On Sunday after the show I spent the day testing the charger, swapped out the blown 2n2222, reoriented the LM211P and hoped for the best, fired up and “It’s alive”, well the LCD panel lit and displayed the 4D systems logo, no smoke or flames so looking good in my opinion.
A bit more reading and it looks like I need to upload firmware to get it going, wired in the firmware upload switch and tried again no joy! the Arduino flashes when I connect but does not upload, remembered a jumper under the Arduino checked the Schematic and it looks like the link supplies the LCD with power, The instructions refer to using the programming switch to turn off the LCD so you can upload software, so I tried it with this jumper removed and voila it worked! YEY
So now when I power up the charger I get a screen asking me to select the battery type showing “LIFEPO” which is exactly what I should see, YEY.
However when I select the battery type it moves to the next screen without clearing the last garbling the text on screen every step just makes it worse so I will need to fix this first before I can test safely.
Fired off a message to Valery and posted on the diyelectriccar forum as well, spent the rest of Sunday prepping the +ve and –ve output cables and realized that now I have fitted the contactor the battery terminal is no longer in the boot with the charger (Dammn!) Still I put it where it is on Steve’s advice to keep the cable as short as possible that way eliminating any long live cables however now considering the charger position I will need 2 meters more “220V Permanently LIVE” cable to connect the charger to the battery otherwise I would need to leave the car on all night whilst I charged and I would be putting my charge power through the contactor set not a good idea me thinks, I will need to check all of this with Steve before wiring up.
So close I can smell the rubber burnin ;-) Two more weeks and she should be road legal :-)
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