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Before you begin:

Please take the time to read.

You undertake your project at your own risk.

The information provided on this wiki and the support forums is intended as information only. The Open Inverter project and its contributors take no responsibility for how you use the information contained within these pages, nor any liability for injuries, or death, that may result from your actions.

Developers's time is best spent developing; Support is best found in the forums - Developers of various projects are often bombarded with private messages and emails. Managing these emails and questions is a extremely large undertaking. Please read, and take the time to understand the information available here and across the web if you don't understand a topic. Developers are not your personal support team, unless you want to pay them directly for their time.

Consider donating to the many developers that have made all this possible and to help keep making things possible: www.patreon.com/openinverter, https://www.evbmw.com/, https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/celeron55

Always check the forums, new developments and solutions are coming along every day, questions being answered, or perhaps you can answer. we work better as a community sharing our knowledge...

...update this wiki. Answers and solutions should find their way here so they don't remain buried in a 30 page long support thread. To edit the wiki, login with your forum credentials.

Welcome to the open inverter community

Legalities

• Legalities around conversion projects

Different countries have different legislation, if you want you car to certified for the road in your country please take the time to review this section. It might save you going down the wrong direction and creating something that can never be driven, or incur costs.

Introduction

The open inverter project originates from Johannes Hübner designing/building his own open source AC motor controller, dubbed the "open inverter"

With the rising popularity/availability of hybrid and electric vehicles, there is a growing supply of high quality and relatively inexpensive parts from auto-wreckers.

The main goal of the open inverter community is to reverse engineer many of these components for use in a variety of projects such as:

• EV conversion
• Energy storage
• Power generation
• Charging infrastructure
• etc.

Open inverter projects now span over many different areas surrounding PEV, HEV, and PHEV components, such as:

• Motor Controllers
• 1-3 phase power converters
• DC/DC converters
• buck/boost converters
• Battery Management Systems (BMS)
• Vehicle integration
• etc.

As a result, there is a growing collection of open source software and hardware designed for the never ending list of OEM parts.

There's a variety of methods of repurposing these OEM components. Methods here are generally chosen with future proofing in mind , reducing chances of firmware or software updates from the manufacture "bricking" or blocking the open source control efforts.

such efforts include:

• Mainboard/brain replacement
• CANBUS/LINBUS
• Sync serial
• FlexRay
• PWM
• Sirmware/software reprogramming
• etc.

Resulting in many bespoke boards running the main open inverter software or other open/semi-open source code designed to ether replace OEM motherboards or VCUs.

This has lead to a large collection of different boards and software, many with redundant features. To unify many of these development projects, the community at large is focused on making a set of standard VCUs and replacement control boards which handle the ever growing list of OEM components.

Many of the VCU and replacement boards consist of these 3 main parts:

Hardware	Firmware	Web Interface
The design and development of the control hardware based around an STM32F103 chip. This provides the control signals to the power stage and on to the attached components.	The development of the code that goes on the STM32F103 chips and determines, amongst other things what signals are sent to the power stage and the attached components.	Using an ESP8266 chip, the development of a simple web based interface to adjust the parameters on the firmware chip and to display values returned from the chip, for example motor speed (RPM).

Getting Started

EV conversions:

A few main parts are needed for an EV conversion, such as:

• Motors
• Inverter
• Batteries
• Chargers / Charge Controllers
• DC/DC Converters
• HV Junction Box
• Heaters
• HVAC
• Brake Assist
  • Vacuum Pumps
  • Electronic Brake Boosters
• Power Steering
• Rapid Charging

Existing information on these items can be found on the EV Conversion Parts page.

OEM Parts:

A variety of OEM parts members of the community have reversed engineered for custom use cases:

• BMW
• Chevrolet
• Ford
• Hyundai
• Isabellenhütte Heusler
• Mercedes-Benz
• Mitsubishi
• Nissan
• Opel/Vauxhall
• Tesla
• Toyota/Lexus
• VAG (VW, Audi, Skoda, Seat, Porsche, ...)

FAQ

• Common Inverter FAQ - questions common to all hardware variants
• Tesla Inverter FAQ - questions regarding Tesla Large Drive Units and Small Drive Units

mechanical design database

Designs for:

• adapter plates
• motor couplers
• drive shaft flanges
• battery mounts
• etc.

Open Inverter (Core Project/s)		Open Inverter Related Projects (Control Boards/VCUs)
core universal hardware and software components
ZombieVerter VCU ZombieVerter VCU Web Interface OEM component compatibility		Tesla Small Drive and Large Drive Units: commonly there is a large drive unit and small drive unit available. These combine the inverter and motor into a single package. The control boards for these replace the existing control board within them.
Open Inverter Hardware Hardware Theory of Operation Schematics and Instructions - for the "vanilla" inverter kit. Mini Mainboard Main Board Version 3 Main Board Version 2 Main Board Version 1 Sense Boards Gate Driver Legacy Sensor Board OEM Repurposing
		Lexus GS450h Drivetrain: The GS450h contains a gearbox (where the motors are located). Using the ZombieVerter VCU, the inverter and the gearbox itself provide a powerful set up suitable for rear wheel drive set ups, replacing the existing longitudinally mounted gearbox.
		Prius Generation 3 Inverter: a cheap available inverter from the popular Prius hybrid, this board goes inside that inverter and allows you to control the features of it.
Open Inverter Software Using FOC Software Downloads Features Web Interface Battery Charging Errors CAN communication Parameters (Tune your inverter) Configuration Files Software Theory of Operation Open Inverter Testing		Auris/Yaris Inverter: similar to the Prius board, there's subtle differences between them and therefore the need for a separate board.
		Nissan Leaf Gen2 Board replaces the nissan OEM logic board with a rev 3 openiverter main board
		Ford ranger ev board openinverter kit for the ford ranger ev
		All Control Boards / OEM Inverters
CAN communication Common across boards is the ability to communicate with a CAN Bus, which is a 'control area network' or a technical way of saying how various components, sensors, controls, etc communicate with one another within the car. Read more about CAN Communication There is also a project to standardise the messages across the various control boards, read more
Parameters The openinverter firmware uses a set of about 70 parameters to adapt it to different inverter power stages, motors and position feedback systems. Also it lets you calibrate the throttle pedal, change regenerative braking settings and so on. Parameter definitions can be found here: Parameters Working parameter sets can be found in the openinverter parameter database
Use inverter as a battery Charger Both the open inverter and some OEM inverters can be used as a battery charger, further saving on component costs. You can read more about how the open inverter and the theory of charging here.

Open Inverter CAN std.

• Introduction
• CAN table
• Getting started with CAN bus

Conversion Projects

• VW Polo 86C Conversion
• Touran Conversion
• Audi A2 Conversion
• toyota gt86 nissan leaf motor
• Porsche Boxster 986 Tesla conversion
• Further Projects on the forum