’s has apparently cratered the Tesla salvage market even up into Michigan.

Longer term, there is just a very good reason I’m bearish about EV battery prices. Factoid one is that people are skittish about being battery operated in the first place. So to sell an electric car at all, the manufacturers have to warranty the batteries for 300 years or 3 million miles. Actually not, but 8 years and 100,000 miles is rather a lot. I have an early 2013 Model S with 16,000 miles on it and it will be under warranty until 2021. So picture that basically ALL existing Tesla’s are under battery warranty and for years hence.

What this means is that there IS no salvage market for Tesla batteries as replacement parts. NOBODY needs a Tesla battery to replace a failed Tesla battery because 1 they don’t fail, and 2 if they did fail it’s Tesla’s problem and they will replace it with a factory fresh NEW battery. So there is no legitimate parts “market” for the batteries or indeed for most Tesla parts.

Further to the point is basic arithmetic. There are 250,000 Tesla Model S on the road now and a certain percentage will meet their demise with some impact. This is exacerbated by the thin aluminum sheet used in their manufacture to make them delightfully light, spriteful and efficient on the road. Unfortunately, it also makes them horrendously expensive in the body shop and a five-minute hailstorm with dime-sized hail pretty much makes it a total write-down from an insurance company perspective.

This is FURTHER exacerbated by Tesla’s unwillingness to provide information, parts, or support to people repairing/rebuilding Tesla’s. This strikes me as profoundly and deeply and most sincerely stupid as a corporate position. But they actually discourage fixing Teslas in any and every way they can. Who wants a reputation as a $100,000 disposable irreparable car? And eventually an uninsurable one? What are you DOING Elon?

But more than all that, they have 455,000 deposits on Model 3 cars that have BETTER batteries. And they would love to manufacture all of those in 2018. Effectively TRIPLING the number of Tesla Motorcars plying the roads.

And an impressive number of people not only want to buy one, but want to buy one so they can immediately take it out and wreck it. One Tesla P100D in the northwest area was salvaged with 44 miles on it. The guy paid $126,000 for the car, and never made it home from picking it up at the service center. Totaled. So we needn’t wait long.

Solar cells are down to 42 cents per watt. And I really see the batteries, LARGE batteries, available for solar energy storage, as being very nearly free. Some of you want to hang in there and wait for your Tesla Powerwall. JB Straubel has assured us that they won’t be using salvage Tesla batteries for solar storage because it just doesn’t make sense. Actually all those things are graven in jello JB. Kind of depends on price and availability. And yes, there are more homes than cars now. But in the U.S., there are 100 million homes and 250 million cars. Work it out.

Just what we needed, and right on time. I did add Tesla battery modules to our online webstore at the request of many.
http://store.evtv.me/proddetail.php?prod=TeslaBattModule

But we aren’t going to handle them. A solar enthusiast, has actually gone crazy on this and has picked up a DOZEN Tesla packs out of salvage and is taking them apart to make a quick $7000 per pack. But he’s trying to avoid being a secret so we’ve agreed to sell them for him.

BING. There, I just felt it. 10:28. Right on time. The winter solstice just kicked in. There was a very slight planetary rocking motion and back on track. Around the back side of the sun now.

Back to blogging. So I see inexpensive EV batteries as solar storage, which is exactly what is needed to actually enable solar power in any useful sense. Indeed all solar installed in homes and businesses and utilities prior are prelude.  Like EV’s, it is ALL about the batteries and always has been.  Solar energy only ever made sense if you could store the energy.

By the way, Tesla’s battery pack just turned hero. A massive coal power plant in Australia went on total shut down and the Tesla battery pack, 1000 kilometers away, shot to full 100MW output within milliseconds. Back up peaker plants took another four to six seconds to come online which very easily could have caused the usual Australian power cascading failure/blackout mess they have become inured to. But the Tesla battery was so fast, and handled the additional load long and strong enough to bring other generators up and cover the shortage. In grid terms, within a month of startup, Tesla’s battery is now the national hero of the Australian grid industry. Methinks this presages more batteries will be on order. Worldwide. Tesla “blue sky.”  $950 per share.

Further to the point, the most recent massive grid solar installation just came in. These days, instead of shopping for solar components based on price, these large mega-plants  simply announce where they want them and how big they should be.  Solar component manufacturers then offer to do ALL the design work and provide the components and they actually compete to do it in a kind of now formalized auction process.

On October 3rd, 2017 , the Saudi energy ministry said Abu Dhabi’s Masdar and Electricite de France SA bid to supply power from a 300-megawatt photovoltaic plant for as little as 6.69736 halalas a kilowatt hour, or 1.79 cents.  If awarded, that would beat the earlier record for a solar project in Abu Dhabi for 2.42 cents a kilowatt-hour. Solar is now EGGREGIOUSLY less expensive than coal to produce electricity. And it is destined to approach the cost of sand – although you don’t burn it up – you can use it for 30 years. The plant is slotted to be online by June 2019, that’s how fast this is moving and it is part of a plan to deploy 9500 MW of solar in Saudi alone by 2030.  They see the writing on the wall for oil, but their vast deserts have no shortage of sunshine.

This is why I say all solar heretofore is prelude.  The pricing of magic rock photovoltaics issues in an entirely new deal.  And the other enabler is battery storage. Right on time.  So the next 10-15 years will be known as the dawn of solar, not the last 15.

I had back burnered making the Tesla onboard charger work for nearly a year now. I wasn’t really sure why. It’s a 10kW charger the size of a briefcase. But they seem to cling to about $800 at the low end on eBay and can be seen at $1800 regularly. Why? Nobody can use them.

I think it is just a bet on the come that sooner or later someone will figure it out. Actually we did. But it is kind of icky with HVIL loops, J1772 issues, odd connectors and connections, and of course liquid cooling.

We have sold a number of 3.3kw Chevy Volt chargers at maybe $1700 with a controller and so forth you can actually use and indeed we now just order new ones from Chevy dealers at $1200 each, add a controller and some kind of pricey connectors, and they work fine. I have one in the 1990 VW Doppelkabine Pickup now.

But liquid cooling is a mess in an EV. It brings us all the leaks and hoses and antifreeze issues we want to be rid of in electric cars. But at the same time it allows us to get rid of heat from our drive units. So we have TWO loops in the DOKA – one for inverter/motor. And one for the Delphi DC-DC converter and the Chevy Volt charger. I actually need to put in a THIRD cooling loop which will actually be for HEATING with a Chevy Volt Eberspacher heating unit so I can drive the thing in winter – which I should get done by about May if EVTV traditional scheduling applies.

But liquid cooling for home solar? What a mess. What an additional expense. What a complication. But we do need a charger to supplement our battery-centric powerplant with grid (or generator) AC. Particularly in the dog days of winter. As mentioned in the video, we simply have an extreme variance seasonally in solar irradiance that either makes us generate power we can’t possibly use in summer or fall short in winter. It is basically the AC coupling for our DC coupled system.

We’ve sold a charger for years from the Tieching Instrument Company we called the TCCH charger. Elsewhere marketed as the Elcon. Served well and admirably and attractively priced. But of course hopelessly dated now.

Apparently Tieching thought so as well. Things just don’t stand still and the EV world in China has received a big boost from major government initiatives regarding electric cars. So TCCH has a new model that is 6.6kw, liquid or air cooled, and we just have one in. I don’t know what I expected. I had kind of lost interest in the genre and assumed we would be using OEM chargers in the future from electric cars.

But this thing has me wowed. First, it’s tiny. 14x9x5.5 inches – the size of a lunchbox. Second, it’s powerful, 6.6kw. Then, it is air cooled. I don’t have to fool with liquid cooling. It has a very OEM look with heavy cast aluminum enclosure and two shiny aluminum heat sinks. Unlike the earlier models, it comes with TWO fans. And they are so quiet I can barely hear them. And with an hour of putting out 6500 watts or so – 18 amps into a Tesla battery, it is COOL to the touch. It is of course CAN controlled. ANd the connectors, which were previously just wires sticking out of the enclosure or cheap Anderson connectors, are now clearly automotive grade.

But best of all they are VERY inexpensive. We have them up in the store at $995. I already have the code to operate it IN the Tesla Full Battery Pack Controller and it works beautifully. You can set the GRIDSTART variable to a state of charge and if your battery SOC falls below that, it turns on the charger. You can also set a GRIDEND state of charge for it to quit – leaving room to charge with solar if and when the sun does ever come up again.

I’ve tried everything with regards to physically interfacing to CAN. My latest foray is with CAT6 ethernet. So while fooling with that and the charger, I came across some of Andromeda Interfaces 7-inch touch screens on the shelf. Recall that we buy these, reflash them with our own software, and use them as a Tesla-like display for our Telsa Drive Unit.

Well I had some that were already flashed with the Orion BMS version from Andromeda. Orion BMS comes from Ewert Systems I think in Illinois and has been the least obnoxious BMS available for EVs. IN any event, it displays the basics, SOC, pack voltage, highest cell, lowest cell, temperatures, and a current progress bar for charging and discharging currents. How hard could it be?

It took all afternoon. So I missed my nap. But beyond that, not to shabby.

No sooner than we had our previous video out extolling the virtues of the 20kW inverter we found in China, that will work off the 300-400vdc battery input, than we received a couple of things. Several e-mails condescendingly noted that many inverters work on 300-400vdc. One actually cited Solar Edge as being a leader and less expensive too.

This is an ongoing problem. We have a lot of attention from those with too MUCH knowledge. And most of what they know is of course wrong. We have SolarEdge on our grid tied side here at EVTV. They indeed make very inexpensive inverters. But they make up for it with the sale of their POWER optimizers. Picture buying an emphase microgrid inverter, and using THAT to feed an ordinary wall inverter. The optimizers mostly optimize their output to a very steady 350v. Not 300-500. SolarEdge IS working on some EdgeStore battery stuff, but again very proprietary, and you will of course use their chosen batteries.

Second group was the left out me-too’s with Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf batteries. Actually almost everything we talk about works just as well for those if you can figure out the management and do a controller for them. But that’s not the problem. They too have found it impossible to find just an off-grid inverter with a 300-400v input.  They are just not available.

And that’s what we’re doing here. I don’t REALLY want to handle inverters. You need them for selfish solar.

Great news. We found em. We have em. You can have em too. Here they are…

Err, ahh., hmmm. Well you see, they don’t REALLY  need a 20kW inverter, they really only need 5k. No problem.

Well, it’s not just they only NEED 5k, it that they want to pay $300 for one. Sorry, can’t help you. And indeed, note that Selfish Solar just isn’t about WEENIE solar. We actually think tepid ginger toe-in the water solar has been the PROBLEM driving most of the developers to come up with all these bizzare and mishapen devices. The experiment is over. Solar works. Now it is about how to cobble together a FULL solar system for a big persons house. This isn’t Tiny House Nation and I’m not about to relocate to a container home.  And no, we still aren’t really about bottom feeders.  We seek to optimize the value proposition and enable those who want to replace dollars with some sweat equity. But I’m sure there is a solar version of DIYelectricjunk for you guys out there somewhere.

