Grad School, Nerdsniping, and things

So grad school is effectively done for me, which hopefully means I can put a lot more time towards this project. And I'll drag Daniel along for the ride, because he doesn't do his homework until the end of the semester, anyway.

I've been organizing, ordering, and checking my bank account, and actual work is finally starting to get done. This weekend I spent some time with the drawings to get the signal connections set up for the motor control (manual/diagrams are available on the google drive, for anyone who has access). The controller was bolted to the electronics plate, but I won't mount that plate until the motor is mounted. The reversing contactor still needs to be wired.



Much of this weekend's progress can be chalked up to the valiant efforts of Aaron Bamberger (AKA I nerd-sniped him) who helped me reverse engineer the circuit in the VW accelerator pedal I have. Despite some initial doubts, it will be usable, providing a linearly scaled voltage range from 0.7 to 4.6v. Some reconfiguration of the controller will be required.

 

After this, it was just a matter of connectorizing the correct wires and running them along the body of the vehicle. A revision will be done before the system is "done", but this will get me through early testing.