Open Source Civic EV Kit

APRIL 11, 2008

To save gas, I mistakenly took the electric 914 to U-Pull-It and forgot to bring a protective mat for the upholstery. I really appreciate working on electric vehicles due to the lack of fluids and other dirt. Here's the cherished transmission brought home and in the garage.

Kits 100

Kits Oregon Google Porsche 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

JUNE 11, 2008

While it's neat to be able to "fill-up" the car from the same place, I really like the charging outlet on the electric 914 on the front left fender. It's closer to the electric outlets inside the garage and I pass by it when I get into the car. Most designs I've seen replace the gasoline filler cap with a charging outlet.

Oregon 100

Oregon Gasoline-Electric Clean Cleaning 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

APRIL 18, 2009

Several events have happened with the Oregon Electric Vehicle Association (of which I'm the Chair) and I also went on vacation. It's been over a month since I've blogged about the Civic and people have started to ask where I've been. I'm still commuting (even with a blown charge detector) and the car has 1500 miles on it.

Oregon 100

Oregon Miles Charging All-Electric 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

JUNE 13, 2008

On a side note: I ran the Oregon Electric Vehicles Association Meeting last night and lost my voice after talking for three hours to answer newcomer questions. We had over 15 electric vehicles crammed into the World Trade Center in downtown Portland, probably the most vehicles I've ever seen.

Clean 100

Clean Cleaning Portland Cars 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

JUNE 15, 2008

I consider this a good baseline for comparison with the final electric vehicle. The third was fairly indicative at 10.33 I'm sure many other folks could do better than this, but I wouldn't want to push the car much further. He might be willing to show his vehicle at the OEVA EV-awareness day coming up in Portland on July 5th.

Portland 100

Portland Electric Vehicles Cars Vehicles 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

OCTOBER 31, 2008

I'm an electrical engineer by training, so I'll be happy to get all this metalwork out of the way. This description is terse as I'm trying to get the whole pile of steel out the door today for powder-coating.

Batteries 100

Batteries Battery All-Electric Engine 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

They are held in place with velcro adhesive tape and the box lids are held together with red electrical tape. After doing another fix to the Charge Detector box on Monday, I enclosed all the BatMon boxes to prevent them from shorting out due to grime and automotive fluids. Here are the plastic boxes I talked about in a prior post.

Charging 100

Charging Porsche Light Miles 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

JUNE 7, 2008

With the huge jump in oil prices yesterday, I received a call from the local KEX radio to ask about electric vehicles and how they could be part of the solution. A few new things have happened over the past two days.

Oil Prices 100

Oil Prices Conversion Cars Oil 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

JULY 12, 2009

After talking about electric vehicles to people all day in the sun, I was rather fried at the end of the day. I gave a press event with the Mayor Sam Adams and two VPs from local power companies (PGE and Pacific Power). Probably one of the coolest things about the show is that a Tesla Roadster showed up unexpectedly!

Portland 113

Portland All-Electric Tesla Power 113

Open Source Civic EV Kit

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Every battery dealer I chat with is glad that I'm converting an electric vehicle, but they all tend to say that you have to choose between bad batteries and worse batteries. The spreadsheet above is also available in the Files section of the Civic-EV Google Group as the file BatteryAnalysis.xls. It's funny.

Batteries 100

Batteries Battery Google Dealers 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

JANUARY 14, 2009

There's a local insurance agent who promotes electric vehicles but was rather embarrassed when her underwriter refused to insure my vehicle because I wanted to use it as a daily driver. Since this vehicle is now road-worthy, I thought it might be a good idea to get it fully insured before I take too many long drives.

Conversion 100

Conversion DC IDEA Auto 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

JANUARY 24, 2009

Since I have an electric vehicle, I'd like to remove as much friction as possible in the transmission. Since I'll probaby be showing off this car at a few electric vehicle shows, I wanted to label all the major components to help people understand what the parts are. This will be fine for my 17 mile commute to work, one-way.

Honda 100

Honda Miles Light Dealers 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

JUNE 19, 2009

For the electric bike application, both charger types work great. The electric car application has a few unexpected differences. We can refund your order or replace the same value with 1212SR chargers, I'm not sure what else to offer you. Both issues you have found have been somewhat unbelievable, I apologize for the "luck" on this.