But yes, we think there are some ways for individuals to save about HALF the going rate on solar installations by doing it themselves, and in the process wind up with a battery system that will run for a couple or three DAYS of bad weather. But we are going to have to misappropriate a few items from the EV industry, starting with the batteries. Likely including the chargers. And the thing left is the inverter.

I wish one of you guys would retool our less than $1000 air-cooled DMOC645 to do about 100kW of 240vac. It’s not REALLY that far of a stretch…

But in the meantime, it is true that many homes simply don’t need 20kW. In fact most do not. I personally use a ridiculous amount of electricity at about 160kWh per day at my home. But that averages 7.5kW per hour  and it rarely sees a peak output over 10kw. So the average American home using 30kW per day probably averages 1.5kW peaking at maybe 3 or 5kW. While I am an “overkill is always appropriate kind of guy because stuff lasts longer that way, I have found some remarkable new inverters of lesser size and cost.

Here’s a unit that will do 5kW continuously and 10kW for close to two minutes at $2995 and it works perfectly on 300-400vdc EV batteries and gives a perfect sine wave 60Hz 240vac L1, L2, N, PE U.S full house output. And it IS simple. This would work with Leaf and Volt and Bolt and BMW batteries IF you can control them as we do with the Tesla batteries.

SO I want to close with an uplifting holiday message wishing you each a very Merry Christmas and a joyous holiday season with friends and family and good will toward men and peace on earth. Hmmm. Well, half the country is made up of alt-left libtard Trump denialists who are very convinced the world is a very messed up place because of Trump and his deplorables.

The other half of us Deplorable Trump Supporters are convinced that the aforementioned alt-left libtards make it a really messed up place.

This is all largely a media event to set us up as two teams after the fashion of NFL football in order to sell MyPillow, Oxyclean, and Progressive insurance. As I’ve claimed in recent blogs and videos, things have just never ever been so miraculously fabulous all the way around. But there are always things you can point to that could be better.

How messed up? My poor brother-in-law, a proud and sometimes militant “African American” just had his DNA tested. Indeed he was 33% Nigerian. Oh, and 27% British. Leaving 40% literally everything else on earth. Picture a Scottish Aleutian Islander Samoan with a fro. This kind of points up the nonsense of race in America – a mythology founded on a gross lack of understanding of both genetics and the binary number system nature of having parents, who all too often do NOT confess to their children their sexual proclivities, generation after generation after generation. This lead to absolutely COMICAL misunderstandings of race and political issues surrounding it, with virtually NONE of the activists and participants even knowing what race is or who or what they themselves actually are.  How messed up is that?

You want more? It is now pretty clear that Jesus Christ had to be born sometime in mid to late September, though there is a vocal minority group who campaign for the first week of October. Kind of have our Christmas date messed up THERE.

Worse, it is generally held that he was born between 6 and 4 BC, which kind of hoses up the entire CONCEPT of their BEING a BC. You see, you can’t really have Christ BEFORE Christ, or maybe you can – like the Trinity thing.

And Santa Claus, the jolly elf advocating good will toward men and peace on earth, was actually a bishop, Nikolaos of Myra who at the first Council of Nicaea in 325 AD (331 years AFTER Christ?) punched another bishop, Arius, in the nose so hard that it pretty much put him out for some time, ending Arianism and the Arian debate, which was very important at the time. So important none of you remember what it was about. But that was Santa Claus’s most notable act. He was later canonized as Saint Nicholas. And the story went on from their thanks to the Dutch, Thomas Nast and his poem, and eventually Macie’s Department Store.

Nonetheless we celebrate the birthday of Christ during the pagan holiday of YuleTide, to mark the winter solstice which is usually three or sometimes FOUR days earlier.  We couldn’t even get THAT right.

So fake news and confusion, opinions and errant misunderstandings, eggregious misrepresentations and the twisting of history and fact for political purposes, was not precisely invented in the 21st century or America.  It has been going on for several thousand years.

With all that, I and my wife will be at St Mary’s Cathedral in Cape Girardeau Missouri this coming Sunday night at 11:00PM and for two and a half hours in the middle of the night, she will bang away at the pianoforte and organ and I will bellow like a bull in a charming simulation of nearly singing — with our marvelous choir, and loving every minute of it. The church will be packed. And a good time will be had by all to the wee hours of the morning.

In fact, it just doesn’t get any better than this. I hope each of you and your families experience the same peace and love and warm holiday friendships and celebrations as well.

Merry Christmas. I’m from the government and I’m here to help…

Jack Rickard

The post Driving on Sunshine – I Get It. appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

Yes Alice in Wonderland has joined the METOOS and has accused Donald Trump of unwanted sexual Solar Tarrifs. Other mythical animated female characters join in.

Or something like that.

Over 140 years ago, Samuel Clemens noted that those who didn’t read the newspaper were uninformed and those who did read the newspaper were misinformed. Not much has changed in the interim.
But the common campfire of news and information has exploded from primarily newspapers to a firestorm of video and of course Internet information streams. And so making sense of the world has become a little bit liking taking a tentative sip from a firehose. It kind of tears your face off just to attempt it.

I received a detailed e-mail from a long time trusted source of useful information and an intelligent guy all around, noting the devastation imminent to sustainable energy advances by the just released news of the “Trump Tarrif” on Chinese imported solar equipment. He provided several links to purportedly authoritive sources and was suitably grounded in the topic from the currently reported information.

By accident of birth, it was something I knew a little bit more than I wanted to about, as we have been importing solar panels from China for four or five years. These are kind of specialized panels suitable for boats and Recreational Vehicles but we do have a contingent of EV guys who just will NOT give up on the solar powered car thing. So these are 3.5 mm thick, weigh 6.5 lbs, and make 200watts.

Obama had long ago applied a 150% tarrif to Chinese solar cells. This is applied to the cells to prevent the inevitable attempt to import Chinese panels to Canada or somewhere, affix a sticker and claim to have “manufactured” them there, with the addition of a couple of eyelets and the sticker, and then import them tarrif free. The tarrif was against ANY solar product CONTAINING Chinese cells.

Our panels actually DO come from China, but use cells manufactured in the Phillippine Islands, by an American company, SunPower. And so we are able to import these without the tarrif, but the paperwork to PROVE the origin of the cells is irksome and tedious. And we have to go through it all over again with every shipment.

So the Trump Tarrif story just didn’t sound right and I agreed to look into it. Understand, this was not a career change. The information is readily available and easily discernable by anyone with any critical thinking skills. I doubt I spent 2 hours on it. But the results were VIOLENTLY in opposition to all the news reports on the topic and an almost hysterical knee-jerk response from the “green” camp. And I was stunned to see how dicked up the narrative on this had become and how quickly it had become so.

I listed my objections in response. And my correspondent found it surprising and illuminating and asked permission to share it. I of course noted no permission is necessary, everything I put out is for any use you might find for it.

And so the first part of our current episode is unnecessarily cluttered with a long diatribe on the “Trump Tarrif” but with all that effort, I fear it is like trying to put out a forest fire with a kiss. The deluge of misinformation is just overpowering. And I fear serious damage to the solar initiatives not from Trump’s Tarrif, but from the well intentioned and horrendously misinformed deluge.

Understand this is just not at all exceptional. It is now the rule. I cannot imagine how “reporters” have reached the point of 8 figure salaries while simultaneously proving incompetent TO A MAN to follow a story into the men’s room/ladies room/LGBTQ whatever crapper is appropriate.

We are not talking about Alex Jones, never Trumpers, or prepper fanatics here. Main stream media outlets that have traditionally provided our news and information have become totally incompetent vectors of misinformation, disinformation and just total bullshit.

Here’s a simple to get your arms around example. In this video, Errol Barnett of CBS News teams up with Dr. Derrick Pitts, Planetarium Director and Chief Astronomer of the Franklin Institute team up to deliver a very authoritive, very intellectual, totally condescending, and indeed patronizing diatribe against Musk’s launch of his first Tesla Roadster and Starman noting that it now joins 20,000 pieces of space junk floating in low earth orbit around the planet. They also note that it will be literally torn to bits within a year by the sun’s radiation

Of course, there is not only no factual basis for this, it is ENTIRELY bullshit made up out of whole cloth by people who don’t know and don’t know they don’t know anything about the topic whatsoever.

The intense radiation of the sun is not particularly intense, but in any event can’t tear anything to bits in a billion years, much less a year. I suppose without any filtration of the UV, you might see a bit of paint fade but it will have to do it in a hurry because the Roadster is traveling AWAY from earth AND the sun at a high rate of speed headed for the Van Allen belt. It can’t be space junk in orbit around earth because it isn’t IN orbit around the earth. The orbit is heliocentric elipsoid going out as far as Mars and then looping back in toward the sun and this eliptical orbit will continue forever. We need not worry about it colliding with the Chinese space lab they are referring to as it will never come within millions of miles of earth ever again.

Understand, I’m not talking about a minor technical flaw they missed. We’re talking about a lengthy detailed report delivered with sanctimonious arched eyebrow condecension, as if lecturing children from an august intellectual height, that is TOTALLY devoid of any useful information at all and the two principles in the discussion appear OBLIVIOUS to how ridiculous they appear on camera. The pronunciation and inflection and neckties of these guys are flawless. Their minds are vegetative brain stems and it is remarkable that they are able to breath. Darwin apparently erred unless he really meant survival of the silliest. The entire BASIS of the piece is simply and fatally inaccurate. But the delivery is flawless.

As of February 8, StarMan and Tesla Roadster were 470,000 kilometers from earth pulling away at about 9000 miles per hour. That should finally end the debate over who can build the fastest sports car, althougn no longer the fastest sports car IN THE WORLD as it is space bound. Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project in Italy and Michael Schwartz of Tenegra Observatory in New Mexico teamed up to combine 54 photographs of the moving roadster in space at 470,000 km into a GIF clip that we enhanced and repurposed for the video above.

As it so happens, I do drive the 1990 Volkswagen Doppelkabine pickup truck depicted in this episode and it is essentially my daily driver. It does have a Tesla drive unit in it and can do some remarkable things I essentially never do. Now I don’t somehow imagine that a 1990 VW pickup is a high performance vehicle. Or particularly appealing for that matter. In fact, I would nominate it as the ugliest, most ungainly and ridiculously mis-designed vehicle since the VW Beetle. It has little to recommend it. But like the bug, there IS something endearing about it. I don’t know if its the seating position, the steering, the outside view, or WHAT. But after driving it a bit, it really becomes endearing.

The juxtaposition of the advanced drive unit, the concept of it being electric at all, and the ridiculous boxy ugliness of the platform, with the outrageously yellow plasti-dip paint job, kind of combine into a magic thing that I can only describe as that it “suits my sense of whimsey.” And I truly DO treasure my whimseys, almost all of which retain some aspects of surprise, irony, humor, or just being outrageously out of place.

