Driving

Many 100's of miles are on the system now, we regularly go 50+ miles on trips but tend to chicken out beyond that.  We have had one 78.7 mile trip to a farm house in the middle of nowhere and waited for an eight mile tow home.  This was before regen was working.  Now that the charger is running as expected we may venture closer to the edges of the battery voltages.  We have been only using the middle 60%.

Confidence in the car is growing and it regularly leaves the city proper for excursions to other nearby cities.

Cruise control is high on the list of things to get functioning.  We purposely turn regen off during higher speeds as we note that the neutral band in the accelerator pedal is not wide enough and we can see the regen fluctuating in and out reducing efficiency in cruising.

Steering

We have not decided that we need power steering.  While maneuvering into a parking space requires more effort, at any rolling pace the feel is normal.  

Rather than dead head the power rack hydraulic connections, we have reinstalled the steering hose lines looped back onto themselves including the one way valve in the inlet.  This should cause the fluid to circulate through the entire system as we drive normally.

Charging update

 We have struggled with public charging, and have not had success at a public charger yet, but we have been able to charge at other peoples homes setup with chargers.

We have learned that in the image taken from Wiki J1772 interface:

 

In our cable from the Vehicle Inlet to the charger (Vehicle Controller) the R5 2.7k resistor had been included and hidden in the cable wrap.  Thus as we were adding R3 and R2 we were inadvertently connecting their ground to the top of R5 and not ground such that the resistance signal back to the EVSE Controller was not 882 ohms but instead 3582 ohm and so the controller would indicate ready, but not charge.

The wiring error has been corrected, but the opportunity to plug into a public station has not happened yet.

Our issue with the charger shutting down early with a high voltage error has been answered by the Brusa support team.

From BRUSA support.

Hi,

 

I think you have done everything right basically, ... What you probably didn’t know (and which is not described clearly I admit) is that the "SDT Batt VoltHi: ERR" is produced by a crowbar like circuitry, which measures output voltage very fast but not very accurately. This is intended to avoid damage to attached circuitry in case the battery suddenly disconnects and causes a load drop to the charger. The resulting voltage overswing might damage sensitive electronics like DCDC-converters, amp-hour counters etc., so it must be avoided by fast shutdown of the power stage.

 

Now: As I said, this fast measurement circuit is neither precise nor is it well filtered, so any peak / disturbance / noise etc will trigger the shutdown and throw the error.

The value which controls this crowbar/shutdown circuitry is the second value in the orange/yellow fields, which says  «switch off immediately if Battery voltage above [V]» 

 

And this value is set to 390V in your case, which is very close to the 384V you intend to reach. So remedy is pretty easy: Add a healthy headroom to the «switch off immediately if Battery voltage above [V]» value, let’s say you set the limit to 460V, and you’re done. Required headroom depends on various influencing parameters, however with a margin of 20% you’ll probably never see any nuisance tripping of this crowbar again.

We changed the value to 403V, =4.2*96 the highest the cells want to see.  The system works now.