EGO 56V LM2100 Mower Cheap Controller Retrofit

so today i just thought we'd take a look at this ego 56 volt 21 inch lm 2100 mower in a previous video we did some troubleshooting with this mower we do believe that this controller is faulty and these controllers are about 125 or so if you can find them so i want to try this 60 amp controller it's a 48 volt 60 amp and i believe it's going to be a good fit i don't have it in yet but this is my first go-to the 40 amp controller here may work as well and i actually have this little 30 amp controller but the thing about this 30 amp controller is it does go to 70 volts but i just don't think it's going to hold up over time as we see here this this original ego controller the pine on it is so hard now there there is no way to repair this unfortunately so i did decide to take my little dc drive out of the housing that came with it got it mounted to a piece of lexan that i have cut to fit this spot probably 101 ways to do it that's just the way i decided to do so i don't know if i'll keep the variable speed yet or just make it wide open we'll see how it goes as we start doing some testing just drilling a hole here so we can mount this 40 amp relay we might end up needing some higher quality relays but this 40 amp relay here has normally open and only closed so we should be able to use this for braking and take the load off of our start switch that eagle originally had taking care of the braking with that normally closed contact and here i've just attached a jump bin terminal strip to this relay just to make terminations easier here i'm just showing that i got the leds mounted back on the housing and got the um the wires routed around and i soldered in a jst dash sm connector a 2 pin connector i just had a bunch of these connectors so i used them just going to mount the terminal strip here to make it fairly accessible there really wasn't a better place to put it so just going to mount it right here for now i can probably get my short screwdriver in there and here's the push button that i've decided to use for the led lights so to keep the led lights functional even the green part of the power only ready led i'll talk more about this at the end of the video and share a diagram but we're going to keep this part coming on green using our blue and our black wire here and i just drilled holes through here so the push button can go through after we mount this little panel back on and there's a lot of ways you can do this this is the button that i had but i'll share a picture of one similar that actually comes with its own wiring harness if you'd rather just use that instead of soldering these connectors on [Music] i'm just connecting my wires here to this temporary drive that i'm setting up this will be going to our motor this plugs right in this will be our power coming in want to come off by relay and these smaller wires even though they look tiny they're tfe wire so they're high current rating and they'll be perfectly fine to quench the load across the brake our permanent controller will be a little bit bigger but i think we're going to have plenty of room here so this is just our controller power coming from the relay normally open contact so when it energizes it puts power in now i'm just going to hook up the jst connector to our headlights around i might actually do this a little bit neater and take this shroud off with a lot of just empty room there for wiring and stuff so we'll use that for storage it'll be kind of handy let's pop this back on i'll share a little bit of footage later about some of the soldering i did to get um these jsts on there maybe up in one of the corners here so it don't take up so much video time but and i'll share a diagram at the end if you're interested in getting your lights working this one's going to hook up try 12 volts in which i have a dc to dc converter here and i'll just go ahead and show now in the video from the top right corner of what i did to get this little converter the way it is here to the amount you can do it many ways but this is just a dc to dc converter that would take up to 60 volts in and i trimmed it down to 12 volts and we're gonna run our leds off of that that's actually the power from our 12 volts from the dc to dc converter going to our switch so we can engage our lighting and also when the power comes right here to our d3dc converter the green led will come on as well because we have a resistor tied in so we can put 12 volts across that so we still have plenty of room here we just got a little bit of cable management to do and we're getting really close already we do have to tie in i normally close for our break and we gotta tie in where our coil voltage for our relay would be and this is going to control our coal on our relay so if our battery voltage drops below what i have set point to 44 volts it's going to drop that relay out and only activate it if it's above so i have notched out this cover here drilled a hole and just knocked it out so the wiring can go in i should have some spiral wrap to put on these wires when i get through wiring keep it neat and we'll just close it down i've already made sure that this slowboat just cut out board will miss the battery when it closes let's just tie wrap