So, imagine my delight at learning that Elon Musk was going to spend a half billion dollars of his company’s money on a non-commercial test flight to prove that you could build a 5 million lb thrust enormous rocket and launch impressively weighty payloads into space BEYOND earth’s orbit and indeed all the way to mars. What a gutsy thing to do. And that instead of launching a concrete doughnut like everyone else does for a test payload, he would instead launch his own very first delivery Tesla Roadster, perhaps the most collectible car in the world at this point, AS the payload, is just too precious. Adding a spacesuit with a dummy onboard and David Bowie’s STARMAN song on the stereo is just playfulness. Indeed, there is no atmosphere to carry sound waves and most probably, the speaker would blow on the first note. It doesn’t matter. It all suits his sense of whimsey…..and mine…and apparently that of many of you. Indeed, I fully expect StarMan to gain popstar status and I would nominate him for Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year”. We’re talking StarMan after all.

And so beyond sense of whimsey, it was a masterful stroke of press management and marketing. A truly brilliant thing that rather distracts from the difficulties with the Model 3 product line production.

The video collage above is my take on it and note it is somewhat different from the presentation of the very superior Mr. Barnett. I hope you enjoy it. THe landing of the two side thrusters was probably the sickest thing I’ve ever seen.

This is not intellectual tourism. These things take on a reality of their own. If enough people BELIEVE the stock market is going down, they pull out of the market and guess what? It goes down. A self-fulfiling prophecy. And if enough investors BELIEVE it is going up, they buy into the market and guess what? It goes up. Misinformation has consequences.

Identically, if enough people BELIEVE a particular thing, it BECOMES an alternate reality that eclipses reality itself. It doesn’t MATTER that corn is not wheat. If enough of us point at corn and call it wheat, it becomes wheat. That’s the new word for corn. The grain didn’t change, but our belief system did and we are forever after destined to eat corn bread.

And that is the problem. Our subsequent ACTIONS and DECISIONS are based on the alternate version of reality – not on factual reality. And this can not only be unfortunate, but dangerous or even fatal. Self fulfilling prophecy only carries us so far. If we all agree and truly truly BELIEVE that power has been removed from the circuit, what will actually be the effect if you give it a 400v wet kiss?

So I suppose bias and point of view are inevitably intertwined in the process of gathering and delivering news. I’m ok with that. But we are now mowing intently into the grass of total gross incompetence across MOST of our information delivery medias and streams. The World Wide Web is quickly becoming the World Wide Wobble. Therein lie chaos. Total chaos. Information anarchy.

In the 1960’s a young boy living in the suburbs of London happened across an old family book titled Enquire Within Upon Everything. Published in 1865, this book was a collection of useful facts that had been assembled as a “common book” full of tips and tricks to run a household, everything from cooking tips to home remedies for headaches, how to bury a deceased relative, how to get married, etc. None of these “facts” were really related. It was just a collection of useful factoids and tips. They had been proven to the authors satisfaction, editorially SELECTED from all the hurricane of other information, and presented in the book.

Apparently it made an impression. Decades later he was working as a software consultant in Switzerland in a chaotic research lab where personnel turnover was very high. He developed an application containing and linking and indexing software snippets and facts useful there, often picked up from other coders who all to often moved on in just a few weeks. He titled this application ENQUIRE after the book he had been entranced with as a child. It allowed him to store small blocks of information and as nodes so you could pull up anyone’s name and see all the projects they were on, or conversely pull up a project and see the names of those involved.

He later resurrected ENQUIRE as a program he titled TANGLE but it too eventually died of neglect. But both programs gurgled in the back of his mind until he developed a concept of larger scope and more general application to link information nodes, using what he termed “hyperlinks” as they would link across a network to documents on other computers. He tried various titles for this including MINE and MESH but eventually settled on the term World Wide Web. He published a paper on it in 1989 and today we are all familiar with Tim Berners-Lee as the father of the web.

Today’s web has no proof of validity or even editorial selection process. It’s just links between whatever anyone puts out there. And so I would posit that it has morphed into the World Wide Wobble.

And in this deluge, how are normal humanoids to sort through this maelstrom of lies and errors to discern truth from lie, fact from fiction, accuracy from error? I don’t have an answer and fear this drives quickly to a societal inability to process. ALL sources, (including this one) claim to have the REAL story. So how to develop trusted sources? Good luck with that…

Beyond political diatribe, we did include some actual information in this episode. We connected two Tesla 85kW batteries and measured the current flows between them over the course of an hour. This is one of those areas where it seems like a useless exercise. Everyone knows what is going to happen. But interestingly, everyone knows differently. And the EV community has generally in the past dealt with such issues by having horrendous online arguments with all proponents furiously typing themselves smart.

EVTV has long advocated a different concept. It just isn’t THAT hard to hook it up and meter it. So we did.

And we have never done much in the way of such experiments without learning something, and I would say 90% of the time learning something we weren’t actually testing for. In this case, we learned that the Tesla Battery Management System internal to the battery pack will actually shut down the pack if it has a charge current exceeding 300 amperes or thereabouts. 300 A and 400v is 120kw, which happens to correspond to the absolute limit of a Tesla Supercharger.

Beyond that, connecting two Tesla battery packs without any intervening power switching electronics is uneventful. There is a serious transfer of power. But it doesn’t even threaten contactor contact weldment. The battery temperature barely increases 10C. Cables of 1/0 size do not even warm appreciably. And in an hour or so, you have one battery effectively of double the size.

I could not write a video advertisement for EVTV more effective than U.S. Representative Thomas Massie’s excellent adventure in driving to Georgia to pick up a Tesla battery pack, disassemble it, and use it and some control electronics and software from EVTV to power his home. First, he IS a public figure, a representive from Kentucky’s fourth district in the U.S. House of Representatives.

But more to the point, he isn’t a whacky “off grider” in a tiny cabin in Montanna using two solar panels and a car battery to run his four LED lights. He has a really BIG and really NICE home in Kentucky that he did build himself and it is totally offgrid. It doesn’t hurt that he has a degree in Electronic Engineering from MIT. And within a few days, he had replaced his very large lead acid battery plant with 16 Tesla Model S Battery modules. I would predict this will power his home longer and more effectively and last much longer than the Pb chemistry cells he was using.

He was upgrading an existing 48v system. I of course advocate using the full Tesla pack at it’s nominal 345 volts. But there are just a lot of legacy 48v systems out there and this is typical of what we are seeing a LOT of demand for.

I don’t like 48v systems for three basic reasons:

1. The vast majority of installed plant in U.S. residences is much higher voltage photovoltaics and grid tied.

The problem here is that we have a large body of invested owners just now waking to the fact that if their grid power goes down, so does their photovoltaic plant. They have $50k tied up in a solar power system. The grid goes down, and with the sun actually baking their solar panels, they don’t have any power. The problem is, these are 400-600v arrays, or enphase microinverters that would be most easily rewired in 400-600v arrays. And the matchup to 48v equipment is very poor. Not much out there to MPPT 500v to a 48v battery.

2. The existing equipment is Pb chemistry biased and hopelessly complex and a very poor fit for our charge/discharge curves.

All the inverters and charge controllers out there have hopelessly complex configuration schemes to accommodate bulk charge, absorption charge, equalization charge etc for lead batteries but lithium battery support is very slow in coming. Worse, all the Pb chemistry is based on a 2.1v cell while our EV batteries are almost all 3.6v cells. At 48v, that means 24 cells of 2.1v are nominally 50.4 volts but charge to 2.4v per cell or 57.6 volts. They are also considered fully discharged at 42 or 44 volts. This is basically the 50% SOC point recommended for Pb cells to maintain rated cycle life.

EV batteries are nominally 3.6v, charge to 4.2 volts, and can be discharged all the way down to 3v quite confidently. And so 12 of these are nominally 43.2v, charge to 50.4 volts and discharge to 36v. This is basically a charge curve mismatch and out of the range of most of the equipment which simply can’t be set to 36 volts to cutoff and normally doesn’t allow charging cutoffs as low as 50v.

3. Cabling and Heat.

Everyone is afraid of 400vdc. I get zapped a couple of times a week. It’s not part of the week I look forward to, but in truth I hardly notice it. But currents can be a problem in system design. You might be surprised to hear this as an EV builder as we routinely do 1000 amps or even 2000 amps. But all of our equipment is designed to do that for six or eight seconds, not six or eight hours. And certainly not 24×7.

A large house can do a continuous average of 6 or 7 kilowatts with peaks to 12 or 15 kW. Well six kw at 400v is 15 amps. But six kW at 48v is 125 amps with excursions as high as 300 amps to do 15kW. This means heavier cables, that produce heat from I2 losses. This be where fire arises. It may also be thermally an issue for our cells. Again,they are designed to produce large currents for brief periods. Not continously.

For these reasons, I think I’ll eventually win on this one. Ultimately the rooftop is easier at 400-600v, and the rest is easier at 300-400v and ultimately we want 240vac. But in the interim, state of the art circa 2018 for battery backup is 48v. So we have to deal with it.

This episode was a slick two hours and forty three minutes, longish even by EVTV standards. I actually cut an entire lengthy segment that we’ll no doubt include in a future video.

Our battery controllers, charger controllers, DC-DC converter controllers and increasingly almost everything we do revolve around CAN and an inexpensive board we developed several years ago we call the EVTV CANDue. We liked the Arduino Due platform with the 84MHz Atmel SAM3 microprocessor. It had CAN built right into the microprocessor. But there were a couple of omissions. The oddest was omission of the 4k EEPROM in almost all Arduinos. This gives you a place to store static variables between power cycles. We use this for configuration data and options for software programs we run. You don’t want to enter the charge voltage for your charger every time you charge your car. The Arduino Due simply doesn’t have an EEPROM.

So we added one.

Despite the microprocessor having CAN built in, the Arduino group really doesn’t care much about CAN. It just isn’t on the Arduino groups radar screen. And to actually DO CAN, you do have to add a transciever for the actual CAN transmission. They didn’t see any point in increasing the expense of the board with that device. We, on the other hand, are all about CAN as that is what controls almost everything in an electric vehicle. So we added the transciever and the termination resistors and a screw terminal for the CANHI and CANLO.

Finally, I just never liked the dual micro USB ports on the Arduino Due. They would routinely actually break off and ruin the board from EYE CONTACT. Just very fragile. So we replaced that with the much heavier and sturdier USB MiniB printer style port. We can kind of solder that onto the boards in a very strong and robust fashion. You can’t pull it off with a pair of channel locks.

And that gives us a handy microcontroller with CAN and we use it for nearly everything.

But innovation is a continuous process. Over a year ago Collin and I started looking at a new chip on the market – the Tensilica ESP32. It was a Chinese chip with very poor documentation, but some very interesting features. Others found it also interesting and Tensilica basically open sourced their software development kit.

