WEEK 4: WOF and REGO, Simulation Battery, Testing Arduino for Battery Balancing

At the start of the week, I took the car in for a recheck at Clint Boon automotive to get the WOF which meant I could finally drive the car legally on the road, I also got 1 month of registration for $16.37 meaning it can be driven around in the meantime. I got an adjustment done on the wheel bearings also at Clint Boon and a proper headlight alignment which cost in total about $63.

I then got onto trying to design and build a battery balancing system, which I have decided against for certification and safety purposes, also found it rather complex and accuracy might be compromised with cheap micro-controllers. But I will still try work on temperature and monitoring controls with the Arduino for the programming side of this project. This may end up more costly, but safety is number one priority.

I also had an enquiry on the engine from the MR2, which I had another guy with my same name Stefan look at it on Saturday. If all goes ahead I will be removing the engine hopefully in the next week to get a better look and design of the engine bay of the car and possibly trying to swap it to their MR2. 

In mechanical engineering class I worked on test routing a steel plate for rebuilding the SmartDrive rotor with good result. I think this is one of the best methods for cutting out the new rotor as it requires perfect balancing and precision which the CNC router offers. I also managed to get ahold of several more motors from CREW Whakatane and I asked around to try source some more for the project. I took apart another rotor on the weekend and I will try to collect enough magnets to position in the final rotor.

Another thing I did was count all the batteries I have so far which I figured there are 681 li-ion cells in total so far with an average of 2000mAh each. This means in theory I have about 5kWh of energy storage for the vehicle so far which is great, but from calculations this is only the bare minimum but should get a solid range of 20-30km range which is awesome. I am still collecting and testing cells, and an idea of building the final pack with room for expansion came to mind at 1am in the morning as more range in future would be way better!

Before I start dismantling everything, I thought it would be a good idea to record a bunch of data on the cars current state such as suspension load and ground clearance and engine revolutions per minute in each gear for various speeds. I will work on recording this during the next week.