Will My Electric Hummer Motor Spin?! - DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE!

behind me is a 1995 military humvee that we're turning into an electric vehicle keep in mind that when we're done this thing is going to be just as powerful if not more powerful than the hummer h1 alpha which was the pinnacle of the hummer h1 back in 2006. the difference between the hummer h1 and the military humvee is that the humvee was made for the military and there were about 280 000 of them made while the civilian version the h1 hummer only had about 11 818 they were made popular by arnold schwarzenegger the h1s are kind of considered the manliest of manly vehicles which is why we want to turn it electric we're going to take the gas guzzling military machine and bring it into the modern era you've probably already watched the videos of us removing everything like the old engine and you've probably seen us install the new electric drivetrain like the electric motor the torque box the transfer case and the inverter we've also done the 12 volt system which handles the headlights and the power steering so if you're not caught up on everything you can check out those videos or in this video we're going to start with the high voltage stuff some electric cars like tesla's are totally silent but i'm kind of hoping my electric humvee will sound more like one of these formula e race cars [Applause] should be a pretty interesting video let's get started [Applause] [Music] so apparently you need more than one pedal to drive a vehicle luckily we have that problem solved with this guy this is an electric gas pedal or accelerator pedal that we can connect straight to the vcu which i'll show you in a second a couple things i like about this is that it's a variable pedal it's kind of like a switch instead of just being off and on though it works by sending a 5 volt signal to the vcu sending nothing when it's not compressed and sending 5 volts when fully floored as well as inside it has double springs so if it's ever compressed it can always decompress and come back out because an accelerator pedal that's always floored would be a very bad thing with this much power this is what the old pedal looked like which is sitting right here in this crevice but obviously we can't use it anymore because there's no electronics attached to it [Music] and the new pedal lucky for us is about the same width and is going to fit in pretty much the same spot [Music] and now we should be able to accelerate and break so as we're making this electric vehicle there's a lot of parts that need to work together and the thing that makes them all work together is called a vcu or a vehicle control unit a vcu doesn't need to be large this little guy right here is super tiny but it is also mighty i'm not sure where that came from and it's what controls the throttle the brakes the forward neutral reverse pretty important it's also what controls the high voltage and the contactors and that's where things get dicey luckily we have jeremy here who's done this before so he has built an entire tesla roadster almost in his garage which is pretty impressive i've done a whole video about that if you want to check that out what is a contactor so in the simplest form contactor is a switch so uh takes voltage and essentially closes the switch so the high voltage can run across so if i got this straight we'll have the high voltage running to one side and then the motor and the inverter connected off of the other side correct yes so we'll be mounting the vcu up underneath the dashboard and about this area here [Music] so the brains is mounted and we should be able to do wire management from here as well as this top corner on the other side [Applause] eventually we'll have all the wires managed very well right now is not that time powering the vcu is done with the 12 volt system using that car battery that we have running all of the other low voltage components it's plugged into a fuse on my control panel with wires running across the vehicle under the dock house and into the cab i'll put all these wires in a wire loom you know for protection once i know everything is working i'll also be running a few of these vcu signal wires over to the inverter so it can control the forward reverse and throttle once those inputs are sent through that small vehicle control unit jeremy is soldering the plug for those little wires the plug is water tight with a rubber seal and connects to little pins inside of the inverter okay so we have the throttle officially wired up to the vcu remember that's underneath here we also have the inverter that guy which changes the dc power from the batteries into ac batteries aren't wired up yet they're over here and that is all powered with the key in the ignition we have communication inverter voltage too low it's probably because we don't have any batteries attached to it but that is progress now the brains of the electric vehicle is talking to us and we can get everything else figured out we'll see if the throttle works so now if i compress the throttle okay so let's throttle now three okay compressed all the way yeah four point eight three oh sweet okay do it halfway one point three seven yes all right we've got the i'm gonna turn this off we still have not gotten the power steering quiet but we now have the throttle communicating the inverter communicating how does it feel step one yeah doing good what's cool with this is like each thing is like a series of problems like it took us we had to troubleshoot like four different steps to get the throttle working because like there's just so many variables going on but it's fun it is fun so right now we are going to connect the ac high voltage lines that go from the inverter to the motor and the high voltage lines might look a little sketchy because they're big and they're orange but right now there's no power flowing through them so we are safe to work on everything uh the only thing we would have to worry about is when the batteries are connected then we have to make sure there's no power flowing through the cables before we start touching stuff ac lines of the motor are installed now we have to connect them to the inverter there's a rubber washer for the seal and lastly we have the dc cables that are coming from the battery that is a lot of orange one cool thing about both of these plates though is that there's a high voltage interlock meaning that if the connection is broken or the plate is taken off power won't flow through these cables so you can see on the back of this plate is a little nub which presses down on this switch here and stops power from flowing we have the boxes laser cut we have the motor connected to the inverter and now we're going to skip a couple steps and start wiring together batteries this isn't exactly what we're supposed to do we're supposed to have the bms all connected but we want to make sure that the motor turns before we get too far we have some help with jacob and jeremy today and to get the batteries connected we're going to use these these are nickel coated copper bus bars with a insulated orange coating on top should look pretty cool when we're done so we've laser cut the boxes in a way that seven modules fit on this plate and seven modules will fit in the passenger seat on either side of the humvee and we'll have another box there in the center but in order for the hummer to spin the motor needs at least 250 volts and so we're going to wire together 10 or 11 of these modules because each one of them is about 24 or 25 volts all by itself and if we