I blew it!!

This past Sunday (happy fathers day) I had decided to run out and make a quick attempt at getting my new controller running. It has been installed for a week or so, but it just doesn't want to run right. On Saturday I had driven it around the block a few times but it felt ... wrong. Getting it moving was a little shaky and my top speed was below what I was getting with the uncapped controller (about 18 to 20 mph tops). To top it off, I had lost connection to my controller and my little Bluetooth program no longer connected. But Sunday I noticed little spots of corossion and so I cleaned up the contacts. Then I was connected again.

After performing a calibration, I decided to take it up and down the driveway. I only had about 15 minutes to blow before family showed up. Then I went to put it in reverse, and it decided that it would not be doing reverse today. The motor would start moving and then stop. So I stuck my foot out the door and *pushed* while flooring it, and I heard a nice *fooof* sort of noise.  Something ... was burned up.

My motor sounded terrible and I was sure that I had completely ruined it. But for the sake of argument I decided to put my old controller back in. Partly because I wanted to see inside of the new controller. But also because I wanted to see if my motor was trashed. To keep things neat, I spent several hours rewiring the old controllers connections. I did it in a way that I could disconnect it easily, and reattach the new one if I wanted to (without having to go through cutting and crimping anything).

Today I drove my car to work, with the original controller installed.  And hey, I made it! So my motor is not trashed (hooray). Although, I do feel like I am missing about 20% of my torque and speed, so a take-apart of the motor is still in order. But now that I had the old controller out, I tore it apart on my desk at work.

And all I can say is YUCK! Once I broke the water tight seal, the smell was obviously that of burnt plastic. If the smell wasn't telling, the exploded black dust sure as hell was.

Here are some pictures, from before I cleaned it up ...

That silver flat bar is actually T-shaped, and serves as a heat sink to those little black rectangular things that are called MOSFETs.

With the heat sink removed ...

Here is a nice show looking down the inner row of MOSFETs.  Each phase cable for the motor has it's own 8 MOSFETs. These just so happen to be attached to the green cable. So does that mean that something shorted out at the green end on my motor? I'm not sure. All I know is that I tried to go backwards, and literally BLEW IT.

Thankfully the damage to the rest of the controller is superficial.  At least four of the MOSFETs are trashed, but I would never replace only the really bad ones. That's going to be an 8-out replacement. At a cost of $3 to $6 each, this will be a costly repair, for sure. There is also a smaller capacitor to the left of the MOSFETs in that bottom picture with a bowed out top. I am not too worry about replacing that one. A capacitor of that size should be about $0.50.

I believe that my next project will be removing my motor to inspect the inner components.  My friend in China who sold me my controller stopped responding to me when I suggested that I may have blown my motor. I hope he knows that I am not blaming his controller for the problems I am having. This is a really, really, cheaply built car. And this replacement controller is actually very well built.

And I neglected to mention that on the DIY Electric Car forum I had a fellow suggest that some of my accelleration problems are likely due to ... a crappy accelerator (the 'gad pedal'). Most accelerators run a range of 1v to 4.5v where they advertise that they go from 0v to 5v. The controller has to then either adjust for the variance, or otherwise tolerate it. This theory made a lot of sense given the jumpy nature of things.

More to come!  Stay tuned!

Controller Diagram / Schematic, nearly translated!

Hello again friends!  Over the past few weeks, I have made several attempts to get a message through to the folks at Jonway.  This is tough for several reasons.  First, there are so many middle men in the chain that it's hard to find "the guy" that has something technical like a wiring diagram.  Secondly, I don't speak or write in Chinese.  But thanks to Google Translate, I was able to ship off messages to 10 or more people (or generic accounts) and one of them was kind enough to answer me!  Here is the diagram that he provided me.

As you can see - this is a screenshot of an engineering drawing, which was obvious created in China using a simplified Chinese font-set.  I have no chance of translating the smaller text here, because it's just too small to be legible.  No amount of enhancing is going to clear up those little pixel blobs.  I have thanked the sender wholeheartedly, because he is the only one who has helped me this far.  But I also kindly asked if he had something larger to where I could read those little blobs.

In the mean time, I was able to invert this diagram and convert it to a black and white image with Gimp.  Then I was able to scan it with this really nifty OCR site.  From there, I was able to copy and paste the Chinese into Google Translate and pop out the meaning.  Sadly ... some of the characters could not be picked up correctly by the OCR and so some of the translations came out as stuff like "I poke her shirt pole".  And when I was done laughing over that non-sense, I found another nice trick.

This site allows you to draw a Chinese glyph and it will pop up a box of characters for you to pick from.  This is perfect for when you can almost make out a character, but you need a little refinement.  From there ... I was able to make sense of MOST of the diagram.

This is what I have come up with so far ...

The most important thing to me, is the wiring color, which I don't think clearly indicated on this diagram.  Still, this provides some great hints as to how the charger is connected to the controller, and how the shifter should be connected.  I am very close to solving a few wiring mysteries.

Using these same OCR and doodling tricks I also made an attempt to translate the wiring diagram off of the top of the factory stereo.  It was much easier to get to than I thought.  Because when they installed it at the factory they didn't bend those little tabs out to hold the security cage in place.  Grab the front - pull hard - and then you don't have to go under the hood to access your wiring.

I should note that the colors here are relatively worthless.  Because they used different colors to wire it inside of the vehicle!  Oh well?

That's all from me for now folks.  Party on, Urbee owners.

Coming soon - a better manual!  Because he also sent me the manual in PDF form which will allow me to fix up the broken English much easier.

