Friday, February 7, 2014

More Pictures - Charging Progress

The BMS is on trickle charge, charging-up the batteries for the first time; doing it right ensuring that we get the maximum longevity from the batteries!

Day 1 after a few hours, 3 cells ready ........


Then about 4 hour stints for every pic below







Ready to go (all but one)! Yay.........

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

A Picture tells a Thousand Words

Well, a lot of progress. The devil is in the detail. All is now manufactured and what remains is the final rebuild, battery pre-charging and wiring.........

Less words and more pics to show progress.

The batteries in assembly:
Using the easy-to-build, green Joey A123 pouch holders and connectors.

Jaron and Mark installing the BMS:
Thank you guys.

The lights are flashing..... We have lift-off!
If you look closely you will see lights flashing in the first part of the video.

We've also received the regen brake pedal

It is no news to Citroen DS lovers that the DS does not have a brake pedal. Instead, it has a "mushroom" button, that DS owners know to thread on gently, as the movement required to go from no brakes to full lock-up is millimetric!

So we are introducing a brake pedal into our Electric DS. Why? Well, we have regen with our AC motor/controller combination. We shall utilise the pedal in the picture (originally manufactured as a throttle for EV deployment) to engage regen braking. The pedal will be setup so that when aggressive braking is required, the pedal pushes the "mushroom" as the pedal is pushed all the way.

This creates progressive braking that starts with, and mostly uses, regen and engages the powerful DS brakes if and when required. We believe that, with some level of precise setting, this will make for ideal braking with little usage of the disc brakes.