And so a group of enthusiasts grew and began struggling with how to use this chip. And so a body of tribal knowledge has formed, and indeed a group has engineered a way to marry it into the Arduino Integrated Development Environment or IDE.

This is basically what ties the Arduino community together is this free software that allows you to compile C++ sourcecode and upload the binaries to the Arduino boards.

So Collin and I have been looking at this chip as a possible for a next generation EVTV CANDue. It is actually a huge steup up in some ways.

First, instead of an 84 MHz 32-bit processor, the ESP32 has TWO 240MHz 32-bit processor plus a third low power processor for wakeup/watchdog duties. This is about six times the horsepower and indeed includes FreeRTOS, kind of a mini Linux real time operating system that can do a couple of simple threads simultaneously.

Second, it has both WiFi and Bluetooth BLE built in. Recall our errant foray into Bluetooth BLE with the Adafruit module for the GEVCU. That didn’t work out well largely due to some eggregious errors by Adafruit and their insistence on NOT open sourcing the firmware. We actually volunteered, or more realistically, volunteered Collin to help them straighten it out. It just wasn’t a priority and they somewhat arrogantly declined.

But Bluetooth BLE is the pathway to Smartphone/Tablet connectivity and apps, both on the Apple iPhone/iTablet side and on the Android phone/tablet side.

WiFi of course is the pathway to the Internet. Both are BUILT INTO the processor. Indeed, the WROOM module we chose has a built in antenna for all of this.

We want to work with our Tesla BMS shield we use to control both full packs and Tesla battery modules. So we put it on essentialy the same Arduino Due form factor for the board. We repeated most of the critical pins, although forfeiting the entire end piece to allow the antenna. So we can plug the same shield into this board and it will work.

And we decided this version would have TWO CAN ports instead of one.

The result is the EVTV ESP32 CANDue. We just got our first prototype boards back from China, with the usual first prototype gotchas and glitches. But with some microsurgery, Collin has made a couple of them work and we’re both exploring the software side of working with this board. While it does use the Arduino IDE, there is a lot to learn and a lot to work out for a useable CAN library and the BLE features and the dual processors.

But I’m very excited about the possibilities and the new capabilities this chip opens up.

Like the Arduino Due, there are literally hundreds of ESP32 boards coming out at phenomenally low prices. But generally they seem fixated on tiny, kind of like Jeff Stoffregens TEENSY series. They require 5v and we live in a 12v automotive world. Again no one seems interested in CAN.. And nobody is making any attempt to accommodate existing 3.3v shields from the Due world.

So we think our approach offers some subtle, but unique features that could be very useful for those working with cars or solar.

These things are an iterative process. It typically takes us four prototype cycles to get these things going and it takes about a month per cycle. But by late spring, assuming the transition from the year of the Rooster to the Year of the Dog in February goes well in China, we should have EVTV ESP32 CANDue available. Migration into the rest of our product line may take a bit longer. But you will be able to purchase these within a few months to experiment with yourself.

Jack Rickard

The post Trump Tarrif in the Internet Wonderland. Alice joins METOOs. appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

This past February 19, on a Monday afternoon, Richard Flentge and I drove up in the Tesla Model 3 to the Tesla Service Center in St. Louis to take delivery of my brand new Tesla Model 3. VIN: 5YJ3E1EA0JF005868
A couple of notable things, there were a LOT of Model 3’s on the lot. Like probably 15 which rather crowds their small lot.

The Tesla Model S purports to provide a 275 mile range. It is right at 125 miles to the service center and I charged it to 100% before we departed. On arrival, we immediately connected to their normal Tesla charger. Ironically the service center doesn’t have supercharge. And we had it connected for over an hour. But on returning to the shop from St. Louis, the Model S was staggering in with less than 4% charge showing. A 250 mile trip WITH an hour of interim charging and it barely made it. Your mileage may vary.

The drive home for me was a bit of a horror. The Model 3 had a very stiff suspension and felt both rough and cheap to my unschooled glutius maximus. But the heroic problem was one that’s rarely spoken of with regards to electric vehicles. They just don’t have the same road noise as an ICE vehicle and it is very easy to look down at the speedometer and find yourself doing 80 in a 35. But on the Model 3, this is compounded by the fact that there is nothing to look down at. The instrument cluster is just missing in action.

The 15.4 inch center screen is all there is. And I mean ALL there is. You have to use it to open the glove compartment. The speed is in thin Helvetica numerals about 1/2 inch high in the upper left hand corner. PRND is in about 4 point type as is SOC. This is not a display. It’s a mess. And you will find yourself leaning over to get a peak (at least with my eyes). When you raise back up and return your eyes to the road you will likely be horrified to learn that you are no longer in the lane you thought you were in, but a concrete truck is and you are closing at an alarming rate.

Basically, the lack of instrumentation and reliance on this absurd display for drive critical information is a safety hazard of potentially fatal proportions and it really surprised me.

Without the noise and vibration cues and no display, my speed was just all over the place, 54 mph one minute and 82mph the next. No problem. I had actually spent a stupid $8000 of the $56,300 purchase price on the enhanced autopilot package and fully autonomous driving when available. So it must at least have cruise control, right?

The problem was, I had no idea how to turn it on. And I searched the screen not only in vain, but at my repeated peril.

So I pulled over in Ozorra and did what any confused driver would do. I Googled it. And immediately learned that I had of course overlooked the obvious. You simply pull down the PRND stalk past D and it engages the cruise control. Couldn’t be simpler.

So I pulled out of the convenience store I had parked at and out onto the freeway to resume the trip. Confidently pulled down on the stalk and….nothing. Actually a TINY little window advisory popped up on the screen. I bent over to see what it said and VROOOOMMMMM the truck next to me stood on his horn as I veered sharply into his lane missing a sideswipe by inches. Several harrowing lane departures later, I was finally able to make out the 4 point type – CRUISE UNAVAILABLE Driver Seatbelt Not Secured.. So my near death experience was CAUSED by Elon Musk’s amazing house of hubris, trying to keep me safe, from myself.

By St. Genevieve the car was for sale. By Perryville I had determined to very publicly auction it off, starting at $1 no reserve.

It’s been 12 years since I’ve bought a Windoze computer and the issue was the same. Bill Gates is pretty sure he knows best what I should be doing about closing files, exiting programs, and updating the operating system. Now it’s showed up in a car. In both cases, I bought the son of a bitch. It’s mine. And the manufacturers opinion as to how I should use it is beyond no interest, I consider it a heroic exercise in hubris and bad manners.

In the days since, my jets have cooled sufficiently I suppose to take a closer look at the car. And I find much to recommend it.

The instrumentation is a horror – actually a safety hazard. The voice recognition is comically inept. But to be fair, it is VIN005868. While not absolute, it rather implies that the car Musk vowed to produce at the rate of 5000 per week by the end of 2017, is more likely the 5868th or thereabout in a series as of February 2018. And all the giggly wow gee whiz very technical overviews of the Model 3 by new owners on YouTube may be a little out over the skis.

For example, to do the Homelink gig with my garage door, I pulled out the trusty user manual from the glove box. Only it was a very brief safety leaflet and advised that the user manual was on the CONTROLS screen of the display. I went to controls, and there was no such thing.

Was I so inept I just couldn’t find it? Not precisely. How do I know? Because three days later I received an over the air software update. And guess what the first installation note advised? Yes, you now have a User Manual on the controls screen. And lo, there. A Users Manual.

This is one of those time paradox things. How did the print manual, printed weeks or months before, know there would be a User Manual on the controls screen, when there clearly wasn’t, but would be weeks or months later? Coincidence? Methinks not.

And so it goes.

It seems so ordinary. Do you know of another car that has a user manual on a video display screen in the car? Why is that seminal? Well first, Tesla has kind of marked new ground with their weaponized technique of updating operating firmware over the GSM network. But now they can update the operating instructions as well. And so the functions of the car can change from hour to hour and day to day as software improvements are made, but the manual can also be updated to reflect the changes. This is unique and really quite powerful.

In the first video, I make much of the car keys. And with good reason. I’ve seen a dozen videos gacking on about the little cards and how they aren’t as good as the fob. Actually they are an order of magnitude better and kind of again a likely patentable improvement to the car owning experience.

For twenty years we have been plagued by these “security” car keys with the RFID chip in them that prevents people from stealing our cars, NOT. But what they do do is ensure that if you break or lose a car key, you get to pay a dealer $300 to “program one” for ya. It’s a $7 key and it takes 22 seconds to “program” but that will be $375 – for your own protection you know. What a racket.

The credit card Near Field Communication (NFC) card with the Model 3 isn’t a car key, although it will substitute for one. It is the key PROGRAMMER. And any phone or iPad that you can run the Tesla app from acts as the car key. You use the card to program as many as you like and link them to the car. And when you get a new phone, it is easy enough to program another one. And with today’s software upgrade, you can list ALL the keys programmed to this particular car, and in fact remove any that no longer make sense. Finally we are free from car key tyranny and empowered to program our OWN car keys.

I have often complained that the TEsla Model S homelink that automatically opens and closes the garage door is indeed COMICAL in its operation. Sometimes working, sometimes not, sometimes closing when it should be opening , and often opening when it should be closing. I have come to believe this is due to a really quite vague sense of the Global Positioning System. It doesn’t actually know where it’s at half the time – at least to the precision necessary to operate the garage door reliably.

The Model 3 has a demonstrably accurate sense of where it is at. I can see on the nav map where in the EVTV shop it is parked. Not that it is IN the shop, but WHERE in the shop and at what angle.

There are a half dozen other innovations small and large in the design of this car that are simply a new level of automotive design. But I was wowed by the car keys, and the operating manual addition to over the air updates. With vehicle 5868 I have come to realize we are in the early stages of a development process. For example, in the second video above you will see me startled by noises coming from the battery. My distraction was over the possible collapse of our lift system, not the car. But the noises were actually the contactors in the battery that kept cycling. Similarly, the car in the shop will just periodically wake up and start hissing and blowing the heater fan and flashing the lights seemingly at random. The hydraulic pump on the drive unit whirs into life and then subsides. My Mother In Law the car? Satanic possession?

Perhaps. Or perhaps it is me. And my Smart phone. Which is the car key. Which unlocks and activates the car when I approach. And automatically locks and deactivates the car when I walk away. All based on a vague sense of Bluetooth BLE RSSI (signal strength). Comical. Annoying. And easily fixed with a future software update.

The very rough ride of the vehicle remains rough. I keep thinking I should get some sort of applause and a style score if I can do a full eight seconds. But a simple twist of perspective in going around one of the circular intersections here in Cape demonstrates that “nimble” and “clever” could also be applied to that same suspension. Frankly, it makes the Model S then feel like a wallowing boat. Or a much smoother more refined ride – depending on your mental state and point of view.

We are of course interested in connecting to the vehicle CAN system and beginning our detailed inquiry into its operation. This is proving non-trivial. There is no OBDII connector. The diagnostics connectors of the Model S and Model X are gone. The Tesla Service Center tech assures me they have a new diagnostic system that connects to a small white Sumitomo five pin connector where the OBDII was on the Model S.

