openinverter forum

after Kevin giving me the idea to use a LS600H awd gearbox for my subaru awd project,
im wondering if anybody have worked on the inverter,
its the highest output mg2 i have come across 221HP/300NM

best regards
Martin

https://www.diyelectriccar.com/threads/ ... er.200883/

and the follow-up:

viewtopic.php?f=14&t=205

The implications are that it -might- work out of the box with the gs450h board & software - and almost certainly that it will run with the 450h board.

Inverter wiring diagram (LHD):
Seems practically identical to the gs450h system, indeed. If the control protocols are indeed the same...

Gearboxes should be the same, other than the LF1A transfer case attachment at the end.

Lwerewolf wrote: ↑Tue Jul 28, 2020 10:31 pm https://www.diyelectriccar.com/threads/ ... er.200883/

and the follow-up:

viewtopic.php?f=14&t=205

The implications are that it -might- work out of the box with the gs450h board & software - and almost certainly that it will run with the 450h board.

Inverter wiring diagram (LHD):

ls600h lhd.jpg

Seems practically identical to the gs450h system, indeed. If the control protocols are indeed the same...

Gearboxes should be the same, other than the LF1A transfer case attachment at the end.

output 220hp for the LS600H
its 197hp for the GS450h

but seems like control will be the same

The chances of the HTM and MTH data being the same for different units is going to be pretty much zero. It is highly unlikely that Toyota did not find improvements over the GS450h unit. Physical aspects such as the IGBT cooling were greatly improved, I can't see the serial data being the same. It would be nice, though.

But by all means, it's worth a shot. the GS450h VCU outputs the MTH/HTM/CLK/REQ signals, as long as the levels are correct, it should work fine from the hardware side.

If the data packet contents are different between the two cars, the only "real" way to figure them out is to get hold of a drivable LS600h.

xp677 wrote: ↑Wed Jul 29, 2020 5:53 pm If the data packet contents are different between the two cars, the only "real" way to figure them out is to get hold of a drivable LS600h.

Correct, but I still have some hopes:

viewtopic.php?f=14&t=205#p2182

Transmission data are 80 bytes, reception 100 as far as I remember for the GS450h/LS600h. The last 2 bytes are the checksum over all data bytes.

viewtopic.php?f=14&t=205&start=10#p2217

Data stream is different for the RAV4h because it has 3 inverters, one additional for the rear axle motor and a built-in 12V DC/DC converter.

hilux_hx's last post is from before you managed to figure out the packet format, so him not sharing the format doesn't rule out the possibility of them being the same. At any rate, it is very likely that I'll be getting one soon-ish. I'm hopeful

Cars are just way too similar with regards to their wiring diagrams...

Yes, it would be good if you're able to confirm compatibility.

Sure is great when people don't share on the "OpenInverter" forum.... Makes life much more interesting.

Yeah, it would be nice to know the results if someone has already done the work, rather than have to figure it out for ourselves.

I don't have access to a LS600h, and I'm currently in the process of moving workshop, but am happy to help out here wherever needed, and should be up and running again sometime in September.

Jack Bauer wrote: ↑Thu Jul 30, 2020 12:37 pm Sure is great when people don't share on the "OpenInverter" forum.... Makes life much more interesting.

I'm happy to start removing people who actively work against the OI ethos... they have plenty of other forums to post support for closed solutions.

Uhh... if you look at the thread, a ton of information was shared:
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=205
I wouldn't attribute this to malice.

Lwerewolf wrote: ↑Fri Jul 31, 2020 2:33 pm I wouldn't attribute this to malice.

I think the intension is clear;

hilux_hx wrote: ↑Mon Jul 29, 2019 12:12 pm With Bigmouse his help we got the transmission / inverter running with our own control module.

Right, it's not exactly the nicest when people don't share what they've discovered or built.
However, it's a universal tendency -- once something's done, you no longer need help with it, so there is no real incentive to post the solution. This shows up on every forum I've ever been on (all 4 of them).

I hope we can encourage people to share solutions more often, but I wouldn't go so far as to suggest banning those who haven't gotten around to it yet.

