Electric Pickup Truck Re-wire

A couple years ago, a class of undergraduate students at my college converted a 1997 Ford Ranger pickup truck to electric power. This vehicle originally sported a 4-cylinder gasoline engine with 5-speed manual transmission. It now has an electric motor and control system bought from Electric Vehicles of America. This company sells parts for conversion of cars, trucks, motorcycles, and even boats to electric power. You can find them at the following link:
http://www.evamerica.com

A bank of 20 six-volt golf cart batteries supply 120 volts DC to run the motor. A separate 12 volt battery supplies power for lights, turn signals, and the control system that handles the motor. As it sits today, this truck has a range of 40 - 50 miles on a charge, and can reach 65 miles per hour. Granted, the range is limited. But it works fine for local driving and short commutes.

This vehicle was originally conceived as a test bed for experimenting with fuel cells and, possibly later on, hybrid power systems.

Having driven it myself I can attest to its quiet operation. At highway speed the motor emits a low hum - mostly what you hear is road noise off the tires.

Under The Hood:
In this photo you can see the view under the hood. All the wiring and controls were mounted on a sheet of plywood, per Electric Vehicles of America's recommendations. While wood may seem a bit "crude", it is rigid and is a good insulator. This setup minimizes the risk of a short of the high voltage to the vehicle's chassis. Appropriately, the plywood is painted an "electric blue" color.

The large, oblong black box in the center of the photo is an electronic controller that provides pulse-width modulated high voltage to the motor. To the left and front of that is a smaller, square black box which serves to convert the 120 volts DC motor supply power to 12 volts to keep the 12 volt control battery charged. When the truck is plugged in to charge, the 12 volt system is thus recharged as well. Two large contactors electrically disconnect the high voltage supply when the truck is parked. One serves as an interlock that is operated when the "ignition" switch is turned to "on". The other contactor is actuated by a microswitch in the throttle control when the accelerator pedal is pressed slightly. A potentiometer in the throttle control works with the motor controller to regulate the speed of the motor. The throttle control box can be seen in the right-hand side of the picture. The high voltage wiring is the large diameter orange cables seen in the pictures. A small electrically operated vacuum pump supplies the power brake booster, since there is no longer a gas engine to supply this.

Sixteen of the batteries, along with the charger, are stored in the rear bed of the truck; the remaining four are secured just behind the front radiator grille. The "shore power" connector for recharging the truck is installed where the gasoline filler used to be. This can be seen in the pictures at the bottom of the post.

Conceptually, a "plug-in" electric vehicle of this type is very simple.

Wiring Issues
The original control wiring was done with cheap, insulated slide on connectors bought at a local auto parts store. Over time these connections worked loose and became intermittent. Last Fall, the professor in charge of the electric vehicle project asked me to do whatever repairs were needed to make the vehicle reliable. I made several suggestions on what needed to be done and gave the professor a parts list. Upon his approval I proceeded.

I ended up replacing most of the control wiring, along with the cheap 1/4" crimp-on slide connectors. The original wiring was #18 gauge; I replaced it with #14. The new connectors, bought from McMaster Carr, were the non-insulated crimp type. I crimped each connector to the wire, then soldered it, then used adhesive-lined heat-shrink tube to insulate the connection. I labeled each connector with a P-touch label, then covered that with clear heat-shrink tubing for protection and to keep the labels from falling off. Doing wiring this way is time consuming, but it vastly improves reliability and makes tracing the wiring for repair a snap. For years I have done this on my own vehicles, too. [On my older truck, when it came time to replace the vacuum lines, I used P-touch labels and clear heat-shrink tube on all of the new hoses as I installed them. Now, at a glance, I know which hoses go where without having to consult the manual.]

You can see pictures of the electric truck wiring, batteries, throttle control, and of the motor below.

A Sticky, GUI Mess - More Form Over Function

Richard W.M. Jones, a programmer who works for Red Hat, had a quite interesting blog entry today. You can find it here:

http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/windows-8-worse-than-gnome-for-usability/

In few words, he gives the new Windows 8 "Metro" user interface a real bashing, saying that "it's even worse than GNOME for usability." If it's worse than GNOME 3, we're all in big trouble. Those who have regularly followed my blog for the last few months know what I think of GNOME 3. GNOME 3 is unusable on my laptop, though the same quad core machine runs Windows 7 with all its graphics just fine. Richard indicated that Red Hat will include the new GNOME shell in its upcoming RHEL 7 release, and expressed his concern that they may lose some loyal users over this decision. Let's hope Red Hat will actually clean it up its implementation of GNOME so it works properly.