Driving Experience (and a look at my car)

The problem with owning a car this small, and powerless, is that you are lucky to propel yourself uphill on a cold day. Let alone, you and another passenger. The only other human to take a ride in this car with me to date has been my wife. She spent the entire ride grasping what she calls the "oh-sh*t bar" and praying that I wouldn't tip the thing over and kill her. I guess you could say she is not a fan. But a lot of people have asked me a lot of questions about the car and wondered what it's like to buzz around town.

Here is a walk-around of the car to give you an idea of what it looks like, etc.


And then if you want to know what it's like to power down the road (or more so, alleys) in this bad boy, here are some dashboard videos. Note: it's a rough ride (and sorry about the soundtrack)!

In the daylight!


In the EARLY morning!


Some warnings to anyone who might be considering buying one of these things:

• On flat roads, you average around 24mph. Uphill? 11-15mph (depending on how cold it is).
• When going down-hill, the car will prevent you from reach 33mph. At 32mph, it engine brakes and drags you back down to 24mph. Drats!
• While it looks a little like an ATV, it's NOT built like one. You will feel every pothole. The suspension is less than average.
• You cannot do wheelies or take this car on "sick jumps". Any attempt to do so will result in a big bump on your head.

What in the heck is this thing?

A long while ago, I got the idea to get myself an electric car. I have been driving my old Honda Civic because my even older Volkswagen Bug was literally falling apart. And I didn't want to dump a whole lot of money into either car. A lightweight, cheap electric vehicle seemed to be the way to go. There is just one problem ... there is no such thing as a cheap electric car in the United States (we just have to f*ck up everything).

If I lived anywhere in China, or Europe, I could take my pick. But here in the States, I have to settle for the very few vehicles that have been imported. Heck, I would have imported a vehicle myself, if that sort of thing was legal (which it is not). What I found is that there are only a small handful of electric vehicles imported here. And most of those companies have failed. So sure, I could get a 5 year old electric car off of eBay, and start repairing it before I even get to drive it. But I really want something new. Something not yet rusted!

Zap Motors had long ago produced some electric cars (such as the Xebra) and they had a new, even uglier, four-wheeled beast called "the Urbee". Not to be confused with a 3D printed car which is also called "Urbee". But printed right there on the specifications page was "not available in the United States". After a lot of Googling, I found that this car is sold all over in China, and under dozens of different makes and models. And they are not all the same. Many of them have doors that swing the opposite direction, different sized motors, and even some with gasoline engines. 

Then I took some of those images that I had saved off and played the reverse Google image search game. To my surprise, I was actually able to uncover a few dealers in the United States who sell something *like* this car. Note, these are not the same car, but are obviously built from some of the same parts from China.

Something like a Biro?

Suicide doors?

At their roots were a car that resembled a little Italian car known as a Biro. This car was a bit more stylish, had a removable battery pack that rolled out of the back (cool), all clear door panels, very narrow tires, and a hug price tag!

But this car was a different sort of beast, no matter what you call it.

I found two reputable dealers, each with their own version of the vehicle. One, is Mullen Motors, and the other is Atomic Vehicles.  Both of these companies sell their own version of the car, and will likely tell you why their version is better! But make no mistake about it, they are not in cahoots with one another, and they each deal with their own independent suppliers. One of them even had two vehicles on-hand (in red and blue) but the price quote about knocked me over (don't expect these to go 'cheaply').

Luckily, I just happened to find a guy selling one in North Carolina, and he was asking "retail price" for it ($6,000). That's the price I like! And I went right to work buying it. It was sold to me as a Massimo Jonway MSE-220. The seller had bought it from Massimo and had only put 11 miles on it before putting it up for sale in his ATV shop. Don't bother trying to look up this model, you won't find it. And if you ask Massimo about this car, they will tell you that they no longer sell it, and to go away. Fair enough, Massimo. And while the VIN plate says that the car was made by Zap, that may also be a lie. I called and spoke with some engineers with questions about the controller and the motor, and the engineers told me that they hadn't imported these yet. What?

After a few weeks, my vehicle arrived. But I couldn't take it out on the road because I needed to get plates. And I knew this would not be fun.

At the title agency, I slid my "manufacturer certificate of origin" across the counter, and spent the next hour or so arguing with the clerks over the legality of this car. They didn't know the difference between an under-speed vehicle, and a low speed vehicle. In Ohio, if it goes under 20 miles per hour, it's an under-speed class, and you can only drive it on your own land or in some parks. If it goes 21-25mph, it's a low-speed vehicle and it can be driven on public roads where the speed limit it 35mph or less. This is all in Ohio Revised Code, and the Internet, and probably in the big damned binders collecting dust at the title agency. But don't take the laws word for it! Call the main State title office and waste my time!

An hour later, I finally had my title. It was just like any other auto title, except it said "LOW SPEED VEHICLE" in the notes area. Getting plates and registration was easy. And with that, I took to the road!  See my post about "driving experiences".

WELCOME

My Jonway Sightseeing Vehicle - Day 1

Hello friends!

As I scour the Internet, digging for any information on my car (and I mean ANYTHING) it occurred to me that there may be others out there doing the same thing.  Shame on me for not sharing anything myself! While I haven't really amassed much useful information yet, I do have some links, photos, and other things to share about this vehicle. And it's high time I organize this pile of stuff.

If you are a fellow owner of a ... whatever this is ... please comment on my posts, or reach out to me directly.  Perhaps one day we can get a community of owners to come together and form some sort of mailing list.