Portland 100

Portland Light Charging IDEA 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

JULY 23, 2008

After taking the harness apart, I'm left with a bunch of rotten electrical tape (top center in picture), the leftover wires (on the right) and what I really care about (on the left). This evening, I took apart the engine harness that we looked at back here.

Engine 100

Engine DC Personal Convert 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

OCTOBER 31, 2008

I'm looking forward to the mechanical design being finished so I can focus on the electrical design, which is much more up my alley. While it may not seem like much, the above picture represents several months of trial-and-error design work to fit twleve group-31 batteries into the limited space of the Honda Civic.

Honda 100

Honda All-Electric Design Batteries 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

JUNE 4, 2008

I still haven't found a donor vehicle, but I've been swamped with preparing for EV-awareness day since I'm the chairperson of the Oregon Electric Vehicle Club. I also bit the bullet and decided to try out the Belktronix system for the controller, charger, battery-managment and DC-DC. The local paper was there and about 30 people showed up.

Portland 100

Portland Seattle Oregon DC 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

JUNE 30, 2008

Here's the service cover removed, exposing the fuel supply hose, the return hose and the electrical connections. Same picture with the electrical connections removed. After raising the rear seat, you get access to the service cover for the fuel tank. The red one was very gummy, but I don't know why.

Exhaust 100

Exhaust Fuel Gasoline-Electric Gasoline 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

JULY 3, 2008

We went for a quick spin in the electric 914 and had a blast. It feels like a huge release after purging all that gasoline-based stuff. Dave is a machinist and was fascinated by the adapter plate and shaft coupling from Electro Automotive. Thanks, Dave, for taking away all my crap. Next up: wrestling with the wiring harness.

Portland 100

Portland Gasoline-Electric Gasoline Exhaust 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

NOVEMBER 14, 2008

It's hard to see, but you can just make it out as a black tube with pieces of red electrical tape on it. Here's the engine compartment with the engine wiring harness plugged in and tie-wrapped to several locations. I tested out the vacuum pump system by attaching the pressure switch and connecting a small 12V UPS battery.

Connect 100

Connect Connected Installation Plug-in 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

JULY 4, 2008

Today was a slow day for the Civic, since I'm preparing for EV awareness day tomorrow with the Oregon Electric Vehicle Association. I printed a bunch of flyers and made about 300 business cards for the event. This should be interesting.

Batteries 100

Batteries Battery Portland Oregon 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

FEBRUARY 3, 2009

The electrical specialist mechanic up the street took my card and vowed to come to the next OEVA meeting. Last Friday, I took the Civic into the suspension shop to replace the passenger-side axle (CV joint boot was broken), replace a brake line (those are important) and get a full alignment.

Charging 100

Charging Gasoline-Electric Motor Motors 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

JULY 14, 2009

Also, to enhance the power steering, they use the electric power steering pump from a Toyota MR2 so that parallel parking isn't as hard. One other thing the folks at Synkromotive showed me was a newer vacuum assist pump for the braking system that's very quiet from EVComponents. More info here. So far, the new controller is doing just fine.

Google 100

Google Toyota Motor Motors 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

AUGUST 17, 2008

On a side note, there are two quick-disconnect terminals the black connector just to the right of the main electrical connection bolt in the picture above. Note that the "CCW" and "N" marks have bolt holes aligned with them for the other two possible brush positions.

Motor 145

Motor Motors Motoring Honda 145

Open Source Civic EV Kit

JUNE 28, 2008

The electric 914 has been relegated to the driveway until the conversion is done or at least until I roll that sucker out of the garage. Today was loads of fun. The conversion process has started and the Civic is out of commission and up on jack stands.

Conversion 100

Conversion Gasoline-Electric Honda DC 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

DECEMBER 3, 2008

Here's the Civic with it's freshly applied "ELECTRIC" emblem on the back! I realized that there was still coolant in the heater core inside the car that drained out when I lowered the front end. With the front lowered, I used the floor jacks to lower the rear end as well. It drove out of the garage quite well.

