Prius Gen 4 Inverter Hacking

[Jack Bauer]

Due to a kind donation I now have a Gen 4 inverter / converter for reverse engineering / hacking. Starting a thread to document the progress.

[Alexstarex]

whoo
not so fast))
STILL NOT DEVELOPED BY THE OLD

[ZooKeeper]

Yea! Some of us are still working on the Gen2 -

[mdrobnak]

I have a feeling in 6 months there's going to be a wide range of solutions based upon budget, space, and power capabilities.
Super exciting!

[Eflyers]

This Prius unit is small enough to possible use on the 2 and 3 wheel EVs I'm working on. Toyota has proposed since ~2013 to produce an even smaller unit based on SiC semiconductors(like Tesla uses now). Damian, what is the part number(G9200-XXXXX) of the one you have? Is it one for a Prius Prime, the plug-in hybrid model, or the regular non plug-in hybrid? After a second look, It seems the label on the one you have has been drawn over.

It will be interesting(OK,exciting!) to see what you come up with for this hack. Keep up the good work.

[arber333]

Of course Mr. Kelly already took gen4 inverter apart .

[mdrobnak]

That's an interesting IGBT setup on there. Super integrated and delicate though, geez.

[Jack Bauer]

Got the inverter on the bench for a first look. I love these Toyota boards. 5 minutes of visual inspection and your half way there. Very logical layout.

The two big square qfp parts have part number : r5f72azakfp

A quick search yeilded this document with some good info :

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files ... 2017_o.pdf

[Jack Bauer]

Seemed a shame to waste my 2 hours for 6 yoyos on Toyota repair so grabbed some gen4 diagrams and info. In the first post.

[Eflyers]

I may be a yahoo, but definitely not a yoyo. Dr. Damian: Does the patient look like it is hackable?

[clanger9]

So, I have a cheap Chinese 'scope and a bunch of crazy ideas.
I'm going to have a go at destroying hacking a Prius Gen 4 inverter, with a view to maybe doing a Damien-style modboard.

So far, I removed the control board from the inverter. I guess the first step is to power it up with 12V and see what makes it tick...

Has anybody tried playing around with this inverter, or am I starting with the proverbial blank sheet of paper?

[Jack Bauer]

Merging with new thread

[Eflyers]

As this model has the logic and driver functions combined on a single board, would it be easier to go the plug and play separate VCU approach? As with the Lexus GS450H VCU?

[clanger9]

I think the VCU approach would make a lot of sense for controlling a Toyota MGU.
I'm not sure it will work for my application, where I want to do something very different with the inverter hardware...

[clanger9]

Thanks to Damien's pin-out data, I was able to power the board up. Which is a nice start.
The board pulls about 8 watts.

There are no blinkenlights, which is always a minor disappointment. CAN traffic appears almost immediately, which I was able to capture with SavvyCAN. I don't know what the messages mean - presumably something like "Help me; my car appears to be missing..."

The inverter itself consists of 14 separately controlled IGBTs (2x 3-phase stages + 1x buck-boost stage), each with its own mystery high-side controller chip that talks to the low-side via a pair of opto-isolators (1x 9104A, 1x 9121A). One for send and one for receive?

At this point, I run out of knowledge, although a quick trace of the boards suggests the opto isolators are daisy-chained together. Is this a typical arrangement in vehicle inverters? How will the low-side comms be arranged? Some sort of SPI signalling or something else?

Any suggestions as to what I should try next? I guess my ultimate objective is to be able to control the inverter stages directly using Johannes-style software.

I will have a poke around and see if I can see any chatter on the low side...

[jnsaff]

I will get myself a new Gen4 inverter and also the RAV4 version (which looks the same except it has an addition inverter for the rear wheel drive).

My idea for starting to figure out the CAN messages would be to use the SavvyCan changes feature (can't remember what it's called) and then start changing things. Obvious things would be to change the 12V voltage and see which message changes. Then connect HV side and start playing with voltage there. Rinse, repeat, post findings here.

[Jack Bauer]

Yeah you'll probably find some inverter to car data that way the problem will be the car to inverter stuff. What we'd really need is a capture from a gen 4 car under various driving conditions. Now my mother in law does have a 2019 chr ......

Then setup a gen4 translaxle and inverter and play back the data and so on. This will only work if there are no encryptions involved. Even the leaf gen 1 system uses a "security" byte between the vcu and inverter so who knows.

[jnsaff]

I could not resist when I saw a CH-R and a 4WD RAV4 Gen4 inverters available for 100 euros each.

To my surprise the RAV4 inverter is much larger than the CH-R. It has 3 inverters in it but it still looks much beefier than I could have imagined.

I will crack them open sometime and post more photos soon.

[mdrobnak]

If those are working, that's quite a steal!

[jnsaff]

Why wouldn't they if even Chuck Norris Jack Bauer can't kill Toyota inverters?!

[ChironWSC]

Do you happen to know the weight of both the units?

I could not resist when I saw a CH-R and a 4WD RAV4 Gen4 inverters available for 100 euros each.

To my surprise the RAV4 inverter is much larger than the CH-R. It has 3 inverters in it but it still looks much beefier than I could have imagined.

I will crack them open sometime and post more photos soon.

IMG_3695.jpgIMG_3697.jpgIMG_3698.jpg

[ChironWSC]

Has any one made any progress on the Gen4?

Also I would be interested in knowing the advantages of the Gen4 over Gen3 if any one knows? We have projects that I think the Toyota inverters would work well in, but want to make sure we choose the best Gen for our application which requires very lightweight components.

Thanks

Yeah you'll probably find some inverter to car data that way the problem will be the car to inverter stuff. What we'd really need is a capture from a gen 4 car under various driving conditions. Now my mother in law does have a 2019 chr ......

Then setup a gen4 translaxle and inverter and play back the data and so on. This will only work if there are no encryptions involved. Even the leaf gen 1 system uses a "security" byte between the vcu and inverter so who knows.

[wprzybyla]

I understand that the Gen4 inverter is controlled via CAN. Has anyone figured out this communication?

[tom91]

Not as far as we are aware of, best to get a vehicle or full setup for reverse engineering.