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Welcome, please take the time to read!
Welcome to the open inverter wiki.
The open inverter community is growing and moving quickly. To stay up-to-date with the latest developments and findings, please check out the forums
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consider donating to www.patreon.com/openinverter and to https://www.evbmw.com/
Before you begin:
Please take the time to read. Many developers of various projects are often bombarded with private messages and emails. Managing all these emails and question is a extremely large undertaking. please read, and re-read the information available here and elsewhere on the web if you don't understand a topic. the core developers are not your personal support team. consider donating to these developers for their open source work!
consider contributing to www.patreon.com/openinverter and to https://www.evbmw.com/
The information provided on this wiki and the support forums is intended as information only. The Open Inverter project and it's contributors take no responsibility for how you use the information contained within these pages, nor any liability for injuries, or death, that may result from your actions.
You undertake your project at your own risk.
Introduction
The projects originates from Johannes Hübner building his own opensource ac motor controller, dubbed the "open inverter".
Now with the rising popularity and availability of hybrid and electric vehicles, there is a growing supply of high quality and relatively inexpensive parts from auto-wreckers.
The main goal of the openinverter community is to reverse engineer many of these components for use for a variety of projects such as ev conversion, energy storages, etc.
The Openinverter projects now span over many different areas surrounding PEV, HEV, and PHEV components, such as:
- AC motor controllers
- 1-3 phase power converters
- dc/dc converts
- buck/boost converters
- battery management systems
- etc
as a results there is a growing selection of open source software and hardware designed for a never ending list of OEM parts.
there is a variety of ways one can take control over these oem parts:
- replace the mother board/ "the brains"
- canbus/linbus
- sync serial
- flexray
- pwm
- firmware/software reprogramming
- ect
as a result there is many bespoke boards running the main openinverter software or other opensource code designed to replace OEM part mother boards.
this has lead to a large collection of different boards and software. To unify many of these development projects, the community is largely focused on making a variety of standard external VCU and replacement control boards which will handle the ever growing list of OEM components.
Many of the VCU and replacement boards consist of these 3 main parts:
| Hardware | Firmware | Web Interface |
|---|---|---|
| The design and development of the control hardware based around an STM32F103 chip. This provides the control signals to the power stage and on to the attached components. | The development of the code that goes on the STM32F103 chips and determines, amongst other things what signals are sent to the power stage and the attached components. | Using an ESP8266 chip, the development of a simple web based interface to adjust the parameters on the firmware chip and to display values returned from the chip, for example motor speed (RPM). |
Getting Started
Its recommend reading the Glossary of Terms before read further.
A few main parts are needed for a ev conversion, such as:
- Motors
- Batteries
- Chargers and charge controllers
- DC/DC Converters
- HV Junction Box
- Heaters
- brake assist
- Vacuum Pumps
- electronic brake boosters
Existing information on these items can be found on the EV Conversion Parts page.
OEM Parts
A variety of OEM manufacture parts members of the community have reversed engineered for custom use cases:
FAQ
- Common Inverter FAQ - questions common to all hardware variants
- Tesla Inverter FAQ - questions regarding Tesla Large Drive Units and Small Drive Units
Open Inverter (Core Project/s) |
Open Inverter Related Projects / Control Boards | |
|---|---|---|
| core universal hardware and software components | ||
| ZombieVerter VCU | Tesla Small Drive and Large Drive Units:
commonly there is a large drive unit and small drive unit available. These combine the inverter and motor into a single package. The control boards for these replace the existing control board within them. | |
Open Inverter Hardware | ||
| Lexus GS450h Inverter / VCU:
the GS450h provides a gearbox (where the motors are located) combined with the original inverter, this board looks to control the inverter and the gearbox itself to provide a powerful set up suitable for rear wheel drive set ups, replacing the existing longitudinally mounted gearbox. | ||
| Prius Generation 3 Inverter:
a cheap available inverter from the popular Prius hybrid, this board goes inside that inverter and allows you to control the features of it. | ||
Open Inverter Software |
Auris/Yaris Inverter:
similar to the Prius board, there's subtle differences between them and therefore the need for a separate board. | |
| Nissan Leaf Gen2 Board
replaces the nissan OEM logic board with a rev 3 openiverter main board | ||
| Ford ranger ev board
openinverter kit for the ford ranger ev | ||
| All Control Boards / OEM Inverters | ||
CAN communicationCommon across boards is the ability to communicate with a CAN Bus, which is a 'control area network' or a technical way of saying how various components, sensors, controls, etc communicate with one another within the car. Read more about CAN Communication There is also a project to standardise the messages across the various control boards, read more | ||
ParametersThe openinverter firmware uses a set of about 70 parameters to adapt it to different inverter power stages, motors and position feedback systems. Also it lets you calibrate the throttle pedal, change regenerative braking settings and so on. Working parameter sets can be found in the openinverter parameter database | ||
Use inverter as a battery ChargerBoth the open inverter and some OEM inverters can be used as a battery charger, further saving on component costs. You can read more about how the open inverter and the theory of charging here | ||
Open Inverter CAN std.
Legalities
Different countries have different legislation, if you want you car to certified for the road in your country please take the time to review this section.