this braking resistor back on here that's how ego had it from the factory and i'm okay with that we'll just tie wrap it back on the side of the motor bolt and get these wires out of the way so we can put our housing back on and just like so we should slide down we just gotta put our screws back down to secure our housing so this is the red coming from our start switch our motor engage switch from ego this switch is rated for high current but we're going to use the relay now so it's going to take a lot of load off of that original oem switch this wire is actually going to go to our break it's coming from our controller minus output and it's going to go to the normally closed of the relay so when it closes or it's released it automatically quenches across the break so this is our wiring back for my low voltage cutout i've marked the labels and as you see here the only modification i've done to this low cutout board as i've added some hot snot some more hot glue just secure the caps and the inductor to the board just to give it some more rigidity as we are going to have a little bit of bouncing open and shutting the lid here so this is more for video this lid when you go to put it on it stops at less than 90 degrees so it falls back down so i'm going to take this and cut this about a 45 degree angle like so and that should allow this lid to hinge back and hopefully stay back out of the way for the video by the way this rod has a groove in it so when you push it through i'll have to take that little cover back off a little e-clip holds that rod from sliding back out so i will put that on at a later time but just so you know if you take yours out it does you do have to have that clip removed from that groove for it to slide out i'm just going to tie in our lobo just cut out i have a plus n and a minus n and then i just have a plus out so we just need to monitor our voltage on our battery level and then output based on that and that's what's going to pull in the coil on our relay to activate the more just going to do a little bit of wiring management here just keep it up out of the way i'm also using these lever nuts made by huego and they're rated over 25 amps and they've been tested well above that but if you want to do something more permanent or terminal strip i understand i'm just going to plug my potentiometer up here and we can slide our cover on snap our side panel back on insert the bag let's see if we can give it a try here there we go [Music] awesome speed regulation works my logo just cut out showing the brake works awesome yep fires back up my green light and just now indicates the mowers having power to come on of course oh my headlights work nice see what the button looks like here i already had this blue one a green one will be even better yeah that life's looking good [Music] [Music] go back now with this mower out the next day ready to test i'm going to cut the speed up around halfway that's down all the way up halfway just playing here i still got to get me some wrap for this the spout wrap i have is too big i'll get some small wrap get my battery in [Music] all we have now is our start button really really low which is really only helpful for direction check on the blade we can cut this one up we'll release and we use our relay to do our breaking now so we've already had the bypass switch we bought it for the handle folding i chose in this instance not to use my switch for the extend because i personally don't care whether this is extended or not it's not going to hurt me so anything you do of course you do at your own risk and it's all up to you how you do yours i chose to leave mine with this man's safety for the start so we are now using our our board for voltage monitoring before we start and then i have this control where i can control it playing around with it until i know for sure how i want to do it so it's very possible you just want to leave this wide open at all times right so if that's the case then we'll just um we'll either hot glue the knob down which is the easiest thing here right or when you're installing it just use that jst connector and just jump jump your power works uh straight on uh max all the time [Music] if we cut this on our lights do work and we get our green led we just turn down really low right now [Music] so we do know with some shortcomings with this design and this was all about testing and i'll share with you in the next part of this video what i learned from it and what i would change for a better design for it but yeah can we get by in a tight you know being thrifty and keeping a good mower running with some pretty cheap and available parts absolutely all this if you choose to do so was done at your own risk there are risks involved with any any type of equipment you're working on modifying or making yourself of course but without risk there's no fun but of course i'm going to be as safe as i can be with this this is going to be my backup more i'm going to always store the battery out of it which you should do with any any device you have kept my my main safety in place and you can even leave this safety gear in place before as well as the fold switch if you really wanted to i didn't have an option without buying one from mine it was already