-Isaac

Isaac96 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 31, 2020 6:04 pm I hope we can encourage people to share solutions more often, but I wouldn't go so far as to suggest banning those who haven't gotten around to it yet.

We started this forum with the intension of doing things differently. If you don't want to share then my advice is to go somewhere else. Feel free to start a thread to discuss this if you wish.

Just as a heads-up, I finally ordered an ls600h inverter, should be able to provide info in... 2-3 weeks, hopefully. Sorry for the delay, other things took precedence

A bit about the part numbers - g9200-500(11/21) - resp. (lhd/rhd) don't show up on toyodiy or the EPC app, I assume they're a very early production model or something. I ordered a g9200-50011. Now to secure wiring before it arrives.

Lwerewolf wrote: ↑Fri Oct 02, 2020 12:58 pm Just as a heads-up, I finally ordered an ls600h inverter, should be able to provide info in... 2-3 weeks, hopefully. Sorry for the delay, other things took precedence

A bit about the part numbers - g9200-500(11/21) - resp. (lhd/rhd) don't show up on toyodiy or the EPC app, I assume they're a very early production model or something. I ordered a g9200-50011. Now to secure wiring before it arrives.

nice looking forward to it

Arrived today (well, yesterday), still haven't gotten around to wire it up. I think I'll end up rearranging the terminals on the stock wire harness, hopefully without breaking the harness-side inverter connector housing, as it's unobtainium, as others here have found out. Then it's a matter of connecting the MGs to the inverter, since the 450h lances "slide in", whereas the 600h (and most other Toyota hybrids) are a bolt-together affair. I have my old blown inverter laying around, so I can use the, uhh... connector and resolver box to get something to bolt on to, but I haven't decided on (and found out) where to get cables & crimp terminals from. At any rate, it'll be a "does it run" setup, but that does include highway speeds and full throttle applications, in order to check whether the engine maintains revs as before - the ls600h keeps the engine below redline until >200kph, whereas the GS hits redline at around 140 - yes, this is a 4th gen gs, but the 3rd gen displays pretty much the same behaviour - other than the redline being 6400rpm and being reached a few kms above - backwards rotation limit on MG1... so if I have to guess, the l110(f) transmission might not have enough power to transmit the ls600h engine (2ur-fse)'s output at lower MG2 RPMs.

Just for the record, the GS wiring (I posted the LS wiring in one of my first posts in this thread):

Opened the inverter in order to repin the 40pin connector, as the wire harness-side connector is, well... let's say that I uhh "broke" it without really breaking it, and I gained a glimpse of the insides . You have to insert your "SST" in the depin hole and push "downwards" to free a terminal from the retainer - this is after you've gotten the retainer at "half lock" (i.e. per-pin individual lock), of course. Repinning the inverter makes switching between the GS and LS inverters way easier and safer (no rearranging 37-ish terminals every time), anyways.

At any rate, put the inverter on top of the original inverter, connected only the 40pin connector (i.e. no MG/Battery/AC connected), put the car in "accessory" mode (everything but the HV system running) - "check hybrid system". Reader - "p0a0d". There's an interlock plug in the battery connector, whou would've thought to check . At any rate - shorted that, cleared the code, car stopped complaining. My laptop needs to charge so I used hybridassistant to check whatever I could - basically the IGBT temperatures for mg1 and mg2 - and they were at 20 and 21 deg. C respectively - same as my house's room temperature. Outside was 11deg. C, engine was 16deg. c, HV (the battery) was reported around that range too. I have "motordata - hybrid" as well, which can read out everything from the HV ECU, but I forgot to use that... ah well.

Next up - up-sizing some fuses (to match the ls600h wiring diagram), connecting the MG harness to the inverter somehow, plumbing coolant, connecting AC & battery, testing.

