EV Projects · 30 January 07

As the comments here and my email Inbox can readily attest there’s always quite a few EV projects in the works from all around the world, along with many other folks interested in taking on their own conversion or finding someone to convert a vehicle for them. I suspect when warm weather and higher gas prices return later this year we’ll see an even larger demand!

So I thought I’d share a couple of the photos from the Inbox.

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Links for 26 January 07

• Popular Science’s DIY Gravity Battery. Yields 1volt, no mention of cycle life.
• Having moved way beyond sloshing glasses of batteries, A123 has secured another 40 Million of investments for their high-powered lithium battery development. “A123Systems has quickly become one of the World’s largest suppliers of high-power lithium-ion batteries. Based on the Company’s patented nanophosphate technology, the batteries deliver previously unattainable levels of power, safety and life.”
• The folks over at the US Dept of Energy Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have been working on improved fuel cell cathode catalysts. “The next step”, Stamenkovic said, “will be to engineer nanoparticle catalysts with electronic and morphological properties that mimic the surfaces of pure single crystals of Pt3Ni.”
• A new electric car maker in Japan, Start Lab SAP is making a small EV for about $18k USD ($2.2M Yen). It has one odd feature: the car comes equipped with the clip-clop sound of horse hooves hitting the pavement to alert pedestrians and other drivers.

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Links for 24 January 07

• I see that Justin already beat me to this posting in his recent comment. In case you missed it Technology Review has an article on a new ultra-capacitor “battery” that purportedly will change the whole landscape of electric cars and energy. Be sure to peruse the article’s comments and if that isn’t enough for you, follow along in the Slashdot comment thread. So far no demonstrable ultra-capacitor, just claims that they have come up with a formula for success and are moving forward with manufacturing plans. Sounds like a wonderful thing, and I wish them all the luck, but as Carl Sagan so aptly put it, Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and so far we haven’t seen any of that.
• From last night’s State of the Union address comes the Twenty in Ten plan. Mostly support for alt fuels, more domestic oil production, and changes to CAFE standards. Comments over at the Energy Blog and you can read the initiatives PDF here.
• Hop over for pictures of the Norwegian-built EV, Kewet Buddy at AutoBlogGreen

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Links for 13 January 07

• Darin has achieved a new milestone in the forkenswift project, they’ve transplanted and awakened the brain!
• A handful of block diagrams outlining the proposed functionality of an energy tower. (that’s a bunch of ammonia folks)
• Article over at the New York Times on Taking Control of your Electric Bill. Some interesting stuff even if you aren’t plugging in an EV every night.
• Need parts? How about making them yourself with the help of the backyard metal casting gang?

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Joe's 280Z EV · 12 January 07

Sitting in my overflowed mail queue from this summer and fall (resend emails if I haven’t answered yet) was a few nice in-progress shots of Joe Porcelli’s 280Z electric conversion.

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Links for 7 January 07

• The FHEPIHDA? (Ford Hydrogen-Electric Plug-in Hybrid Drive and Airstream Concept)
• Meanwhile GM has been working “almost a year” on plug-in hybrids (woo!) and the current concept car to employ this blossoming tech is called the Chevy Volt (thanks for the link David). Green Car Congress has some more details.
• From Freep readers: Electric cars to rule the roads?
• Check out the TransWarP11 direct drive, 11” DC motor. I sniffed around the net but couldn’t find anything regarding it’s max RPM.

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Links for 5 January 07

• MacWorld is coming up in a few days so I thought I’d cover the Mac-in-a-Car angle. Here’s a great how-to for putting a Mini in your car: Carputer and a commercial restoration firm’s install of a mini-in-a-Jeep. In fact there’s a whole website dedicated to putting a Mac Mini in your vehicle, MacVroom. You can even buy a dock in case you want to easily move the computer from car to house.
• Most of the in-car computer sites are adding the computer for music, video, or GPS functionality. Very few, if any, are integrating data acquisition so they can monitor a string of, say, EV batteries. Here’s a few solutions for the mini: bTop, National Instruments, LabJack, Data Translation, and Instrutech.
• As for software to control or make sense of all of this data there’s of course the built in perl/php/ruby/mysql and apache webserver included with OS X, not to mention free full-bore developer tools. I use php/mysql to store the data and jpgraph to render the weather at our house. There’s also commercial offerings like Igor, Labview and even open source projects like iDash and RoadNav. You could analyze the squeaks in your conversion like crazy using the Electroacoustics Toolbox.
• Or just do it all in legos...

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Links for 2 January 07

• First off welcome to 2007! Starting off the new year I ran across a couple of interesting articles on Stanford Ovshinsky. If you’ve followed EV/Hybrid history his name should ring a bell, being the founder of Ovonics and inventor of the NiMH battery used in most hybrid cars along with the GM EV1. There are a few scenes with him and his wife/business partner in the movie, Who Killed the Electric Car. Stanford has over 300 patents and his latest business/technology venture is photovoltaic panels at Energy Conversion Devices. He has also, somewhat controversially, been working on hydrogen systems for quite some time, and his plant has a Prius hacked to run off of hydrogen instead of gasoline. Wiki entry on Stanford R. Ovshinsky.
• Speaking of which, here’s a brief peek under the floorboards of a fuel cell powered car. DaimlerChrysler spokeswoman Lora Renz said a typical fuel cell car gets about “50 miles per kilogram of hydrogen, equivalent to a gallon of gasoline.” She said the target price of hydrogen is the same as gasoline. Well, duh…but in what year?
• Me and my Sparrow, Valerie Myers’ funky little electric car.
• A few Instructables to start off the year: LED’s for beginners, Serial controlled motor, DIY Wind Generator.

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