Installation 100

Installation Store All-Electric Batteries 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

JANUARY 31, 2010

After jamming the cap in there, I just wrapped a bit of electrical tape around the whole thing. After bending one lead back on itself and cutting off the excess wires to leave 3/16" sticking out, I simply jammed the two leads into the rear end of the blue plug that attaches to the PakTrakr module.

Gas-Electric 100

Gas-Electric Volt Batteries Battery 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

JUNE 1, 2008

This is a bit of a dilemma because I only have a one-car garage and my current electric vehicle (the Porsche 914) is sitting in it, charging up.

Neighborhood 100

Neighborhood Google 2000 Porsche 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

JUNE 5, 2009

The actual electrical potentiometer is black at the far left of the picture, while the cable attachment is on the far side of the large butterfly intake valve. You can see the top of the grey-painted angle iron that I bolted to the engine mount side. I had to chamfer one corner to prevent interfering with the engine mount rubber.

Installation 100

Installation All-Electric Engine Cars 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

The "IsoBatmon" circuit in the lower right corner of the picture electrically isolates the signals from all the Batmon boards from the rest of the system for safety. The plastic bag in the upper right contains all the plastic mounting hardware for each batmon. These are standard tie-wrap holders with sticky bottoms.

Parts 100

Parts Batteries Battery DC 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

JULY 31, 2008

While I'm still sticking with group-31 batteries, I'm going to have to re-open the battery decision since I don't want to invest $2000 every 12 months in the electric vehicle. The ZAP cars have a Discover EV31a-a upgrade, so they appear to like them too. Hopefully this information will help others using group 31 batteries as well.

Oregon 100

Oregon Portland Re-Charge 2000 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

DECEMBER 4, 2008

After checking a few other electrical items, I noticed that my 12V car battery was actually quite low (11.8 Here's the ECU unbolted on the passenger side floor. Just for yucks, I opened it up to see the inside. I'll probably sell this if there is a local buyer. I'm pretty sure it came this way, since the DC-DC converter appears to be working.

Volt 100

Volt DC Engine Batteries 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

AUGUST 22, 2009

Other interesting news: I'm resigning as chairperson of the local Oregon Electric Vehicle Association. To solve this problem, I purchased a $300 vacuum pump from Victor over at Metric Mind that is much quieter than the Gast pump and should have much tigher hysteresis on the levels of vacuum in the system.

Dodge 113

Dodge Oregon Kits Installation 113

Open Source Civic EV Kit

SEPTEMBER 5, 2008

I climbed South Sister last weekend and this weekend I'm showing off the electric 914 at the Alternative Energy and Sustainable Living Show in Hillsboro. Well, things are going slow. In the meantime, I've done a few minor things. I have to remove the transmission to bolt it to the motor, so that involved removing the firewall rack.

Convert 100

Convert All-Electric Purchase Batteries 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

MAY 23, 2009

I don't have the motor RPM sensor hooked up yet, but I wanted to get the system going because there's an electric car show this weekend at PIR (we're demonstrating EVs along side the Electrathon and Human-Powered-Vehicle folks). I'll have to give this feedback to Synkromotive. Here's the preliminary installation.

Installation 100

Installation Connect Connected All-Electric 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

APRIL 8, 2008

I'll also be talking with folks at the Oregon Electric Vehicle Association on Thursday, so perhaps I can find some experienced people there to join as well. My next step is to get the structure of the Civic EV Kit Google Group set up and invite several key people in the Civic EV community so we can get this ball rolling.

Google 100

Google Kits Oregon Design 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

JULY 9, 2009

We're showing off 30 electric vehicles in Downtown Portland and Mayor Adams is also showing up at our press event to endorse our group. Fortunately, you simply need to toggle the ignition switch and wait four seconds for the precharge circuit to run to re-engage the contactor before driving again.

Re-Charge 100

Re-Charge Portland Cheap Charging 100

Open Source Civic EV Kit

MAY 31, 2009

During initial acceleration, the electrical noise tends to cause a spike in the temperature sensors, causing the controller to shut down. After propping open the hood, removing the primary 12V power from the controller and hard-booting it, it seemed to start up again and I drove the rest of the way home.

Parts 100

Parts Power Powered Installation 100