Is my Electric Hummer LEGAL?! - Lets do some programming...

throughout the process of making my own electric military humvee one of the questions i've got the most is is this even legal am i allowed to take my electric conversion and drive it around on public roads you see me driving this around in a parking lot it is 100 mobile and ready to go minus the cooling system so it's time to see if we can get legally approved to drive on public roads this video is sponsored by kiwico more on them later let's get started [Applause] [Music] one thing i have going for me that should make this process a whole lot easier is that this beast was registered and insured prior to me taking it all apart so i do have a current title we just have to get that title changed so it better correlates with what's inside the hummer now instead of what used to be there we've changed a lot over the past year and the place we find out for sure is everyone's favorite location the dmv for people outside the united states the department of motor vehicles is where people go to get their vehicles registered now i have talked to them already and they said to bring in the original title plus the receipts of everything i put in along with some pictures of the changes that we've made to the vehicle and yes i have kept receipts for this whole project and i do know how much it costs but my wallet's not ready to talk about it just yet maybe in the next video or the video after that and i'm not gonna film while we're inside since it's a government building and i'm not sure if they're okay with that but we should know in a few minutes if the hummer is gonna be legal so that was infinitely easier than i anticipated it only cost 10 dollars to transition from my old title with the diesel fuel to the new title with electric written right there next to humvee no complaints no safety inspections no extra fees or anything like that just 10 bucks now it's a whole other conversation entirely if that process should be more complicated or not because you know i did just change the entire internal components of a vehicle and i'm still allowed to drive it around right now i mean it's safe but at the same time it is a whole new vehicle but i'm also not really sure how they would do any safety inspections because you know figuring out how an electric vehicle works requires a whole separate skill set than it would with a normal vehicle either way no complaints on my end 10 bucks well spent and now we can officially drive around on public roads there's a few more things i need to do internally though on my own vehicle and that's getting the components to talk to themselves a little bit better right now everything works but there needs to be more communication through the can network i'll get to the can network in a second but first as a celebration for getting the electric title for the humvee i'm going to offer these shirts at the exact same price i've always offered them they fit great look great and have all the specs of the military humvee turned electric the whisper project on the back you might also be curious about insurance since here in the united states you do have to have insurance before you can drive on the road and like i mentioned earlier this was insured back when it was using dyno droplets by a company called progressive and now that is powered by the sun i did call them back up and let them know that i did the ev conversion and changed the fuel type and they said they didn't care in the slightest adding the tesla batteries as the fuel type did not change my insurance at all now does that seem a little too easy i think so but that's what they said and so we're gonna go with it we are now titled and insured and the paperwork is there for us to drive around on the roads i just need to fix a few more things first this project has been super complex and a very educational experience for me hopefully for you as well because i think education is the solution to all the world's problems so while this project is educational and fun for adults it's nice that kiwiko has designed educational and fun projects for children so they can learn the same concepts on a much simpler and fun level like this robots and coding crate designed for kids 5 and up huge thanks to kiwiko for sponsoring this video i'm a huge fan of the way they take hands-on projects and activities to make learning fun each monthly crate from kiwico is designed by experts like industrial designers or aerospace engineers there are eight different subscription lines catering to different age groups and topics from toddlers to teenagers even adults since the crates are a great resource for learning at home and provide hours of educational entertainment my wife and i have been giving them out as birthday presents to our nieces it's fun having different projects every month that expose kids to different concepts in steam science technology engineering art and math like this crate without the right code in place to follow like a can network our little robot friend would get lost very similar to how the equipment in my humvee would be lost without the right guidance in place but explained in a more fun hands-on way for kids to enjoy i'll leave a link down in the description so you can get 30 percent off your first month the kit comes with everything you need for constructive non-digital entertainment kids develop well-rounded skill sets for when problems arise in the future because learning and expanding your mind today does make tomorrow's problems much easier you can use my link for thirty percent off your first month it's down in the description kiwico.com jerryrig in the last video with my military humvee that we've turned electric we were able to leave the garage and do a lap around a parking lot near my house but one thing you don't know is when we went to go turn the key and leave the garage the hummer didn't have enough torque to get over this small little bump in between my lift we had to pause the video get out and program the vcu up the torque so we would be allowed to leave the garage and i'm sure that's not the only setting in here that needs to be set before we can drive around for real so today we're going to be connecting to all the individual components that make this humvee work program them make sure they're all working together should be interesting the first thing we're going to plug into is down here it is the vcu or the vehicle control unit and it's what handles the communication to the motor funny enough it uses a headphone jack and usb cable and we should be able to program everything from my laptop once we have the usb plugged in communicating with this thing is rather weird we have to pick which communication port it's using this usb is plugged into com3 and then once we hit open it brings us up this command window and even with that command window open there's not many people doing this there's not many tutorials online teaching how it's done but we do have jeremy who's built his own electric supercar