Locost 7 Upgrade

[KimchiKimKim]

Hi,

I just bought a Nissan leaf 2011 with 75k miles on craigslist for $550 (that actually drives). According to leafspy the battery has 2 bars which I'm really hoping that the BMS is bugging because I have never seen someone with a pack this bad if so. Worse case I got a motor, drive unit onboard charger, dc/dc hvjb, and a ton of extra parts from it like PTC heater and ac compressor. I pulled the entire car apart today and took the parts I needed. The icing on the cake is that pick n pull will buy the shell for $475 in scrap metal (yay!). I will test the battery module on the bench soon but I really gotta clean the garage up first!

Anyways these parts will be put into my first Locost 7 inspired EV project. It's in dire need of an upgrade!

Here is a link to the build video:

I'm also working on another fairly large project so this will be on the side project.

[joromy]

Wow, great project.
I guess you are swapping motor and inverter with openinverter and leaf motor

[janosch]

What a steal. You will make your money back in parts alone, consider taking doors off and selling them separately if you haven't done so. That should cover your costs already.

In terms of battery, I hope you only have 2 - 3 bad modules that you can replace!

Either way, great start to a project.

[KimchiKimKim]

Wow, great project.
I guess you are swapping motor and inverter with openinverter and leaf motor

Exactly! I'm not sure what Im doing for inverter control yet but most likely CAN control but we will see! Might give the logic board route a try too. Either way much more power than I need.

[KimchiKimKim]

What a steal. You will make your money back in parts alone, consider taking doors off and selling them separately if you haven't done so. That should cover your costs already.

In terms of battery, I hope you only have 2 - 3 bad modules that you can replace!

Either way, great start to a project.

I got a quote for the car shell and they will pay me $552 with towing included! They are picking it up on Saturday so got everything else in the car for free.

I'm crossing my fingers on the battery, Thinking about buying an electronic load tester to measure each module's capacity.

[KimchiKimKim]

Update:

Tore down everything to cell level and looked a little at cell voltages through a DMM. Looks like the delta in cell to cell voltage is well within 100mv! The cells are charged to 3.8 ish volts which is super weird since the leaf said the battery had 2 miles of range left in it. I'm thinking that the BMS might have been bugged out of its mind but I also don't know much about the leaf cells or the leaf EV system in general. If anyone can comment on 2011 leaf battery voltages this I would super appreciate it. I'm currently looking around for a proper high current (20ish amp) electronic load to test the actual capacity.

[KimchiKimKim]

Update

currently crying since the battery modules only hold 35ah of capacity. RIP.

I charged to 8.3v and discharge to 6v

Well, the batteries are no good for my EV conversion but at least I can sell them to the powerwall folks.

On a brighter note, I picked up an inverter from Pick n pull for 51 bucks! Its a Toyota gen 3 inverter from 2013 (which has a different PCB than the evbmw PCB as its slighter shorter) well it seems to work great and buzzes a very low inductance BLDC outrunner motor nicely (sadly don't have any big 3 phase motors to try it out on right now)

[Isaac96]

Ouch. 35Ah is no fun. I made a similar mistake, bought modules that were promised at 85% and were about 32Ah.

What did Leafspy show the SOH to be?