Makes sense. But we can find no sign of CAN on it. It has two twisted pairs connected to the four installed pins, but they do not appear to carry CAN data. BroadR-Reach technology is an Ethernet physical layer standard designed for use in automotive connectivity applications. It allows multiple in-vehicle systems to simultaneously access information over unshielded single twisted pair cable. Benefits for automotive manufacturers integrating the BroadR-Reach Ethernet standard include reduced connectivity costs and cabling weight, according to Broadcom Corporation, now Broadcom Limited, inventor of the BroadR-Reach standard.

It mostly operates at a relatively low 33.3 Mbps. Low by ethernet standards, high relative to CAN speeds. And would serve some serious advantages if you were checking multiple video cameras while troubleshooting enhanced autopilot hardware.

But it almost certainly HAS CAN. Tesla has made a very odd announcement about an EVENT DATA RECORDER that have been in all Model X and Model S vehicles and now in the Model 3 as well.
You have to order a data cable set from that costs $799 and includes a PCAN CAN to USB adapter. And you download a Windoze program to capture EDR information. Then you upload the data and the website processes out a PDF report. The EDR only records when an unusual event occurs. And Tesla retrieves entirely different data from the MCU to do similar analysis but for any time period

So we’re a little vague on the purpose of the EDR. But it does provide us a pointer to CAN connectivity. And it is somewhere buried in the Model 3 console. Which opens the door to installing a device to read CAN and port it to an OBDII connector you could install on the side of the console.

Our investigation thus far reveals something I am at a bit of a loss to describe. The Model S and Model X have very conventional wiring harnesses. But on the Model 3, all the harnesses and connectors feel and look more “integrated” in the car, meaning harder to dig out and separate from everything else. You just don’t really have very good access to anything. But I’ve quickly come to admire the workmanship. And I mean true workmanship – not the infantile sophomoric and 50 year old focus on door and panel gaps. This is something from the 1950’s and I could care less about door gaps and panel alignment as long as the doors and trunk close well. But the various devices on the vehicle very much look like they were put there on purpose.

The interior room is a bit of magic. The vehicle is fully 11.5 inches shorter than the Model S. But it’s all taken out of the frunk. And the dash is lowered and moved forward and the windshield is extended downward and forward. The result is what feels like more interior room and better visibility, at the cost of frunk space. I’ve actually used the frunk four times in the Model S in five years. And the rear space available in the Model 3 is actually an embarrassment of riches.

I don’t like the door handles. I didn’t like the door handles on the Model S. Now that I think about it, I didn’t really care much for the door handles on my grandfathers 1952 Studebaker pickup. I don’t recall a car where I DID like the door handles. Maybe I have some sort of deep seated door handle issues. These are probably better than most.

Mirror, seat, and steering wheel adjustments are a hoot. Sound system is excellent. iPhone integration is reasonably good. And in the video I rave about the center console. Cup holders the right size and the right place and an excellent space to hold a phone and charge it.

In the second video, we take a look at the drive unit and suspension. The drive unit is small, compact, and probably easier to swap out than a Tesla. Again, a couple of innovations. It has a hydraulic lubrication pump and a filter for the gearbox lubricant. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this in a transmission. I can only surmise it is a fulfillment of a Musk directive that they produce a drive unit that would do a million miles. While difficult to examine, I have to believe the heat exchanger on the top of the drive unit features two separate cooling loops, one for inverter and a second for the motor. This should relieve Tesla owners of the embarrassment of doing 3 laps at the track and then overheating the inverter and going into a kind of a limp mode. The Model S had a single cooling loop for both motor and inverter.

The rest I am largely just making up. But as long time EVTV viewers are aware, I make shit up better than most people who are supposed to actually know.

The motor is described as a three phase AC permanent magnet motor. I think this may be slightly disengenous, albeit likely true in a literal sense. Tesla has suffered an invasion of motor talent from the National Technical University of Athens. Principle motor designer is Konstantinos Laskaris. He is joined by Motor design engineer Konstantinos Bourchas and Staff Motor Design Engineer Vasilis Papanikolaou. And indeed, rumor has it that Tesla has built a motor design skunkworks in Athens with perhaps a dozen of the local talent engaged. Apparently greeks like motor design. Who knew?

And I’m looking at this motor and thinking that these guys, hungry to make a mark in the world as top talent at the most advanced car manufacturer on planet, have come up with a boring 192kW 3-phase permanent magnet motor design???. Like in a Leaf???… hmmm…. what are the chances??

And we seem to be seeing a 5 or 6 percent INCREASE in efficiency for the overall drive train over a Model S. And a 17600 rpm top end and 140 mph??? And a million mile motor??? With a filter and pump on the gearbox????

Many tout the permanent magnet motor but in truth it just isn’t as good at almost anything as a common induction motor beyond size and weight. The magnets weaken over time, they weaken catastrophically if over heated, and they just don’t have any ass at high rpms. They lose all torque at high speeds. These are of course generalizations.

If I wanted to make a mark, I think I would want to make a switched reluctance motor work in a vehicle. They work great at high rpm and are heroically efficient. But they suffer even worse torque ripple/cogging issues than permanent magnet machines. Indeed, fashion of the day is experiments to add SMALL permanent magnets, not to drive the motor, but to distort the stator flux fields to weaken the SRM motor but flatten out the cogging and torque ripple and acoustic noise that basically prevent the use of SRM motors in vehicles. And so I’m picturing a six pole 3-phase stator with small permanent magnets with a switched reluctance rotor. Kind of a hybrid – a Permanent Magnet Switched Reluctance Motor or PMSRM.

I’m not originating this idea. There are a number of papers on this very topic 2010 to 2015 and sooner or later, somebody is going to try to put the theory and experiments into production. I mean why would three Greeks travel halfway around the world to Fremont California to lay up? Oh, did I mention that SRM motors are basically indestructible.?? Much less heat loss than induction motors?

SRM’s are truly different. AC Induction and Permanent Magnet AC motors both rely on the irresistible forces of two opposed magnetic fields. SRM’s are not. They produce torque based on the principle that a distorted magnetic field will produce a torque effect in trying to straighten the path of the magnetic lines of flux through the path of least “reluctance”. Reluctance in magnetic flux fields can be thought of as similar to resistance in electrical circuits. Air in the spaces between rotor poles have a HIGH reluctance while the ferrous nature of silicon steel laminates in the rotor poles themselves exhibit a very LOW reluctance.

There are numerous tutorials on YouTube describing switched or synchronous reluctance motors. But I think you will find most descriptions somewhat vaguely unsatisfying. I might be persuaded to attempt it. But I’m not sure I can even do so without building a gauss table first in order to be persuasive.

In any event, I could be completely wrong. They might be very tame Greeks. It’s all probably considered secret sauce if true. And I could be reading messages from God in cloud formations. But there is “just” a tiny bit of hesitancy on startup, it seems quite perky after that, and there is something deeply troubling about cutting 1500 watts out of the continuous 50mph numbers by cutting another 0.01 from the coefficient of drag. I can’t work all that out from what I see in this car.

This past week or so, Porsche has announced a pretty serious challenge to the Model X and Jaguar has entered the field as well. These are likely NOT the press release paper tigers of yore, but could quite likely be real cars. The moment of the electric car is finally here. It’s been a ten year ride here at EVTV, and a hell of a party Woodrow. But I might want to kick a pig. It is my belief that we are quickly blazing through a firm early adopter advance, and the curve is about to turn vertical drawing in the super consumer and prosumer elements. We’re kind of taking a victory lap here at EVTV and giving more serious consideration to the concept of repurposing EV batteries for solar energy storage – a bit of a new frontier.

Stay with us.

Jack Rickard

The post VIN: 5YJ3E1EA0JF005868 appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

We continue to stumble along and find our way. In this case, I think its important to share the process and ignore the embarrassment of “being wrong” as we go along. We need to walk our sins out with you. It’s peculiarly important in this case. As my needs for personal self-aggrandizement are modest and diminishing rapidly with age, cool.

As many of you know, I spent a personal fortune on a photovoltaic power system for my home in Morrison Colorado in 1998 – about $275,000 for what would today be viewed as a quaintly modest 15kW system. More recently we had a 24kW array installed here at the EVTV shop at a cost of $63,000, which was actually rebated by AmerenUE to $48,000 of that amount. And more recently yet, we added a little over 13kw as a DC test array using 40 Panasonic HIT panels that we just use for testing.

So it would appear solar power is pretty far along as a technology – perhaps even mature.

Our work with EV’s is really pretty much done. That doesn’t precisely mean we won’t do them anymore. But our mission, to promote the adoption of electric vehicles and magnetic drive for personal transportation is pretty well over. We kind of lingered in the tinkerer and innovator stage of this, but appear to be rather racing through the early adopter phase which looks like it barely occupied 18 months. The demand has basically “hockey sticked” or turned vertical and I take the Model 3 demand as evidence of that. Volkswagen is now issuing press releases indicating 16 new electric models. Capitulation by BMW, VW, GM, and essentially ALL automobile manufacturers. Forward from here, there is little EVTV can contribute to that process. Our impact will diminish by the hour. We won. An irony of winning in all the endeavors of my life has been to make myself irrelevant as fast as I possibly can.

Am I premature in this analysis? Well, I would hope so. Peering into the future rather demands a bit of that.

But it has caught many by surprise our sudden interest in solar technologies. They too have “hockey sticked” and indeed OVER HALF of ALL solar installations in the United States have occurred in the past 24 months. Of about 53 GW of total generation capacity, some 25 of it was installed in 2016 and 2017. So it might appear we’re steering from one area that is taking off to another.

Perhaps. But I find a deeply disturbing situation in Solar and we need a resteer or reset and we need it quickly. It’s rather part of an unholy alliance between the utility companies, legislators, and a backroom tie between the grid and Underwriter Laboratories and the regulatory schemata to require all installations comply with UL listed equipment that directs our entire solar effort toward the benefit of large stake holders at the expense of the small. The wild west nature of current installations has caused them to come quite out of the closet on this and they have dropped the facade. The irony is that it is actually NOT in the interest of the large stake holders, neither in the short term nor in the long. And I am incensed by the pathological stupidity and lack of vision of those managing those assets.

And it all centers on a central issue with solar energy that has never been satisfactorily resolved – electrical energy storage.

Elon Musk has been the central figure correctly steering the adoption of EV’s. He’s done less well on solar. We’re never shy about offering him advice. I ordered a Powerwall TWICE, the original and the newer one. We’ve of course never received one. Most of those who have are in Australia. He can’t get Powerwall installations “approved”.  That’s why they’re not available.  They’re not legal in most venues.  We’re not quite so bound by legalities at EVTV as we might be as a large publicly traded company.