Microsoft Office 2010 - Tied Up In Ribbons:
Lately, I've been using a borrowed computer from work to complete some assignments. The machine is running Windows 7 and MS Office 2010. I'm using it to edit some Word documents with the "track changes" feature - which isn't, to my knowledge, duplicated in Open Office. The work machine has what Microsoft calls its new "Fluent User Interface." I haven't seen this "Fluent User Interface" on my own laptop, which is a year old yet came with Windows 7. Their "Fluent User Interface" consists of a new "ribbon" which runs across the top of the application window, replacing the usual and customary toolbars that Windows and LINUX users alike have grown to recognise as standard. It's not just a feature of Office, the 'Paint' program I used for saving the screen shot below also has it.














The thing I noticed immediately while using Office 2010, besides their new ribbon, was that I couldn't find spell check. There is no "Help" dropdown menu, and no, not even an "Edit" dropdown menu, either. The "Help" dropdown menu has been replaced with a little blue question mark that I didn't immediately notice in the low contrast coloring of the ribbon. Eventually I found the Spell Checker in a very non-intuitive place: A dropdown menu called "Review".

So, as GNOME did with their latest creation, Microsoft had to take something I previously could access in a fraction of a second with ONE mouse click and make it into an operation that now takes several seconds and two or more mouse clicks. After a considerable time getting acquainted with the new regime I can now, more or less, get my work done.

What's The Rationale For All This?
I spoke with a colleague at work who has worked in IT for many years. His comment was that "all the 'old school' folks who have written all the stuff we have used for years are all starting to retire. All the twenty-somethings who grew up texting on their iPhones are now getting software development jobs and starting to impact the industry."

All I have to say about that is I hope and pray that some companies will consider those of us who do NOT want their PC to look like an iPhone, and who simply want to continue to get their work done.

A BIG 'Thank You' Is In Order

Recently, there has been a large spike in the traffic to one of my MIPS Assembly language pages. I soon discovered that the University of Massachusetts College of Engineering had linked to my page via one of their internal sites.

Humbly, I say "Thank You!!" to the University of Massachusetts for this honor.

I'd also like to say "Thank You" to ALL my readership for checking out what is published here.

Hopefully I have been able to help somebody in their work or otherwise contribute something worthwhile to their lives. That is one of the two main goals of this blog: to showcase my own activities and interests, and to share knowledge with others.

I haven't posted much here lately due to some extenuating family issues as well as a heavy work load at school. That said, please check back periodically, as I will get more material up here as time and circumstances allow.

Ballistic Chronometer - Revision 1.5

A colleague brought it to my attention that there were a couple errors on the schematic I posted for the Poor Man's Ballistic Chronometer. The revised version is shown here.

I have also updated the schematic on the original post and wish to offer my sincere apologies to anyone who might have downloaded this circuit and attempted to build it.

The original post is located here: http://inkarlslab.blogspot.com/2012/01/poor-mans-ballistic-chronometer-part-1.html

The Pareto Rule: Its Profound Effect on Your Personal Finances

It's a given that this economy has been brutal on most people other than the top 10% income bracket. The popular press is filled with articles about managing money, where to invest your money, and how to save a bit here and there. Read any magazine or go online and you will find articles detailing how to use coupons to save on groceries, what time of year retailers tend to mark certain items down, how to cut your fuel consumption 10%, etc. While there's nothing wrong with saving gas - in fact there's much RIGHT with saving fuel - if you are paying $50/week on fuel, do you really think 10% (that's $5) saved will really get you out of the hole economically? REALLY? Especially when you consider an average 2-bedroom apartment rents for an average of $700 -$900/month in much of the U.S. Especially when food may cost a family of three $500/month? And your cable bill is likely another $100/month. Electric and gas - throw another $150/month average "on the grill". If you own a home in many areas you are likely paying thousands per year in county property taxes. I haven't even mentioned the chunk state and Federal income taxes take out.