wire them in series the voltages will add up and give us about 250 volts to turn the motor as always current is dangerous and so we're taking as many steps as possible to keep the current from flowing through us one of which is wearing rubber gloves these things are good up to 1000 volts pretty cool and when we need them we have insulated tools as well as insulated sockets which once again help keep the current from flowing through us so [Music] now that we have seven of these modules wired together let me explain what's going on each of these are wired in series meaning that the positive of one battery is connected to the negative of the other batteries adding up the voltage as it goes along so this battery right now is at 24.6 volts added up with this battery at 24.6 volts all the way to the end which means that all of these batteries added up is 172.2 volts which is an incredible amount of voltage but still not enough to turn the motor on the humvee we have a few more to go [Music] [Music] with 11 battery modules all wired in series each being 24 volts if i hold my lead on the negative end jacob holds his lead on the positive end we should have 270 volts which is enough to turn the motor on the humvee now we just need something that will connect everything together which brings us to jeremy who's been building this contraption right here which we'll explain later this allows us to switch high voltage on and off safely to connect the positive and negative ends of the battery we're going to use two watt wire and do basically the same thing that we saw in the 12 volt video but on a much larger scale we're still going to crimp a terminal onto the end of the wire with a pair of large hydraulic crimpers and put some black heat shrink over that connection insinuating that this is going to be the negative battery cable just like all those tiny 12-volt connections we did in a previous video just this one is much much larger all due to the amount of electricity that's going to be flowing through it so we are almost ready to turn things on just as a quick summary we have the inverter connected to the motor with the three ac cables and then we have the two the red and the black positive and negative cables coming out to here which is jeremy's contraption and then we have the positive and negative after the fuse coming to the positive and negative ends of the battery hopefully after we connect the positive and negative to the battery we can raise the hummer a bit off the ground and hopefully something turns [Applause] my transfer case is in neutral as well but it's still a lot safer to have the tires off the ground so we don't uh accidentally go through the door okay negative sketch okay everything's wired up we have jeremy doing the honors of turning the car on seeing if we get any error messages out of the vcu shall we contactor went off is that inverter voltage too low we're not off to a good start but did you hear two contactors well that was a little anticlimactic we spent about another hour last night trying to figure it out um but there's not a whole lot of people doing stuff like this we have some of the two only people here in the room right now but we reached out to a guy who has youtube channel called greg goes electric who's worked with uqm and the thunderstruck vcu that we're trying to run and he suggested which now that we think about it is pretty smart to connect to the inverter and make sure it's programmed which we haven't done yet so right now we have the inverter connected to the laptop here and we're making sure all the settings are correct and now that the inverter knows to accept signal from the vcu underneath the dash we might be able to get the motor spinning assuming of course one of the other five million things don't go wrong we will take the hummer contactors went off throttle contactor enabled there's no other warning signs so are we going to forward nothing pressing the throttle hmm whoa i heard it no way dude no way that's freaking amazing we have motors turning okay so we gotta figure out why forward's not working but reverse is working i'm gonna see this from the other side oh man that's amazing i don't even know what to do again all right we have it shifted into gear and we're gonna see if the back wheels turn let's do it that is going in reverse yes sick that is amazing yes i'm so pumped so don't get me wrong spinning the tires is a huge milestone for this project but at the moment they are only spinning in reverse which is totally doable just get a nice rear-view mirror and drive backwards everywhere to get it spinning forward though if we wanted to do such things there's probably a setting either in the vcu the inverter or there is not a grounding strap between the motor and the inverter yet and the manual says that the grounding strap is necessary to make sure there's no funny business because when we are going between forward and reverse there is only a 2.5 volt signal heading to the inverter to tell it which direction it needs to go and that two and a half volts might be getting interference from the high voltage wires next to it so hopefully this grounding strap fixes it if not we'll have to delve into the settings a bit farther now this grounding wire is grounding the frame of the inverter with the frame of the motor because it's attached to a bolt down there as well so we have the ground connected and it can detect our throttle as you can see we have direction forward here and it can also flip into reverse so it can sense the throttle it's just not moving in a forward direction so we've been working on this for probably two or three or four hours but we figured it out yeah so all it was is we have things wired to the brake switch and whenever we press the throttle um if the brake if it sees the brake is applied it'll ignore all throttle input so all we had to do is kind of press that brake switch and we're good because we don't actually have the brake switch connected to the brake pedal it just thinks that the brake is always on and so we would press the throttle and it wouldn't do anything because it the thought the break was engaged anyway it's working now yeah so it was just dangling down and the vcu kept thinking that the brakes were being pressed we have forward motion obviously we're not going to gun it while it's up on the lift and we're not quite in the situation where we're ready to be moving forward but we just hit the milestone of having the motor spin and i am super excited after getting the motor spinning i wish we could say we were close but we still have the bms system to install the dc to dc converter the charging system the cooling system and i think that's close to it but there's a lot more that needs to go inside of this vehicle but turning the wheels is a massive milestone and i am super excited about it if you have any questions for us leave them down in the comments and we will try to answer them i mean we're not the best at answering questions either um but yeah this has been super fun i will leave jeremy's information as well down in the video description if you're curious to see his channel and his build he's been working on it for quite a while and yeah next time for watching and we'll see you around

Channel: JerryRigEverything

Views: 1,215,962

Keywords: Electric Hummer, EV hummer conversion, ev hummer, Electric humvee, cybertruck, tesla, Formula E racing, rivian, ford lightning, electric truck, tesla truck, VCU, UQM, EV conversion, tires

Id: 8sPpL_9SaBk

Length: 18min 33sec (1113 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021