Those cluck clucking and admonishing about “following the law” are simply woefully ignorant of the history of technology and what the purpose of laws are. It is kind of a unidirectional tool to CONTROL YOU and at any point if you find the powers that be breaking exactly the same law willfully and with malice aforethought, you will be shocked at how little is done about it. It is simply excused and swept away with vague and unsatisfactory misexplanations.  It has nothing to do with fairness or justice or being a “nation of laws”.  It is about the powerful protecting their position.  Let me assure you, slavish adherence to law would have prevented you ever seeing a global Internet through which you access these words today. It would not have happened.

It is brilliantly obvious that the sun doesn’t shine at night, and it is rather dim through hurricanes, thunderstorms, and blizzards. The energy generated by photovoltaics MUST be stored to be useful. And we have idiotically designed a photovoltaic world where the grid is used AS the battery for energy storage, which it is curiously and almost uniquely ill-suited to perform. 97% of all photovoltaic rooftop systems in the U.S. have ZERO battery storage. They pump excess INTO the grid, and withdraw shortfall FROM the grid, using it AS the battery. And if the grid goes down, hysterically it can’t make ANY power at all by DESIGN of a grid that really has no storage of its own at all.  With a rooftop of solar, almost everyone invested in it cannot charge a cell phone at 5v and 1 amp if the grid goes down.

The solution is inevitable and inescapable. Lithium batteries WILL be the default storage for solar electrical power. There are other chemistries and indeed other storage forms. They are simply unworkable as a practical matter. Much lower efficiencies, much higher complexities, and extraordinary cost define them all. Oachim’s razor commands the simplest solution. And that is lithium ionic batteries.  And I actually view it as somewhat more practical to have a couple of large batteries in every building in the country than to have a few enormous battery sites in the Tesla fashion.

They are expensive. But not so very much so. And in an irony of my life, the solution is held in the problem of the electric vehicle. Batteries. It is ALWAYS about the batteries. Our universal suspicion of batteries has driven automakers to offer long warranties of eight years and 100,000 miles OR MORE, on batteries for EVs. ALL Tesla electric cars since the first model S delivery (not including the 2400 Roadsters) are STILL under warranty. And the very first to expire with regards to calendar won’t be for another two years.

It is also THE most expensive part ever devised for an automobile. And when the car is destroyed, the battery rarely is. But there is NO automotive market for it as a replacement. All the cars on the road are under warranty. They will be for some time. And relating the battery warranty period of eight years to the normal working life of an automobile, 9.6 years, the automotive market for salvaged batteries is destined to ever be essentially nonexistant.

Irionically, the demands for storage and power in solar installations are truly trivial juxtaposed to those in a car. A Tesla battery has to be able to deliver 350kw of power for brief periods. Solar installations, at least for homes, would reach 20kW only in large homes and only for a few seconds.

Battery capacity does diminish with age and use. For a 75 mile range Nissan Leaf, reducing that range to 45 miles severely limits the utility of the car. It does little to a solar installation, indeed we can START with the 45 mile range battery and use it for years. Unlike the car, we don’t have a range, and having two elderly Leaf batteries or even three hardly strains the storage capacity of a house or barn.

Absurdly today, if you have a rooftop solar installation in the U.S., if the grid goes down, you have a 97% assurance that you can’t make ANY electrical power even with a 50kw array on the roof with full sun shining on it. You are grid-tied, so to speak.  After investing $50,000 in a solar system, you can’t charge a cell phone until the grid comes back up????

And so we are examining this. And everything you think you know about solar equipment and solar energy MIGHT be true. I’m from Missouri. I think a fresh look is in order. And you kind of have to show me.

I wanted to experiment with using an off-grid inverter to provide the necessary AC waveform for the “grid-tied” inverters to synchronize to and so produce power even when the grid is lost. EVERYONE assures me you cannot do this.

To do so, I had to of course shut off the grid. When I did, I found my grid-tied inverters on one circuit, and the rest of my shop on another, and they weren’t connected at all. Examining the setup, I found it more than a bit bizarre although ultimately it all made sense. We had TWO grid shutoffs and when we shut them off, we disconnect the two sides. So we had to “rewire the sucker” so we could put them back together on our side of the wall.

I had noticed an anomaly with our utility bill and concluded in this video that I had one side going UP the meter and then DOWN the meter to the other side. That would partially explain the billing anomaly. I had inquired of our grid provider, AmerenUE and while they always promised to get back to me, nobody ever gets back to me.

After making this video, a number of viewers noted that my connection COULD NOT work that way. Yes and no. The separation was real, but the loop through the meter simply cannot be. Falling on my sword, I jumped to a bizarre conclusion. It’s a bizarre situation.

I have since contacted AmerenUE rather insistently. Here is a copy of my most recent bill.

I was pleasured to be entertained by the ever charming Ms. Kimberly Alexander of the AmerenUE Missouri Business office – an erstwhile refugee of Charles Murray’s Bell Curve. I very politely asked her to help me understand how this bill was calculated.

Note that there are TWO electric readings at the bottom of the bill Both on meter 17317959. The upper reading in blue, I happen to know, increments with my use of energy FROM the grid and never decrements at all. It shows a use in this billing period of 448 kWh.

The line below it, I happen to know, only increments when we are PRODUCING power from the grid-tied array. It never decrements at all. It shows 1101 kWh during this period.

The ELECTRIC ENERGY CHARGE at the top of the bill is a modest $37.49. And while modest, it doesn’t quite explain how I produced over twice the electricity I used, but still wound up with a due amount. And so I asked her to walk me through it.

She did. And it was impressive. First, she did so in unctuousely condescending and indeed a patronizing lecturing tone. She explained that you took the 440kWh from the top line, added it to the 1101 kWh on the bottom line to get a total of 1549 kWh. You then multiply that by the winter rate of 8.3 cents per kWh and presto chango, you get $37.49.

I waited a full minute in silence for her to catch her embarrassing 2nd grade arithmetic mistake. “Can I help you with anything else, Mr. Rickard” was the next thing I heard.

I replied that I didn’t think that her calculation was correct. She insisted it was. And I asked her to try that on her calculator. “Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, Mr. Rickard. It appears we have UNDERCHARGED you on this bill. I’ll make the correction now and it will be added to your next bill.”

I have decided to BE nice during this call. And as all EVTV viewers know full well this is just NOT part of my skill set or core competency. But straining heroically and indeed in physical pain from the effort, I attempted to explain the solar installation and the raw concept of net metering and how it was supposed to work.

That caused some serious attitude on her end and I could see the fight was on. So I reined it in and asked to speak to any other humanoid in her vicinity. She replied that she was only trying to help me and she was sure she could handle it. And so I kind of blew up and told her to lose the attitude and put her mickey fucking mouse listening ears on then.

Incredibly, she must have been used to that type of blowup and indeed apparently enjoys it. She told me she wasn’t trying to have an attitude and would be happy to inquire about the bill from the accounting office as indeed there appeared to be something amiss. I thanked her, gave her a brief course on the basics of net metering and how I thought it was SUPPOSED to work, but stressed I had no idea how they were actually doing it.  She assured me something was definitely wrong and she would absolutely get back with me within ONE day – no longer.

Sounded good. Predictably enough it was FOUR days later. She did call, and said that they had looked into it. They were sending me a 12 page billing correction and would I like a check for the $2346.85 credit for the past two years.

I pointed out that the system was installed four years ago come July. She told me that they only kept billing records for the previous two years, and then noted the most profoundly spiritually life changing pronouncement I believe I have ever heard. Resuming the arrogantly superior and condescending tone of our initial contact: “You know it is the CUSTOMERS responsibility to ensure the accuracy of the billng Mr. Rickard. We of course don’t have anyone checking these things.”

At this point, I was having fun. I told her, “Kimberley, let me play back what I heard, and you compare that to what you think you said. You all MAKE the electricity. I BUY the electricity. You use YOUR meter, to calculate how much I have used. You then send me a bill for it. MY RESPONSIBILITY is to write the check. And if I don’t do that within just a few days, you disconnect me. What would I know about the accuracy of the bill? On Tuesday, you carefully explained to me how read the bill and how it was calculated, and YOU didn’t get ANY PART OF IT CORRECT and you work in the AmerenUE Business office. So if YOU can’t read the bill correctly, how can it be MY RESPONSIBILITY to do so?”

To her credit, she did giggle out loud and somewhat at length. Glimmer of sentience?

Compare this with Elon Musks assertion that it is the DRIVER’s responsibility to drive the car when in autopilot mode. FIVE YEARS ago I went on a raging rant wanting to know WHY he was going to give up the cart blanche pass granted automobile manufacturers by our legal system in the event of a car accident. The first responsibility is driver and driver error. And if any mechanical failure occurs it is ASSUMED to be due to the driver/owner failing to maintain the vehicle. But autopilot virtually assures that some 20 year old girl in court will be telling the judge: “But your honor, I thought the CAR was driving. It said so on the web site.”  Why would he voluntarily take on this legal quagmire by adopting this “autopilot” thing???

This month he is assuring us that it is THE DRIVERS RESPONSIBILITY to make sure the car doesn’t have an accident while on autopilot. Indeed, they have LOGS proving that the driver had his hands entirely off the wheel for six full seconds prior to the collision.????  It is the drivers responsibility to make sure his broken autopilot works?  This on a car that cannot reliably open a garage door?

And so we are on the brink of establishing lack of responsibility by declaration. If you DECLARE that it is someone else’sresponsibility, then it is. Methinks NOT. Maybe if you add some four point type in the Owners Manual. Well that’s on screen now so you can even add it to the manual in arrears.

Two solar stories have emerged since our episode. One involves a California utility that is addressing battery backed up Solar installations. They are incensed that the end users are CHARGING the batteries at the low Time of Day rate, and then selling electricity BACK during the high TOD rate period. They are buying back their own electricity and are nearly hysterical about it.  But they MIGHT support the notion of battery storage for solar installations, but ONLY if they can get an Underwriter Laboratories requirement that the battery be entirely UNABLE to charge from the grid.

This was the first time I’ve actually seen a utility note that they conspire and collude with UL for profit. UL is supposed to be certifying electrical equipment for SAFETY standards.

Actually I’ve known about this little scam for decades but this was the first time I had seen them actually talk about it in public.

What strikes you about this? A couple of things should. First, they don’t want to sell you electricity when they experience low demand and so charge a low rate for it. And they definitely don’t want to buy it back during high demand periods when they charge more for it???  In other words, they don’t even know WHAT they want. Just whatever YOU want they DON’T want. Obviously they NEED power during high demand periods and definitely need USE during low demand periods. You do realize they pay DOUBLE THE RETAIL rate in some cases for additional capacity to peaker plants and even more bizarre, they pay LOAD suppliers to absorb electricity when they have excess. Why would they even WANT you not to do storage for them and pay you for it.????? This is an eggregious case of dog in the manger without benefit of sentient life form oversight.

The second thing notable in the article was what the periods were. There has apparently been SO much solar installation in California that afternoon periods of highest level of irradiance are now the LOW rate period  when they have an excess of electrical generation capacity. This inverts the historical model where we previously used about 55% of the level of electricity at 3:00 AM as at 3:00 PM.