So far, I'm very hopeful

Lwerewolf wrote: ↑Sat Oct 17, 2020 3:55 am Opened the inverter in order to repin the 40pin connector, as the wire harness-side connector is, well... let's say that I uhh "broke" it without really breaking it, and I gained a glimpse of the insides . You have to insert your "SST" in the depin hole and push "downwards" to free a terminal from the retainer - this is after you've gotten the retainer at "half lock" (i.e. per-pin individual lock), of course. Repinning the inverter makes switching between the GS and LS inverters way easier and safer (no rearranging 37-ish terminals every time), anyways.

At any rate, put the inverter on top of the original inverter, connected only the 40pin connector (i.e. no MG/Battery/AC connected), put the car in "accessory" mode (everything but the HV system running) - "check hybrid system". Reader - "p0a0d". There's an interlock plug in the battery connector, whou would've thought to check . At any rate - shorted that, cleared the code, car stopped complaining. My laptop needs to charge so I used hybridassistant to check whatever I could - basically the IGBT temperatures for mg1 and mg2 - and they were at 20 and 21 deg. C respectively - same as my house's room temperature. Outside was 11deg. C, engine was 16deg. c, HV (the battery) was reported around that range too. I have "motordata - hybrid" as well, which can read out everything from the HV ECU, but I forgot to use that... ah well.

Next up - up-sizing some fuses (to match the ls600h wiring diagram), connecting the MG harness to the inverter somehow, plumbing coolant, connecting AC & battery, testing.

So far, I'm very hopeful

nice work buddy

I guess this is the better place to post this (i.e. not the gs450h inverter temperature thread thingy).

At any rate, first try was a failure.

The inverter fits somewhat. Following notes are for LHD cars:

I used my old blown inverter's water inlet/outlet pipes (they're pressed into the main casting - just... "wiggle" them out) as 90deg. coolant hose joints, in order to use the otherwise stock coolant plumbing. The gs450h's inverter "cage" (the thing to which the power steering ECU/inverter is mounted to) obviously won't let the ls600h inverter fit (since it's a bit "wider"), but removing it and mounting the EPS ECU straight to the car's body does work (the ECU bolts to the chassis anyways - the bracket just has holes and a bit of support on one side). The fuel pipe heading into the HPFP gets pushed against said HPFP by the battery connector - solvable by either removing the noise insulation covers off the HPFP (they're stock on the ls600h, not stock but present on some 2GR-FSE-equipped cars - there's a TSB for "ticking" noise), or by rotating it - it's the rubber portion that is curved to almost a full circle, can be fitted to "curve" to the other side.

Inverter outputs when viewed head-on are W-U-V on both the ls600h and gs450h inverter - checked via techinfo.toyota.com, I also have an EU-spec ls600h manual. The difference is that the generator output is on the inside (relative to the center of the car) for the ls600h,and on the outside for the gs450h.

Battery and AC connectors are the same. The wiring diagram indicates that the AC's positive and negative poles are swapped, but I simply do not see how that can be the case, given that the assembly that has the battery & AC connectors, the AC fuse (450v 40a) and the connecting bus bars is the same between both inverters (checked) - either I'm missing something, or the LS (or maybe it's the GS?) wiring diagram is wrong on that account (EDIT: the GS diagram & DTC troubleshooting pages appear to be wrong in this regard - AC pinouts are reversed).

I used H07V-K 35mm2 cables with crimped copper terminals - 1 meter in length - to connect the inverter's terminals to the old blown inverter's MG connectors housing - I use it as an interface between the slide-in-style gs450h connectors and the bolt-on ls600h terminals. No shielding implemented.

What happpened - p0a78-306 and p0a7a-344 are set when the car attempts to "start the engine" (which is all the time when engine coolant temperature is <40deg. C - engine warmup, catalyst lightoff, etc). The "ready" light does light up for a second, then the DTCs are set right as the car attempts to crank the engine - the cranking itself sounds/looks just like when the car is set in "compression check mode" (i.e. disabled engine fuel supply and ignition).

p0a78-306 (for mg2) and p0a7a-344 (for mg1) both indicate "Motor(mg2)/Generator(mg1) torque execution monitoring malfunction" - "If the difference between the requested (MG1/MG2) torque and the actual (MG1/MG2) torque exceeds a predetermined value, the MG ECU determines that there is a malfunction in the execution or monitoring of the (MG1/MG2) torque. Then, the hybrid vehicle control ECU will illuminate the MIL and set a DTC."

