Saturday 16 October 2010

Chapter 4, Potbox

The Potbox:

Okay this is the box in which you keep your stash... Cause there is nothing like a fresh rolled joint when you ride around in your electric car Hippie!

Just joking.
Infact the pot-box is the speed regulator of an electric car. It is named this way because it is a box in which there is a potentiometer otherwise known as a pot-meter.
And what is that, you might ask. A potentiometer is a resistor which can be regulated. like when you turn a turn key on an amplifier or radio.

But it is of cause not directly adjusting the high voltage from the battery pack since potentiometers are small sensible precision things. So here is the way it functions:

The controller is the thing which regulates the high voltage from the battery-pack to the motor. The way the controller knows how much power to send out to the motor is by sending a low voltage signal to the Potbox. the potbox is conected to the speeder cable. depending on the pressure on the gas pedal the postbox is going to alter the amount of this signal curent going back to the controller which will make the controller turn the amount of power going to the motor, and thereby the speed of the car, up or down.



You can see the little holes for connecting the speeder cable on the little arm sticking up from the box.

Normally the price of a potbox is around USD 150.- or DKR 800.- + shipping and handling fee.
If you are going to buy a well-known brand like Curtis of a web page which specializes in electric car.

But you can also search a little around for the specifications of the potbox you need. Like I knew that I wanted one that was regulating 0-5 Kilo Ohms. So I came across this nice little thing you can see on the picture above for USD 65.- that is DKR 350.- including shipment. I ended up buying that and a couple of weeks ago I received it.

Here is the link for the place I found it.
http://www.fourthgen.net/

There is probably some other electric vehicle interested people out there who is thinking, why does he buy the Pot-box before the controller? Since the Potbox must fit the controller, rather than the other way around as the controller is a big expensive thing, and the pot-box is not.

I can tell you why. It is because I have already settled on a controller. it is going to be the home made open source controller, ether made from the kit you can buy, or from parts located around in shops here in Denmark, the last is if I can get one of my friends relatives to help me find the right parts.


No comments:

Post a Comment