The bottom line is that solar installations and batteries offer a serious advantage to levelling the demand curve FOR electric utilities. But they are so myopically focused on short term business model issues caused by a relic system of monopoly rate structuring, that they cannot see the forest for the trees, and indeed in this case the trees for all the leaves. Moronic and deeply troubling dysfunctional public policy going forward.

A second story in Montanna just brazenly and without art announces that the utility companies are tired of net metering and will not survive unless the legislature removes it and replaces it with net billing – described specifically in our video this week. In this story, they actually correctly used the same terms we did in our explanation.  Net metering.  And Net Billing.

And so the war between utility grids and home solar owners I predicted several years ago is on FULL BORE. You’re in it whether you think you are in it or not. My job is to show you how to win it. But you will have to break the law. And most importantly, you have to learn to break it safely. Comic incidents and explosions that pose a danger to the community will be used to make the case for MORE regulations and LESS freedom to generate electricity at the point of use.

Here are our latest efforts. I advocate using full batteries from EVs as they come out of the car. But currently most of our viewers just aren’t there yet and want to deal with 48vdc banks of MODULES extracted from the batteries. Unfortunately, most of the charge controller and inverter equipment available just isn’t a very good match to the voltages in the current Model S modules. This is a subtle thing, but crucially important for safe and effective operation.  They innately want to overcharge your batteries.  And then tend to do low voltage disconnect at much higher voltages leaving you with half your capacity stranded.

We’ve commissioned a Chinese inverter design firm to modify their 12kw 48vdc inverter to work SPECIFICALLY with the voltages of two Tesla Model S battery modules as kind of an OEM version for EVTV. It will actually do 36kW peak for up to 20 seconds.  It will allow discharge down to 36v and never charge beyond 50.5.

It connects to the grid from the rear. And in AC mode it simply passes the grid through to the loads and to a series of AC-coupled microinverters. It also charges the batteries kind of bidiretionally from the grid power and/or the microinverter output. Microinverter output in excess of the batteries and loads would push to the grid if available.

On grid failure, or if in BATTERY priority mode, it works with the microinverters and produces AC from the batteries and panels to the loads. Only if the battery reaches a low level of charge is the AC grid power or generator power switched in. It even provides a generator start output.

This vastly reduces the body count and expense of such a system. It also probably breaks 30 or 40 laws in the process. But it will operate on loss of grid. IT won’t present solar power to the grid if the grid goes down. And should be reasonably safe. IF nothing else, it provides an inexpensive way to update one of the 97% grid tied systems to have battery backup.

We’ll be doing a build of a large box with 10 Tesla Modules for 50kW storage using this for a gentleman in Costa Rica I believe starting next month.

Finally we did acheive what I originally set out to do and BLEW UP our 20kW inverter by tying it to the grid-tied inverters. With two cars charging, and with about 10kW charging the batteries, the batteries reached full and automatically disconnected from the inverter. We lost all electrical power of course, but this time we blew the capacitors in the inverter rather completely with an enormous BOOM but no fire or smoke really.

I think we can repair it. But it illustrates the common wisdom that you can’t use an inverter to trick a grid-tied inverter to make electricity. Actually it doesn’t. You can. But you have to have a battery to absorb any excess and so we have to come up with a contactor control system to disable the microgrid inverters when the battery becomes full and no grid to push to. We’re working on it.

It’s actually quite easy. What I would like to do is work out some Power Line Communications (PLC) system to effect it to eliminate two wires.

I dismiss and indeed laugh out loud at pathetic attempts to be an activist and shrilly demand change based on nonsense global warming religious arguments. Jute grocery bags are not going to change the world. But I do have deeply held true religious beliefs that command and direct a better stewardship of our planet, its’ environment, and the lives of the humanoids living there. Not by ineffective chants and polemics and shrilly annoying anyone who might otherwise find common purpose.

I believe empowering and enabling the generation and storage of electricity at the point of use through photovoltaics and lithium batteries provides an UNBOUNDED benefit to dozens of problems simultaneously. The benefits are just incalculable. Almost beyond human comprehension. Vast and enormous arrays of filth and nast and disease-causing noxious vapors are simply ERADICATED if large numbers of humanoids see a clear and present advantage to adopting this FOR THEMSELVES.

Mandating nonsense is neither persuasive or effective. But enabling and empowering people worldwide to cut the cord and harness the power of the sun for local energy needs (and personal transportation) can truly and radically change the world for the better. Not by a little bit that is theoretically cummulative. But massively and DISRUPTIVELY.

And those who happen to get disrupted can lead, follow or get the hell out of the way.

Cynically having perhaps lived too long already, I can predict how they will react too accurately. But you never know. Hope springs eternal.

Repurpose electric vehicle batteries for local solar energy storage.  Simple. Wish I’d thought of that… who knew????

The post SOLAR RESET. appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

I’ve been asked, numerously and recently, to blog a bit about phillisophical and political matters having nothing to do with Electric Vehicles and Solar Energy. I confess I don’t know quite what that’s about, but it appears that some of my asides on EVTV cause curiosity regarding my “beliefs” and how they came about more generally.

I often do share some of these with close intimates but generally prefer to be pleasant and tell a lot of jokes because it puts people more at ease and I get along better socially. Trust me, to know me is not to particularly like me. And I can provide references.

I regularly hear and have heard from a young age that I am very smart. I never know how to take that, or what they think it means. Suffice it to say that I don’t view smart the way most people apparently do. It is not of any particular advantage in my estimation, it is vastly overrated in our society, it is mostly a parlor trick, and I’m really quite confident that when you say it and I hear it there are two different things going on in the conversation, neither of which have much to do with each other.

In commenting on YOUR apparent belief systems there, I would refer you to Albert Einstein, who serves as the rather universal syntactical iconic symbol of “smart” when he says that “Every man is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, you are likely to be disappointed.” Gifts of birth are much more various and complicated than I perceive as the common view.

In MY belief system, there was a mixup at the distribution center and I was sent to the wrong freaking planet. Life on MY world is very different I can assure you. But the powers that be are loathe to admit mistake. And their response was a grudging acknowledgement that I had been lucky in guessing correctly, but that I was kind of stuck with it this trip and would have to live out my life on earth. They would note it and try to do better next pass. Oh well.

So my estimation of my own mental acuity is vastly different and more humble than you can imagine. But my estimation of yours is even more humble than you might perhaps hope. I think I’m quite ordinary. You all are really “special” as in “special needs people.” My ego, from your perspective, would appear to have no end in sight. A legend in my own mind.

I only acknowledge all this in that you kind of have to see WHAT I see for anything else to make sense. Almost everything I’ve been told since cognizance as a Toddler I’ve been able to sort out to my own satisfaction as hopelessly confused, erroneous, and generally to comic extreme. Not just “off” or with the odd error, but hopelessly dicked up beyond all recognition. Some basic arithmetic works and the alphabet, sort of self justified, works if you accept it as is and don’t peer to closely into its use. Past that, nonsentient and irrationally insane. On my world this would get you 24 hour medical and adult supervision. Almost everything you believe or at least claim to believe. About 90% of the time I am almost CERTAIN you know better and are just jacking me off to humor yourselves. Or maybe you all are really brilliant and I am blissfully and moronically unaware of something really big.

So let’s look at an example. Currently our land is about to break into civil war over race. The “great one” who was supposed to bring us all together finally and at last instead has brought us to the precipice of mutual genocide based on “race”.

I am an aging fat white guy raised in fly over country with the other deplorables in a very race conscious rural area of Southeast Missouri. I talk and sound like a cracker and I confess I am almost abusively unsympathetic to the entire black African-American/Negro/Colored People/ whatever they want to be called this morning thing. Oh, yes, I do have an affinity for the feral black children raising themselves on the streets here in the south end of town where I live, but that’s because their miserable drug infested parents have largely abandoned them and they really have no one else to care for them. I don’t really “care” but they are here, and I am here, and they just seem to have a hard time of it without meriting such abuse. So a Dr. Pepper and bag of Fritos and a kind word is little enough to offer.

So it will surprise some that my first wife of 19 years was a beautiful Philipina from Catmon Bagu Cebu. And my second wife of 22 years is a proud African American from the mission district in San Francisco. The second being sufficiently an upgrade from the first that I can’t wait to meet Mrs. number three. And all of that is not precisely because they obsequiously serve me mint julips on the antebellum porch of an evening. Though truth to tell, either probably would if I really wanted one.

Even the first one.

Even now.

Just great people both times. Physically gorgeous to the point of driving me wild with desire – both times. I have been truly blessed with regards to relationships, to the point that it must be some sort of cosmic and underserved joke to make some point that I don’t quite get yet. But I’ll take it where I can get it and we’ll all have a good laugh after they explain it to me.

So what with the race thing. From my point of view, and as I say, I do better keeping these things to myself, EVERYTHING YOU THINK YOU KNOW ABOUT RACE IS COMICALLY AND TRAGICALLY FUCKED UP. And the errors are not errors. They are cosmic level blunders.

Some are small. Some large. The Republican Party is not “racist” and the Democratic Party is not black. Historically, the Republican party was founded in Minnesota with one purpose, end slavery in America. And the deep south slave holders were Democrats. And they hated the Republicans sufficiently to assassinate President Lincoln. Lyndon Johnson created the Democratic black voting block very deliberately and as a very manipulative ploy to take advantage of them assuring his Democrat colleagues that if they joined him they would “have those niggers voting Democrat for the next 200 years.” He did it not with equality, but with government money – a war on poverty that essentially destroyed black families across the land.

But all of that is historical trivia really not part of the experience of any whites or blacks in America today and not particularly close to anything I believe.

I have serious problems with the basic CONCEPT of race as you know and believe it. This is based on three basic premises that I just can’t believe anyone is unaware of and doesn’t fully realize.

1. The cruelty of the binary numbering system.

2. The universal propensity of all of us to lie to our children.

3. The very obvious exigencies of the combination of DNA material to produce humanoids.

BINARY NUMBERS

Why binary numbers? Well it is pretty hard to argue that we each of us had TWO parents. I know in America today about 51% of you will realize we did and 49% of you will believe that this is fake news and an alt-fact. But trust me on this one. TWO parents.

And indeed if those two parents hadn’t shown up at precisely the correct moment and performed precisely the same and mutual disgusting act, we as individuals go POOF and are gone. WORSE, we could be our sister. YOUR biological existence depends on that crucial moment in time and that critical exchange of body fluids. I can prove it.

In an act of perfect symmetry, it is further beyond argument that EACH of your parents had precisely TWO parents of their own. Same is true for each of them. And so extending that to your point of view, we actually have SIX people who all had to show up at the crucial but various moments in time to perform their role or again – you look a lot like your sister or brother or worse, never happened at all.

