Quote:
|
Originally Posted by tonto
Just wondering if there were any open source guys out there that might have published info.
|
Most of what you are looking for is over at the
Priusplus group.
E-drive are the "professionals", but Priusplus were the not-for-profit amateur group. E-drive could afford the lithium-ions, but Priusplus went for cheaper lead acid batteries - both groups succeeded in making a PHEV Prius. Sadly, the Priusplus ringleaders have closed the forum now as they are too busy with other projects, but the archive is still there and it has a lot of info on potential batteries and of course lots of potential contacts for you.
There is much discussion in the archive of how they overcame the issues of the OEM computer (to cut a long story short, they basically fool it into thinking it still has the old pack and that everything is OK except that the pack is overcharged, so it constantly tries to remove that excess charge by "assisting" at every opportunity). Once some issues of electrical noise were addressed, the project worked quite smoothly.
But as others have said in this thread, this is not an easy project for an individual at the moment! (as far as I can tell no instructions or kit has has yet been made publicly available) Having said that, the more people that try it, the more is learnt!
If you're on a budget, the major stumbling block will be the Valence batteries which are still very expensive, so I'd suggest trying AC propulsion's route of using multiple 18650s Lithium Ions (
see here for how its done). By choosing 18650, you get three major advantages over the Valence cells: (i) You can buy them off the shelf! (ii) The Valence are about $1,000 per kWh, but 18650 are about $350 per kWh (so a 9kWh pack as in the Edrive Prius would come in at just over $3,000). (iii) The energy density of 18650s can be about 200 Wh/kg, vs about 100 Wh/kg for the Valence batteries, so the 18650 pack would be about half the weight of the Valence solution. Of course the major downside is the fiddly nature of assembling the pack and trying to tie them all up together with a decent homemade BMS!
Tell us how it goes!
