Nissan Leaf Powered E46 Touring

[Jack Bauer]

Motor mounts sanded and painted. Inverter mounts done. Power steering pump mounted and high pressure line in. All hail the Grey Goose

[Jack Bauer]

Power steering up and running and no leaks:)

[johnspark]

Good stuff JB

[Jack Bauer]

So having a bit of a change of plan regards the Grey Goose inverter. Going to have a go at running the Leaf inverter with CAN thanks to the info on this website :
http://productions.8dromeda.net/c55-lea ... tocol.html

Guaranteed to strain my Commodre 64 era programming skills to their last but we'll see what happens.

I've designed a simple little shield for the Arduino Due to take a throttle and brake input and pump out CAN on two channels so it will command the inverter and act as a CAN bridge to take the motor rpm, temp and other info and spit that back into the E46 to run the instrument cluster:)

[doobedoobedo]

Interesting. This was something that I'd considered, but was put off by the 80KW max power.

Some fine people have put together a spreadsheet of the CAN messages used by the leaf. One thing I did wonder is if the max power available from the inverter could be changed by sending it 1dc messages...

[Jack Bauer]

Very useful. Thanks for the link. Plan is to reverse engineer the logic board connections (looks easy enough) and work up a Heubner board in parallel with working on driving the original with CAN. covers all the bases.

[doobedoobedo]

Yes I can see the advantages to using the Gen 1. No PITA proprietary connector for a start.

[Jack Bauer]

Made a little progress today on the Nismo touring:)

Leaf inverter mounted.

[langoo]

I'm in the same situation as you are and are programming an Arduino to take controll of the original logic board of a Gen1 och Gen2 Leaf inverter.

I've got to the stage where I think it's time to test it in the car instead of on the bench. How far have you come regarding the needed pins on the Gen1 inverter, the website you linked is for a Gen2 and what I've read on some forum did one user test it on a Gen1 but the motor spinned backwards.

Keep posting your progress on the Gen1 and maybe we can together get it working.

[Jack Bauer]

[langoo]

Great video! Look forward to you see your progress with making the motor turning.

A heads up from one running a Gen2 motor the same way. Sending around 100 in torque command makes the motor spin up and it doesn't take many tenth of a second for it to spin really fast without any gearbox attached to it

If I get the time to wire in my Gen1 next week then will I update you. I have a little work to do thou I've already adopted the Nissan connector to work with Paul Holmes replacement logic board an therefore do I need to see if he changed the use of any of the pins on his board compared to Nissan's original.

[Jack Bauer]

Getting the high voltage junction box together. Should have power to the inverter next week for testing.

[Jack Bauer]

Some good progress today on the grey goose. Battery pack installation and high voltage junction box.

[Cookie6000]

That's cracking progress. Nicely done
Looks very along the lines of how i hope to do the 80 Avant when it arrives. Following the E46 build closely as its Ingolstadt cousin is going to get the same treatment For the noobs amongst us, will you be putting together a shopping list for the HV junction box?

[Jack Bauer]

Some pictures from today. Getting close to power up:)

[langoo]

Great work!

[Jack Bauer]

[Jack Bauer]

Got the Leaf inverter running.........in one direction:)

[Jack Bauer]

First test drive today with the open source vcu and gen 1 leaf motor and inverter. The Grey Goose Lives:)

[johu]

That looks really smooth, congratulations!
That low hanging DC cable under the car is a familiar sight

[langoo]

Congrats!

Looks really nice and the feeling of getting results never dies

I also had a drive today with the CAN-bus controlled Gen1 in my VW but I will not spam your thread with my car, only thing I can say is that 80 kW in a beetle is sufficient!

[Jack Bauer]

Great to hear another gen 1 up and running. I did post that info on the resolver you asked about.

[langoo]

Great to hear another gen 1 up and running. I did post that info on the resolver you asked about.

I saw that and will try to confirm your wiring with mine when my daughter gets well from her cold

[Igor]

Inspiring as always, Damien!

[Jack Bauer]

Cranked up the torque limit a little