To extend this absurd reasoning, I will further stretch you a bit in that each of your four grandparents had two parents. Rendering eight great grandparents. All required. All necessary. And so 16 before them, and 32 before that, and 64, and 128, and 256, and 512, 1024, 2048, and on and on and on. This is just as obvious as the fact that each and every one had a nose. Or staretd with one.

If you can’t follow this, leave this page now. We just can’t have this conversation.

If you can, let’s assume it takes about 20 years to be born, grow up enough to dress yourself, find a mate, and show up for your OWN little moment of ecstasy so the next generation has something to live for. And so with five “generations” per century, how long does it take before the number in the SINGLE most senior generation becomes slightly larger than the then population of the earth???/ Adam and Eve.

Do the math. I KNOW you can do it. And if you go over 500 years, leave this page now. We can’t have this conversation.

Going forward is even worse. You see, you are hardwired LIMITED to 2 parents, but the two parents don’t have ANY limits on offspring. They could have two. They could have 20. And indeed do pretty much within those end points. But some have none. And a few have even more than 20.

My father had eight brothers and sisters – a sibling group of nine. They all had kids. Their kids had kids. And so there are easily four generations of my fathers sibling group and probably five now as my father and ALL his brothers and sisters are now dead. All of these people could not be seated in a Boeing 747- there just aren’t that many seats on the plane. All are first cousins and then slightly removed. But I would probably recognize, including my own siblings and their children, less than 25 of them out of context.

In other words, I could get on that 747 in San Francisco, and fly non-stop to New York City, and get off the plane and get in a cab, completely oblivious to the fact that I was on an aircraft full of my own people. In that large a group, it is possible I wouldn’t actually encounter my own children on that flight except by a fluke of seating chart.

We are all really really interconnected in ways we are entirely oblivious to, and not over millenia, but over decades. In this churning roiling stew of biomass, we really ARE all brothers in ways that apparently escape almost all of you. Or perhaps I have something wrong.

OUR PROPENSITY TO LIE TO OUR CHILDREN.

Actually this is not precisely a propensity. It appears to be some sort of biological imperative. It is UNIVERSAL not exceptional and YOU WILL PARTICIPATE if you have children, trust me.

Here’s a funny story popular in my area of the country for obvious reasons given our close geographic propensity to Arkansas. Young lady comes home from her day at high school all excited and giggly. “What’s up?” asks her father. “I met a boy at school. We are in love. I finally have a steady boyfriend.”

“What’s his name?”

“Johnny Foxmueller”

Father frowns and ahems ahahs for a few minutes. “Well you can’t date that boy.”

“Why not?”

“Never mind you just can’t see him. Stay away from him.”

“You can’t tell me to stay away from my boyfriend pop, and not even give a reason!” huffed the daughter.

“Ok. Ok. But you have to promise me you won’t breathe a word of this to your mother…”

“Well ok. I promise.”

“That boy is your half-brother. I’m his father too.”

“You can’t be serious…”

“God is my witness. No doubt about it. It just is what it is daughter. Sorry.”

The young girl cried her eyes out for a day. But finally went to school and broke it to her mystified boyfriend that they couldn’t see other anymore. No matter how he pleaded she would not reveal why. Time went on and fortunately time wounds all heals and she met another young gentleman and as these things do happen for the better, she liked him better than the first one. So she returned home and proudly announced to her father that she had run the first one off and had her a brand new beau.”

“What’s his name?”

“Randol Hardy.” she announced quite proudly.

“Ahem…ah…whoo.. daughter I am REALLY sorry but you can’t date him either….”

“You have GOT to be kidding!” she wailed.

“Nope. Sorry hon. Same problem…” He sheepishly found he needed to be down at the local tavern at that hour and departed in some haste.

Her mother came in and found her bawling on the couch in such distress she was inconsolable. “Whatever is the matter dear?” her mother exclaimed.

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“I promised Dad…”

“Honey you can tell me ANYTHING. We’re both women. He’s just a stupid man. Promises to men don’t mean anything atall. There, there. You just tell mom what’s got you all crossed up.”

“Well I got a boyfriend. And Dad said I couldn’t date him because he’s my half brother. And so I got ANOTHER and he tells me HE’s my half brother too. The randy old goat. I’ll never find ANYBODY I can date in this town apparently.”

“There there dear.” her mother laughed. “Things are not quite as bad as they seem. I can tell you with absolute authority that you can feel free to date ANY boy you like in THIS town. And you won’t be related to any of them. But not a word to your father…”

This is of course a joke. But is it really. My first cousin Steve Rickard was out for a 15 mile bicycle ride, and being 69 years old and safety conscious he wore kneepads and elbow pads and safety helmet and goggles the whole delightful ride. But he stopped in at his neighbors, 150 feet from his house for a chat on his return. And he took off his helmet and his gloves and hung them on the handlebars of the bicycle while they chatted and yucked it up. Finally he said he HAD to get home and shower for an evening event and pushed off on his bicycle for the 150 foot ride.

The neighbors dog got all excited and jumped right into the spokes of the front wheel and Steve threw on the brakes, pitched head over the handlebars and crashed to the sidewalk helmetless head first. He was in a coma for a week and then unfortunately succumbed.

After the funeral we had dinner with his only child, a son. He told us a remarkable tale. He is a Hollywood TV producer in California but he had received a call from a man in Virginia claiming to be his BROTHER. As he was well aware that he was an only child he told the man he must be mistaken and hung up. But at with his father’s death he related the story to his mother and was astounded when she broke down in teares admitting it was true.

It seems that Steve and his wife had dated in college and decided they really didn’t like each other very much. But she was pregnant and put the child up for adoption which was common in those days. They graduated college and went on their separate ways for several years but then met in a coffee shop and thoroughly enjoyed discussing the times they had in college. They started dating and eventually married. He was their result a year later. But they didn’t really think it was prudent to tell him about his older brother and there never was really a good time to do so – until his father’s death.

The son eventually met with his brother and sure enough, he was a Rickard all the way through. And a striking resemblance to his father.

EVERY TIME I TELL either of these stories, to anyone anywhere, the response is always the same. “You know, funny you should mention that. In my family we had one even better than THAT…..”

And so it goes. If YOU have children, you know what I’m talking about. There are just some things about your early history and sexual misadventures that they will NEVER know if you have anything to say about it.
There are no exceptions.

We ALL lie to our children. And the lies become cummulative over the generations.

More innocently, the family tails that were passed down to through the generations to you, may or may not be generally true. But with each generation, technically they are HALF true for you. So the story of the German farmer great great grandfather, MAY have actually been true. But for your grandfather, that is half of his genetic story. For your father 1/4. For you, 1/8th. And so it goes. IN THEORY.

In reality, we used to talk about 256 thousand roughly chromosome pairs. Turns out to be more like 59 million base pairs. Some genetic material from your mother. Some from your father. But there is no 50%. It’s not half from your mother and half from your father. It might be anything but it is statistically almost impossible for it to be exactly half. You might have 1% from your mother and 99% from your father. Or the other way around. Or anything in between. This is why you and your brother or sister look so different, act so different, and have led such different lives. The fact is this involves millions of base pairs. And results in trillions of trillions of combinations. Every human that has ever lived has been truly truly unique. Identical twins PERHAPS excepted.

DNA TESTING.

My proudly if not militantly black brother in-law is a bright guy. But he recently had one of the DNA tests and was alarmed and disappointed in the results. It turns out it revealed he was indeed 30% Nigerian…. and 27% British.

Unfortunately, even that was a problem. As it adds up to 57% and the remaining 43% was listed as a heroic mix of almost everything else. Yes, he’s black…”ISH”…but not really BLACK black. More like Eskimo Sumo wrestler English Irish German Swedish Mideastern Armenian Black. Not as much Chinese as he might have made us of at University. But enough Korean to be annoying and slightly threatening.

So my wife assumes the same applies to her and wants to take the test as well. So how do explain to her that she’s about HALF a humanoid. What? Well men carry an X chromosome and a Y chromosome. Wonen only carry the X chromosome and so genetically they are only half human. And so she must rely on her BROTHER’s test to get any info at all. Actually there IS mitochondrial test for the X chromosome, but it only records the data mother to mother excluding all data from any of the fathers.

There are “markers” or genetic traits that have been mapped more or less successfully to certain humanoid groups and we have historical migration data that allows the projection of kind of a pseudo profile. This is what they are selling online as genetic “testing”. The concept is more or less preposterous as it is impossible to determine the specific mix in any one generation never mind the combinations going intergenerationally. But by noting the markers, they can relate this little story to the uninitiated. More prehensile sentients would recognize this as nonsense of the most scurrilous sort. But not entirely so. It at least illustrates or implies the complexity of the situation.

And so the concepts of race in America are hopelessly confused, historically nonsensical, and indeed the nature of humanoids is such that EVERYTHING I HAVE HEARD since birth regarding the topic is nonsense. And I’m left in the untenable position that almost everything I know about it is probably wrong, and there is a LOT I don’t know about it, but what you all are talking about is so comically nonsensical I’m not going to learn much about it from YOU. And so generally why have the conversation at all? You’re going to like “splain” it to me?

You aren’t who you think you are. You are not WHAT you think you are. What you think happened to you never did. What you think happened to your parents never did. And what they told you about it is almost certainly a lie. But that’s ok because they may not be your parents at all.

And worse all THAT is basically untrue as well. You see, what you THINK you are, basically BECOMES what you are, just not for the reasons you think. Ergo my frustration, fascination, and deeply rooted disgust. You people are HOPELESS. And if they knew about you on my planet, they would find it HILARIOUS.

But since I’m stuck here with you. It’s mostly sad.

Here’s what I THINK I have worked out over 62 years.

1. You are EACH totally unique and incredibly POWERFUL spirits of a reach and power over quantum matter/energy/reality you simply cannot imagine.

2. You each have been awarded a very special set of very powerful GIFTS- traits and strengths and powers UNIQUE to you and you alone.

3. You have each ALSO been awarded a very special set of handicaps and challenges and hurdles unique to you and you alone.

4. From birth, you face a grand and fabulous adventure.

But unfortunately, the vast majority of you will make little of it because you are absolutely PARALYSED by fear. Fear of hunger, fear of cold, fear of heat, fear of thirst, fear of rejection, and most of all fear of death. Which is odd because none of you have truly experienced any of that and with good reason. You can’t. But you CAN fear it anyway and you are really really good at it.

BE NOT AFRAID.

I hope this clarifies, by way of example, why we talk about batteries, motors, chargers, sunlight, alternate energy, ways to improve life for humanoids on this planet, and the odd stock tip. There is much more of me and what I believe you simply don’t want to know and you would be truly offended by, to no particular good point. And certainly to no good reason for me. I can tell a few jokes. Talk cogently about technology. Etc. But what I THINK I know about almost everything more transcendant, you would no doubt find offensive and not particularly useful. I am certain of almost nothing, but at a very different level and for very different reasons. We just don’t have much to talk about there. And I love each of you and do not want to offend anyone at all.

Jack Rickard

The post White Like Me…. appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.