The White Lightning 818e thread

[Speedy G]

There's updates up on the first post btw. I'm still in the design stage since the kit hasn't arrived. My date was the 27 of Dec, but in this holiday season it's hard to arrange everything. Banks and my shipping company as well as FFR have days off, etc. I'm thinking I'll get the kit in mid-february at this pace. I've solved several issues though. I now know that I can register the car here in Colombia as long as I register my company as an automotive assembly plant, and therefore I can say what model year the car is. The process will be long, but I can start it once the car drives but there's a ton of post initial drive projects that I can be doing while the whole legal stuff gets sorted out. Here's a short list:

1) Replace the monstrous power stage of the AC propulsion drive with my modern day design - Powerex IGBT MOD NX 600A 1200V DUAL + driver board + snubber capacitors + water cooling. This alone should shed maybe 15 lbs and use less power than the air cooling system the original power modules had.

2) Battery management system - I'm thinking of using a battery management system just so I an keep track of the battery voltages. I plan to abuse the batteries to 10C (1C would be a discharge rate of 30kW/h), so keeping track of failing batteries is probably a good idea.

3) Main control system - I'll be using a Cubietruck (ARM based computer) as the main entertainment and control system of the car. It'll have 500G of solid state hard drive, and run some flavour of linux.
3a) It'll be connected to a DAC which in turn will be connected to a power amp using balanced connections. My cell phone will also connect to the cubie so I can use music on my phone over the car stereo.
3b) It'll control the power steering pump. Less power steering as speed goes up. The power steering pump is electric btw.
3c) It'll control the vacuum pump for the brakes. I'll be using computer controlled power brakes. Another electric pump will provide the vacuum to power assist the brakes. You gotta remember this thing will weigh in at around 2300lbs when I'm done.
3d) I'm thinking maybe I'll have some power ventilation in the car. If I do, the cubie would also control that.
3e) The cubie will have either a 7" or a 9" touchscreen built into the center console. So I imagine I'll have to develop some software to display the control options as well as various sensors (water temp, motor temps, battery temps, total current used, kwh/km, battery voltage, etc). I'd also like to have google maps and a wifi connection through my phone.

4) Automate the tranny with a modified mastershift shifting system since I'm running a directly coupled motor to tranny. The mastershift workflow needs to be altered to shift, like this: run-> depower motor-> neutral-> rev match-> shift-> repower motor.

5) Redo all the fibreglass parts in carbon fiber. There's a local guy that works on racecars that makes the carbon fiber molds. I should be able to shed quite a bit of weight with this mod. Locally it's not as expensive as it would be in the US.

But then again this is all still vaporware since I haven't turned the first screw yet...