if you've seen the video on that and luckily he knows how this works so there are quite a few settings that can be changed yeah so we're going to change the max torque it was set at 70 newton meters and with a few clicks of the buttons we are now set at 700. so it is super easy once you know how it works i just have no idea how it works inside of the vcu as well is where you set the regen or how much power is able to go back into the battery as you're slowing down using the vehicle's weight and momentum to recharge the batteries we can set the throttle sensitivity as well as the rpm range of the motor so if i want to put it into valet mode or something i can limit the rpms to 2000 instead of 6000 and that would keep people from taking this for a joyride at full power so another thing this car has that my car doesn't have is it's got an acceleration limit so you can actually dial in the amount of torque you want per second so you will not spin your wheels when you don't want so with the vcu set and our torque maxed out let's move on to the screen which has another cable of its own this is more of a printer style cable with a usb port all of these different pieces of equipment are communicating with each other via a can network which i'll talk more about in a second we're just programming them right now one thing that you probably didn't notice during the first drive video is that my screen is only displaying half of the information the half it gets from the bms showing battery capacity and amps being used but nothing with relation to the motor or inverter they're not communicating correctly so i reached out to andromeda the manufacturer of the display and they were recently bought out by a company called aptera motors they make a solar powered teardrop shape electric car that can go a thousand miles and that might be a story for a different day but they sent me a new skin and added my motor and inverter's frequency the one it uses to communicate with other objects on the can system and now it should be able to communicate with my display and accurately show you know the motor temperature and miles per hour which is kind of important when driving around so right now we are off the ground the motor is turned on we are in neutral with the transfer case so just the motor will spin but not the tires and that is true and it is showing us how many amps we're using which is barely nothing because just the motor is turning its own weight in the parking lot i saw this number get up to about 100 amps when we were accelerating hard and the motor's capacity at peak is 500 amps so we still have a long way to go and a lot of testing before we max this thing out another thing i'm hoping gets changed is right now everything is in amp hours we have a state of charge of 80 percent but most electric vehicles these days like the ford mustang machi the rivian and even teslas all communicate with kilowatt hours and display battery capacity in watts so while amps gets the point across i still want this to be like other electric vehicles so we'll see if this skin fixes it so to get my skin working i come over here we are working with the evic 7 now with the screen flipped over and turned on should load for a second nice so it looks like the skin has taken but now we're not reading anything from the bms or the motor so we have a bit more programming to do one step forward two steps back [Music] so once we're plugged into the inverter we have another set of data points that we can program right now you can see what the temperatures are how many volts we have how much torque we're pulling and if we go in here to the system configuration we have the ability to set torque profiles for how much torque is being provided at a certain rpm i'm going to leave these all standard for right now what we want to adjust is here in the can bus settings and we want to move the baud rate to 500 so we can match the screen and the vcu and with that done it should be set and now for the bms or battery management system this also plugs directly into the can network via usb and already is communicating through that 500 baud rate the bms is in charge of everything related to the battery you know how much power is coming or going whether it's charging or going to the motor as of right now we can see every single individual cell and what voltage they're currently at along with temperature there's a lot going on inside of the bms now that we have the inverter vcu screen and bms all communicating at the same frequency everything should function correctly next time we leave the garage which i'm not going to do today because it is getting warmer outside and i'm still worried about the motor overheating but that also means it's warmer inside of the garage and it shouldn't take me long to add the cooling system remember the way all of these components are talking to each other is through the can network which is actually pretty simple there's two wires connecting each of the components from the inverter to the vcu to the display to the bms and the charger and it doesn't matter which order they're in as long as the two wires the high and the low are connected to all of them somewhere in that tree the two little wires can branch off anywhere inside of that loop and as long as all of those components are communicating at the same frequency or baud rate they can all understand each other and get along you know it's their own little language of sorts but let's say the screen was communicating at 250 and everything else was at 500 the screen would get all lonely and stuff because nothing can see where it's at and nothing can communicate with it reminds me of a fairly sad story there's actually a whale right now swimming around in the ocean that can't communicate at the same frequency of other whales and so it's just kind of singing to itself i know it's a sad story and there's really no way to fix a biological baud rate and i'm not really sure where i'm going with that but lucky for us this project is all communicating well together and i think we've accomplished quite a lot today this 27 year old military humvee is now a legally electric vehicle the next video in this series will probably be the liquid cooling at the moment we do have all the liquid cooling set up inside of the battery modules we just have to string it together and get the liquid flowing through everything else so hit that subscribe button if you haven't already turn on notifications come hang out with me on instagram and twitter and thanks a ton for watching i'll see you around

Channel: JerryRigEverything

Views: 1,103,664

Keywords: electric hummer, electric humvee, electric hmmwv, electric conversion, legal conversion, DMV, electric conversion legal, cybertruck, tesla, rivian, ford lightning, electric truck, electric motor, diy ev, EV truck

Id: r0znjWhAhY4

Length: 14min 8sec (848 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 31 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/ZacksJerryRig]

That man is gorgeous.