The MG ECU is built into the inverter, from what I've read from the few internal presentations on the evolution of Toyota's hybrid system that I could find - there are a few more on scribd but they don't seem to want to take my money... ah well. My guess is that the MG ECU is the thing with which the HV ECU (the hybrid vehicle ECU - basically the orchestrator) is communicating via the HTM/MTH USART lines.

Unfortunately, neither DTCs' freeze frame data includes MGx exec/actual torque values, or RPMs... actually, there's just about nothing inverter related in the freeze frame data. Attempting to log the event manually wasn't much of a success - from what I gather, techstream's "snapshot" recording function doesn't run on the ECU itself, so I'm left with the relatively atrocious "few frames per second" sampling rate that I get with an adapter. Good news is that what I saw from that was promising - proper pre- and post-boost voltages are reported, motor/generator RPMs seem in line with what was expected (the engine doing maybe a single revolution and then stalling back-and-forth - tiny RPM fluctuations in mg2, somewhat larger in MG1), torque request/exec values seem "decent" too...

Not sure what to make of this. One possibility is the lack of shielding on the MG extension harness thing that I made - might be fooling the CTs, given that MG1 & MG2 cables are pretty much mixed with each other due to the way that the old inverter breakout box is arranged:
Top (original MG harness side): (MG2-W MG2-U MG2-V MG1-W MG1-U MG1-V)
Bottom (inverter internal side): (MG2-W MG1-W MG2-U MG1-U MG2-V MG1-V)
Another possibility is that I didn't repin something on the inverter connector properly - will recheck. Given the amount of care I gave that, I kind of doubt it, but we'll see.
Yet another possibility is being mislead by the wiring diagram (the AC pinout still comes to mind).
Could also be a different motor magnet/winding/etc configuration leading to "unexpected" (to the inverter) torque values.

Re: whether it works or not with the controller board - I'd say that there's a high probability that it does, given that it did at least attempt to spin the engine in the right direction

I think that's all I have to report for now, questions and insight are always welcome. Plan moving forward is to attempt to depin the MG 3 phase harness (seems possible) and convert it to a bolt terminal (nondestructively), check the wiring diagrams and the various DTC pages for every little thing again, etc, etc.

Thanks for the hard work. And for sharing the results.

Lwerewolf wrote: ↑Sat Oct 24, 2020 5:05 pm The MG ECU is built into the inverter, from what I've read from the few internal presentations on the evolution of Toyota's hybrid system that I could find - there are a few more on scribd but they don't seem to want to take my money... ah well. My guess is that the MG ECU is the thing with which the HV ECU (the hybrid vehicle ECU - basically the orchestrator) is communicating via the HTM/MTH USART lines.

Correct. The "MG ECU" is the microcontroller on the control board within the inverter casing.

Lwerewolf wrote: ↑Sat Oct 24, 2020 5:05 pm Unfortunately, neither DTCs' freeze frame data includes MGx exec/actual torque values, or RPMs... actually, there's just about nothing inverter related in the freeze frame data. Attempting to log the event manually wasn't much of a success - from what I gather, techstream's "snapshot" recording function doesn't run on the ECU itself

Techstream/TIT pulls data from the HVECU. At least on the GS450h, there is no "outside" communication possible via the synchronous serial port, the only communication allowed to the inverter is via the microcontroller in the HVECU.

The MTH packet for the GS includes torque, rpm, position, inverter temp, bus voltage, and some other data. The HVECU passes this on.


If you're looking to reverse engineer the serial data (to allow the inverter unit to be used in electric vehicles) and you have a complete car, the easiest way is to put a logic analyzer onto HTM-, MTH-, CLK-, REQ- wires, leave everything else alone, and drive the car as normal, while recording the data. I found it helpful to record a video of me doing this, so you can "line up" various events (accelerating, etc) with the data.

It's very likely that the data is near identical to the GS450h, so by using the code from the GS450h VCU, you can likely solve this problem from both ends!

