1993 Rx7 + Tesla Motor

[mike.bmw]

Best part of the conversion so far!

2nd! That is awesome!

[rjmcdermott81]

Many moons ago I bought an e46 pedal for the swap because I was familiar with it. Same pedal I used in my e30 but, of course I didn't look at the pedal and compare how it mounted vs what is in the car. Obviously, with a top mounted pedal fitting the e46 pedal would have required a bunch of work to get it to sit right in the pedal box:



So I took a chance and bought a tesla pedal. Much closer in mounting style and position:



I'm working on a bracket to 3D print because this pedal needs to be mounted higher.

[rjmcdermott81]

Shipment from ZeroEV - yeah!

[rjmcdermott81]

Starting to layout the highvoltage and wiring for testing. This is my first time making wiring harnesses, etc. so I'm going very slow for now.

[rjmcdermott81]

Big moment! We are successfully logged into the opensource board.

[rjmcdermott81]

K....we are now getting the tesla drive unit to move but we are running into issues. Just posted this in the support forum so hopefully someone has a though about what's going on.

Here is the video of it running....and smoke coming from HV wires....

[rjmcdermott81]

Success! Johannes from Openinverter.org did a support session with me this morning and quickly diagnosed the issue. The root cause was that my board wasn't getting any signal from the encoder at all. This was a quick fix because I was suspicious that I didn't have the pins fully engaged. It's possible that because there wasn't a signal coming from the encoder, the motor kept pulling more current to spin which overheated my under-spec'd wires.

We ran the test with 60v (5 x car batteries) and 2/00 wiring on the HV side. Everything is now working great.

In hindsight, if I had to do it all over again I would pay for a few hours with Johannes to be there for the first test runs. Really great resource to have. Thanks Johannes!

Here is the obligatory video...

[rjmcdermott81]

I spoke to ElectricGT and my batteries are 5-6 weeks out which gives me time to sort out all the other parts - charger, brake pump, coolant pump, fuses/relays, etc.

I bought this fuse/relay box on Amazon for $40 and I'm pretty happy with it. People in the reviews complained that it is nothing more than a box of parts and no instructions and they are right, but it's all pretty straightforward: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

[rjmcdermott81]

A couple updates. These feel like trivial things in the whole project but figuring out where and how to mount everything is taking time. I have the fuse/relay box wired in and working for testing but not mounted yet.

1. Brake Vacuum Pump - I mounted the vacuum pump in front of the radiator in hopes that having the radiator full of water between myself and the pump will dampen the noise. I put together a bracket by cutting thin steel and welding it. The hardware is temporary for now.




2. Accelerator Pedal - I printed a bracket to mount the Tesla pedal in the car. Overall, placement looks similar to stock.





After mounting I zero'd in on the hole placement and I'm printing a beefier bracket with a higher infill:

[rjmcdermott81]

3. Water Pump - I purchased the Bosch pump from ZeroEV and I was trying to determine the right place to put it. Chatting with my neighbor we decided to look at his i3 and...well, it's the same pump. My takeaway is to put the pump directly below the coolant reservoir that. This will avoid air bubbles getting stuck.

[varg]

Updates?