I've got one of these, and it works great! The core developers behind this work very, very hard on it, and I am amazed that it works to the degree that it does. Like, there are cars on the road running with this VCU.<p>Two weaknesses of the project are spotty / outdated / unclear documentation and support. This is not because the community doesn't care, it's because keeping the documentation up to date is hard. And support is hard, because you have like 3 core commenters on the forum answering 90% of questions. They know the stuff inside out, but they take strain from having to answer 'my hello world is broken' type questions over and over again.<p>It's hard to demonstrate this to software people. You know the endless 'works on my machine' swamps people would get stuck in in the bad old days? Imagine that, but you also have no assurance that the machine the person is using has a hard drive connected, or a cooling fan. You have to cover _all_ the hardware related root causes before you can even begin to address and software related issues people run into.<p>I think the best support this community could get is more resources dedicated to documentation and support. That would also serve to make the learning curve less steep.<p>EDIT: I think it's also worth saying that once you set one of these once, it becomes very easy. It's just figuring it out the first time that's hard. If anyone buys one and has trouble, hit me up and maybe I can help.
I thought “This sounds a lot like the logical next step to what Damien Maguire has been working on” and sure enough it is!<p>This man has been working for years on repurposing old EV hardware and using it to electrify cars, sometimes in really wacky (and extremely entertaining) ways on the Youtube channel “evmbw” - I suggest giving it a watch! Some of the cars are <i>really</i> scrappy, but he obviously knows very well what he’s doing.
Hey, my startup is currently working on something like this.<p>We use a production VCU hardware with custom software and currently support most of the VCU functions you would find in a production vehicle, including in-built CCS2 and NACS charging
on the single controller.<p>We are looking to raise to go to the next stage, would love to hear from potential customers or interested angels?
This is a great resource with pragmatic solutions for reusing commodity EV parts.<p>Worth a read through for folks like me that are mechanically inclined but don’t know/have time to figure out how the various puzzle pieces in an EV “talk” to each other (because of their proprietary nature.)
Given that battery fires and automobile crashes happen, and that there are business and legal cultures around that for <i>stock</i> vehicles...<p>Does this "ZombieVerter" have a high chance of being blamed for an incident involving death/injury or very expensive property damage?
I love the line in one page:
'If you combine a LHD transmission with a RHD inverter (or vice versa) you might end up with a motor that is juddering, not spinning. IN this case you need to swap any two phase cables of both MG1 and MG2. '
It's always a little jarring to me to see a seemingly competently laid out automotive grade PCB, with a cheap as dirt Amazon special D1 mini ESP board lovingly stapled in one corner.<p>Best rating you can get on those ESP modules is "blue PCB".