I'm off work for the next few weeks, if you are able to send me a (understandably huge) data dump, I might be able to help out.

Edit: not sure if it's much help, or if it's been posted before, but here's a teardown/evaluation of this unit: https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/947393

I know that there's no (official ) way to get data from the serial lines externally, I thought that the "snapshot" feature was a time-limited (well, memory-limited) internal recording mode of the ECUs that can be communicated with - engine, HV, abs/vsc/trac, etc - basically internal logging, so that you don't rely on the obd2 adapter readout speed - the best one that I have (some OTC thing that can't run half the utilities but reads HV ECU data fast) has a refresh rate of about 4hz on HV ECU data, which is very insufficient for catching this condition

I've seen all the ORNL teardowns, the original diyelectriccar thread, I think all the gs450h discussions here (communicating, support thread, buck/boost, connectors, etc, etc), the service manuals, so on.

For context, I'm not trying to build an EV (yet), I'm trying to replace the inverter in a stock EU-spec LHD 3rd gen gs450h (gws191l) with an ls600h unit - they share the same transmission (well, one has the LF1A transfer case at the rear). Reasons are listed here:
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=776
tl:dr - anything without IGBTs with double-sided cooling seems to be blowing up a lot (3rd gen gs450h, rx400h, ct200h, hs250h, pre-gen4 prius, etc), whereas I've only found somewhat obscure evicence of one (rx450h) inverter failure of the newer design (started with ls600h, then 450h, then 4th gen gs450h/gs/is/rc300h, etc). More details on why mine is not in a great shape - in the thread linked above, I've gone way too off-topic

At any rate, next up is connecting the MG cables to the 450h inverter the same way that I did to the 600h - need to fabricate "blade to screw terminal" copper adapters for that. Hopefully that will net me the same codes. After that, I guess I'll have to fabricate a shielded "adapter" from the 450h to the ls600h inverter - the blades are 13mm x 2mm, haven't found anything like that for sale anywhere - Yazaki does list something mostly identical, but the blades are 9.5mm in width. Guess I'll have to fabricate female connectors out of bent copper pipes or something.

So you'll be using the HVECU from the LS600h as well, or the original GS450h unit? Either way, you're in for a headache. Let me know your plans, it sounds interesting.

gs450h HV ECU. There are DTCs for Engine and HV ECU mismatch in the manual, plus the ls600h's engine has a different powerband and is resp. kept at different revs, so I'm guessing that an ls600h HV ECU won't work - this assumes that the ECU takes care of orchestrating the CVT aspects.

Plans are as I noted above - make a proper "adapter" for the GS harness to connect to the LS inverter terminals, see if it still throws the "throttle monitoring" DTCs - I imagine the CTs don't really like the two motors' cables coiling around each other without any kind of shielding... or something like that.

Other than that, I've been meaning to ask this for some time:
https://github.com/damienmaguire/Lexus- ... 50h_v7.ino

Code: Select all

    //speed feedback
    speedSum=mg2_speed+mg1_speed;
    speedSum/=113;
    htm_data[0]=(byte)speedSum;
    htm_data[75]=(mg1_torque*4)&0xFF;
    htm_data[76]=((mg1_torque*4)>>8);

I don't recall seeing this mentioned anywhere. Any clue as to what it is? I'm guessing it's something calculated off of driveshaft/wheel speed.

It will be interesting to see if the two ECUs from different cars are able to communicate with each other. I doubt it, but would love for it to be so!

In the code you quoted, the first 3 lines are just data fed back from the MTH packet. I guess as a sort of safety check, to ensure that the HVECU has received the speed information somewhat correctly.

The last two lines should be in the section below, for the MG1 torque command.

The source of the speed signals is the motor resolver, via the MGECU (inverter) as part of the MTH packet. You can see this earlier in the code:

MG2 speed is an appropriate place to get vehicle speed from. I wrote some extra code for this for my project, but I'm not sure if I mentioned it:
Stick the defines at the top, and the 3 lines of code within the if(mth_good).