openinverter forum

Top Tip: for liberating old stubborn rubber hoses from metal hose ends, cut them length wise with a sharp box cutter blade and split them open

my ground breaking progress continued

and removing the glued on plastic underneath that black metal strip required my level of precision

I decided to labelize ("Add" and "Subtract") these bus bar thingies as Damien likes to flip the Inverter upside down from time to time to make things interesting in his videos, this is where we will connect our electron hoses later on

duplicate

again

what is wrong with me

can you guess who this is from? I'll give you a hint, have you ever heard of the Gnome Cat?

So this is what I was expecting... the pic is a bit misleading as it pictures the 40 pin connector header thingie, yet on his website it states "Enclosure and connectors NOT supplied." again absolutely no complaint here just an observation and a clarification for anyone following along, that's all.

and this is what I got...

I do realize there is a parts/components shortage, this is more of an "observe and report" than a rant or a complaint, I am truly grateful to have gotten anything at all considering the circumstances, I am also very happy to see that he already soldered on the USB port for me

Missing is only the small black 5 volt switch mode regulator

FYI the shipping from Ireland to California took exactly precisely 2 weeks to the day

with the electronics parts shortage, I had to find an alternative to the Cinch 40 pin connector and I gotta admit I now know way more about connector pitches and number of pins and pin positions and rows than I care to admit, ha ha

Meet "Mo" short for Molex, part number 348302001 this is that original 40 pin header's long lost cousin, on it's mother's side, so it still takes the same 33472-2001 plugs believe it or not

and I am pleased to report that with zero effort on my part, meaning having soldered nothing to the board myself, as you can see the WiFi adapter is just laying along side of the PCB we can talk to the VCU via a USB cable and the Arduino free software called IDE, which stands for a fancy text editor on steroids and a compiler, Integrated Development Environment

you are welcome to Google Arduino or watch me try to ride that Bronco in a companion thread called Any Isabellenhütte IVT-S Ninjas on here?

Essentially we are simply using the free Arduino IDE software as a Terminal Emulation program to serially talk to our VCU since some companies decided to no longer include a perfectly good Terminal Emulation software in their Windows Operating System [yes I'm looking at you Microsoft]

so yeah it's as easy as point and shoot, just make sure your Arduino software knows which COM port to look for the VCU on like so
and then dial in your Baud rate (pronounced: how many symbols we can send per second)
and if we type ? and hit enter we get the Menu
the menu is case sensitive so lower case d gives us the received data from the inverter

Door Key
Piano Key
Digi-Key

isn't this the most inefficient and wasteful packaging ever?

and here are the other components I bought to complete the VCU build, an enclosure and two plugulators

so the first thing I checked was the plugulators, and quickly realized HUSTON We Have A Problem

the gray plug seems to be keyed slightly different and won't go over the 20 pin connector, the black one matches it perfectly

What to do? What to do?

Well we could order another black plug, but then it would be hard to tell them apart and we risk plugging them into the wrong connectors!

five minutes later...

next the twins needed a little attitude adjustment

fitment by a 1,000 cuts

no peg, no problem

the pins aligned perfectly no tweaking necessary

wait what? your brother want's to join too

10 minutes later...

let's try that on for size... that looks gooder