This week is a fairly short show. We mostly feature Duane Ball's Electric Beck Spyder 550 build. Built by Scott Smith in New York state, this car features many of the components in our own Speedster Part Duh prototype. It is an excellent example of craftmanship in an EV build.
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Here are some further detailed photos.
This is the slotted heat sink for the Curtis 1238. This should provide excellent cooling for this controller.
The Spyder filler cap is most interesting. In this case, it allows external connection of the power cord.
This is a shot of the front compartment
This shot shows the rear compartment. Click on any of these for a larger view.
We continue to work on Speedster Part duh. Truth to tell, we did our first test drive this week. It will be featured in next weeks show.
We put some further thought and experimentation into the daughter box and valet function. Essentially, we eliminated the box entirely. We're down to a couple of resistors and a switch wired to the Xantrex LinkPro. Here's the Linkpro connections:
It simply applies a current limit resistor of 100 ohms and a 5k 10-turn pot across the 0-5v throttle output to throttle return lines. Either the valet switch or the Xantrex can do this. We measured throttle inputs TO the controller using teh Curtis 1311 Programmer and it works fine.
We also found that the Curtis would NOT drive our two series Gigavacs. These comprise a 24 volt coil together, but the Curtis did not agree. So we replaced them with a Kilovac LEV200A5NAA contactor and the Curtis is now quite happy.
Jack Rickard