removed here but whatever you feel is best for your situation and even though i don't have any grass to really test it on right now i'm just going to go through these leaves just let you see it working on video and we'll discuss some pros and cons afterwards [Music] [Music] so back now with our 40 amp controller [Music] it does have a little bit of noise to the low end but this controller seems like it it might work okay it does have a built-in pot let's try it one more time breaks well now back with my 50 amp controller and i just have it temporarily mounted here to see how it fits in there but it also has the switch on the potentiometer and it is remote so we could extend that all the way to the handle if we really wanted to or we could just put it back like it would and i am liking the sound of this one a lot better it does fit in here quite well i got the pot mounted back on the cover for now let's see how this works it's a lot bigger but i think this controller here is the way to go [Applause] so not 100 sure about the 48 volt rating but really even most 48 volt lead asset systems will be charged up to like 56 volts when charging so hopefully it's going to be fine and one more time awesome so now i just want to take a few minutes to go with the drawings and these are just preliminary drawings that i come up with just sharing them with you here if you're interested the first one i want to look at is the actual power for the controller and i'll have it up on the screen here just to share it with you you can modify it or whatever you would like hopefully you find it helpful but i do want to share that the um the red wire coming off the 40 amp fuse that i showed going to the uh the 20 amp low voltage cutout that wire is actually not there it's coming through from the start button and the plus on the level just cut out jumps through so that's not a separate contact like i thought when i ordered it that's going to be fine it's still taking load off of that start button the startup current when that nurse is on the load it's actually going to be on the relay contact so it's still helping with that delay of the low voltage cutout coming on so that's going to help and of course that 30 amp controller that i showed on the bottom left here is actually going to be a 50 amp controller that's how i'm going to end up with mine so whichever controller you choose i don't recommend a 30 amp because it's truly only 500 watts when you get to reading about it so 500 watts is not enough to run this motor for long term but that's how i tied my brake in so yeah other than the um that one red wire showing from the fuse to the level of just cut out that's really the main difference of how we ended up so you can print out that drawing and modify it however you would like the next thing i want to talk about is a little bit about the lights in the interest in the lights you can stay tuned for this part so i decided to use that dc to dc converter 60 volts set down right at 12 volts so this is going to be a very stable voltage so i'm using a resistor to limit my current and the calculation here is 12 volts minus the three volts for the green led so it come out to i'm guessing 20 milliamps to calculate what ohm's law here e over i times r so we're going to be somewhere around 450 ohms calculated so i used a 470 ohm resistor i had you know half watt resistor there is fine and as i mentioned our anode is going to the black and the cathode is actually the blue wire this the ego has connected that tricolor led if you're interested in keeping it and like i mentioned earlier in the video you can modify it to turn different colors if you wanted to just add the microcontroller and stuff to it just i want to be straightforward i don't want more complicated stuff when i get ready to cut grass i want to cut grass so as we come on down to the eliminated push button that i added we see it's got a contact point that i'm going over to the headlights and i'm also using the led built into it for this indication that they're on from when you actually operate in the more you can see that it's on or off easy um the headlights there it looked like there was a 12 volts when i tested my mower i think 11.85 volts so i set it at 12 volts and set it and forget it i think they're 2 watt headlights so so there you go if you're interested in doing your likes like so you can use that diagram as well and modify it however you would like so guys thanks so much for watching i hope you enjoyed the video i hope you at least found it helpful as always i'll have links down in the description if you find them helpful for for a project you might be doing or similar retrofit to the ego more feel free to check those out and any link that i share there that you click on does help support the channel through affiliate links and i greatly appreciate it so guys thanks so much for watching and god bless

Channel: Thrifty Tool Shed

Views: 9,253

Keywords: how to, repair, fix, restore, tear down, electronics, hobby, diy, refurbish, restoration, technical, Ego, 56v, lm, 2100, mower, battery, pack, controller, troubleshoot, xt-60, current, fault, dc, motor, test

Id: Kdib1irxq-Q

Length: 22min 45sec (1365 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 15 2022