mjrickard | EVTV LLC

Life in LiFePo4 – Cycle Life and Attenuation Data

16 Comments / mjrickard / June 4, 2010

Kind of a late blog entry. Busy week with Rickard Electric Speedster design. The May 28th show rounded up a lot of little parts such as the accelerator – with a little valet function box I refer to as “daughter mode.” [jwplayer file=”news052810-1280 – iPhone.mov” hd.file=”news052810-1280.mov” image=”http://media.ev-tv.me/news052810.jpg” streamer=”rtmp://s3jgrp4mv5fnqx.cloudfront.net/cfx/st” provider=”rtmp” html5_file=”http://media.ev-tv.me/news052810 – iPhone.mov” download_file=”http://media.ev-tv.me/news052810-1280.mov”] The basic […]

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Online Forums – signing off

15 Comments / mjrickard / May 28, 2010

My experience with online forums goes back to the early 1980s, and indeed I wrote one of the very few 8080 assembly language software programs to manage large numbers of Usenet Newsgroups – PIMP. But the experience has always been mixed. The written word in the forums or newsgroups leaves many more able than others,

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Speedster Charger Installation – Carbon Fiber/Kevlar Battery Box

2 Comments / mjrickard / May 14, 2010

We’ve made some recent progress on the Speedster Part Duh, and rather gotten ahead of ourselves on the video thing. We were trying some things, they came together, and we’re not too much wanting to remove them at this point. So in this video we kind of do a walkaround to show the week’s progress.

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2009 Mini Cooper Clubman – Porsche 356 Heater/Defroster

10 Comments / mjrickard / April 27, 2010

I’ve posted the April 23rd Friday Show. We had a lot of wind noise I had to filter out so forgive Brain and I in the opening segments. We hadn’t been breathing helium or anything, I just had to lose the low frequencies to make the wind more or less go away. We’re still learning

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April 16 Friday Show

20 Comments / mjrickard / April 21, 2010

This week we digress a bit from vehicle issues and take a look at the progression of LiFePo4 cell offerings over the past two years. We also do some full 1C discharge and charge tests on the cells. The first cell in this series is a Thundersky TS-LFP160AH cell we purchased about 18 months ago.

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March 26, 2010 EVTV News

8 Comments / mjrickard / March 29, 2010

We were recently featured in a story in our local paper, the Southeast Missourian. Nice story. Thank you guys. We’ve been in quite a struggle with our MES-DEA 200-250 Motor. On assembly, we found a vibration in the drive train. When we removed the drivetrain from the vehicle, we found a huge crack almost all

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Mini Cooper Clubman Drive Train Assembly

13 Comments / mjrickard / January 31, 2010

We have finally made some progress on the 2009 Mini Cooper Clubman drive train. I had nearly given up all hope. My history is of course in electronics and software. Mechanical issues usually result in the use of a hammer at some point from frustration. This one almost brought out the big sledge. We originally

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OK. HERE IT IS. SAG. VOLTAGE. MORE

34 Comments / mjrickard / December 22, 2009

I’ve heard a lot the last couple of weeks regarding our top balance/bottom balance situation. Most of the online forum engineers did NOT skip a beat. They went off of current shunt balancers pretty much cold turkey, but immediately lunged to monitoring individual cell voltages for a “low voltage limit” as the holy grail of

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GET RID OF THOSE SHUNT BALANCING CIRCUITS

31 Comments / mjrickard / November 25, 2009

As you may know, I’ve been a bit at odds with the cognescetti of the EV community on the topic of Battery Managements Systems, and particularly of the form of shunt balancing circuits. They’re pretty much unified in the position that you have to have them or you will kill your expensive LiFePo4 batteries. My

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This Week on the Mini Cooper

9 Comments / mjrickard / October 31, 2009

The concept of a weekly show requires us to actually do some work each week. We had a very good week this past, the last week in October. It rained every day, so no goofing around in the electric Speedster. We had done a video on the EVision installation. What we didn’t show was all

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