Way back in the early 1900s, Vilfredo Pareto observed that 20% of the people in Italy at the time owned 80% of the land. In the late 1940s Dr. Joseph M. Juran applied this same idea to create a general rule that 20% of something accounts for 80% of the effects. This principle applies in many areas of life and commerce. Here are a few examples:
1) How many times have you observed in school that it's always the same one or two bad kids that cause most of the classroom disruptions?
2) It's well known by many police officers that a small subset of known criminals do most of the crimes in a given area.
3) At an electronic company I worked for several years, most of the failures and RMA returns we got were attributable to one or two problems. Granted, we got a few other types of complaints as well, but fully 85% were caused by one or two components we had lots of problems with. Once we got those two problem areas fixed, our warranty return rate went waaay down!
4) Typically, between 2 and 3 of a household's 8 or 10 expense categories account for 80% of its expenditures.

You may be saying "Gee, Karl. That's all well and good, but what does this have to do with paying my bills?"

Plenty!
The same "Pareto Principle" also applies to household and even business finances. Re-read #4 above and try an experiment:
Sit down and write out ALL your monthly expenditures, listed from largest to least. Right away you will see that out of the 8 or 10 things you listed, between 2 - 4 categories are where you spend most of your net income. For most of us, rent or mortgage occupies the number 1 slot. Food and/or car payments follow next, utilities, cable, and so on. A Pareto graph shows this in startling, visual clarity. A Pareto graph is similar to any other bar graph except the items are shown in descending order of their value - with the largest one being on the far left-hand side of the chart. This gives a quick visual idea of which few items are doing the most damage, as it were.

See the hypothetical chart above. You can see that "1" and "2" - whatever they are - amount to 81% of the expenses, while the rest of the stuff only amounts to 19% of the total. For many people rent and food, or rent and car payments, are their numbers "1" and "2". So if you CAN get into a cheaper rent situation, or put the wife to work saving on groceries with coupons, you can QUICKLY save MANY dollars per month. An hour a week spent couponing can indeed produce dramatic results! *(For those of you who noticed, YES, the "cumulative amount" line is missing on my example chart - but it is easily enough to calculate how close to the critical 80% line the cumulative total of the largest two or three items is. Simply add the first 2 or three itmes, then divide that figure by the grand total of everything. That will give you the fractional percentage of total expenditures those items make up.)


See the links below for examples and how to use a spreadsheet to create your own Pareto graphs.

http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/cause-analysis-tools/overview/pareto.html

http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/pareto-chart.html

The Upshot of All This:
Basically, before you worry too much about saving $5 on a $50 weekly gasoline fill-up, consider dealing realistically with the bigger stuff FIRST. Granted, you might be stuck in a mortgage. Or leaving your apartment for another might not be feasible due to work or school ties. But likely there ARE other large, but somewhat negotiable bills that can be pared down with minimal effort that would save tens of dollars per month, if not more. I found it totally mind boggling during my teen years how my mother would scream about the cost of a roll of paper towels, while Dad drove 80 - 100 miles round trip to work every day. Between wear and tear, depreciation, and gasoline, driving that car ALONE was eating HUNDREDS of dollars per week!! We could have bought LOTS of paper towels - and other things - on the money saved if we moved closer to Dad's work or if he even got other employment closer to home. The family was hemorrhaging hundreds of dollars EVERY MONTH just in Dad's work expenses while Mom worried about $2/week in paper towels. Incredible. That's a bit like worrying about a scratch on the coffee table after a tornado just tore the roof off the house.

I'm in NO WAY saying "go out and waste gas, paper towels, or anything else"! What I AM saying is this society has got people buffaloed into worrying about a few pennies when it's often costing MORE to live "normally" than one makes working. Many parents and the schools have failed totally in teaching folks the realities of personal finance and earning a living in America. The media also strives to keep you focused on minutiae - they want you "on the string" working slavishly, watching their programming, and handing your hard-earned money to their advertisers.

A quick word about driving a car:
You can also do a Pareto analysis within any category of your expenses, too.

A good place to start is your car. You may or may not make payments, you have depreciation, you'll make repairs if you keep it long enough, you may pay taxes on it, ... These expenses can be Pareto-charted, too.

I have run the math, figuring PER MILE - guess what: Even as pricy as gasoline has been, fuel is the LEAST of my car related expenses when figured per mile. Maintenance (tires, batteries, tune-ups, belts, hoses, ...) followed by monthly insurance bills are what I'm really paying out for. "Per mile" figures prominently in how the car leasing companies figure their economics; and it's quite valid for households too.

People don't shell out weekly for a timing belt or a fuel innjector cleaning, so they forget to figure it into what they are really spending to drive.