I also received an e-mail from John Barton who used the open-source Civic battery rack design as a starting point for his own lithium-ion battery racks for his Civic DelSol:
Hi Tim,It looks like he has a cool display that takes the PakTrakr output and shows in a user friendly format. I'm quite swamped these days, so I'll consider trying it out if things slow down this winter.
I'm finishing up my second ev conversion, this time its a '93 Honda del Sol. My blog is http://mt-ev.blogspot.com. I'm also finishing a display for the paktrakr that runs on windows ce 5.0. I've got a basic version running on a GPS. Since you are using a paktrakr I thought you might like to give the display I wrote a try. Let me know if you are interested and I can send you an early version of the bits. I'll be blogging about it in a day or so.
The display I'm using is this:
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.22067
Also it requires a serial to bluetooth adapter like the IOGEAR.
Regards,
John Barton
Looking forward to getting my PakTrakr back...
2 comments:
Tim,
I have read your entire blog and find it innovative and entertaining. I enjoy your resourcefulness and attention to detail.
After one year of driving and maintaining your ev, my question is this... is it economical?
For example, last year I bought a road bicycle to make my 10 mile commute to work when the weather was nice. I kept track of what I spent on the bike and maintenance and recorded these as losses. I also kept track of what I saved in gas prices and recorded that as a deposit. see http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ApsayTs6XcVRcHNna2kzZ20xLXluT1k5enVHQmg0RFE&hl=en for details
In the end, mile for mile, the bike cost me about $15 per gallon where as if I had paid for gas I could have only paid about $3.
My questions is, have you experienced this same kind of thing with your ev?
Hi Art,
Thanks for your spreadsheet. I tell people all the time: converting and maintaining an EV is a hobby. You will probably never break even. In the case of the Civic-EV, the batteries tended to degrade faster than I wanted them to. If electricity was about $25 a month ($300 a year) and battery degradation was $1500 a year, it was about $1800 for raw fuel/battery costs. That doesn't count all the hours of debugging and self maintenance I had to do to fix things if they went wrong. For $1800, I can get about $700 in maintenance and $1100 in gasoline to go the same mileage (assuming 30 miles/gallon and $3.00 gas).
Moneywise, I'd be better just tuning up the original civic and driving it into the ground. Again, EV conversions are a hobby...
Cheers,
Tim
Post a Comment