I THINK IT IS EVERYTHING IN THE WAITING TIME BETWEEN POSITION 2 AND "STARTING - KEY PURE IN LAST POSITION, 5 MIN. WAIT AND START NOW - THE DIVICES NEED TIME TO START
As for the PC, that Drive is either Bad or it was formatted. That is a very old, very expensive (back then $2K+) IDE (Flash Memory based) SSD. Its MFD is likely around 2008/2009. Because of its age, and the technology it was made with it is likely no longer recognizable because the older Flash memory needed... i'll call it anual voltage... meaning it needed some power every so often in order for it to keep its information, as it was older silicon/early SSD tech I would likely say it is probably toast. Even a recovery service may not be able to get the info back. As for the Display, that little board you plugged back in would have the buttons on it to turn on and off, and change settings of the display. Older displays like that didn't always just come on when you put power to them. So you may need to take off the electrical tape and try the likely 4 or 5 buttons to get figure out the power button and turn the display on. OR, see if you can feel the bumps of the small buttons, while the tape is still on, and press them to see which one is power and if it will turn on.
Still fixing my 04 dodge ram 2500 4x4 w/5.9 cuCummins!! Just vacuumed & charged the AC and it blows cold. Had front end damage and fixed all but needs a bumper then done w/ that part!
The battery is a CMOS battery, but as far as the disk boot error you may need to go into the bios and tell it where to boot from. It may have lost the BIOS settings from the CMOS battery being dead and doesn’t know where to boot from. It would be odd for the SSD to be dead, but it could be corrupted of course. However, it is IDE so it may be a 2.5 HDD, but either way I hope you recover the data.
could be jsut a missing hard drive since yeah it wasn't detected in any of the channels. Interesting note that a core 2 duo t2300 is what's powering the system!
Not where to boot from but potentially the drive configuration itself. The drive isn't even SATA, it's using an IDE connector (and isn't being detected at all as per the POST screen).
SSDs lose their contents/corrupt data if unpowered for too long (couple years). This one isn't even being detected at all anymore (see 25:25 4x "none" on all IDE channels) so there's nothing to set in the BIOS for it to work. that drive's done for
The Composite video to USB device is a USB video grabber. It's for video INPUT, so probably for video in from either the BMS or a reverse cam. The circuit board at 24:24 is the front panel PCB for the LCD monitor. Under the tape you will find all the buttons for operating it, ON/OFF, input select, brightness etc. The LCD monitor in front is an off-the-shelf unit modified to fit the dash.
Honestly, I think the best part of this whole series is the buy in and involvement of everyone in the comments! Thousands of individuals coming together to solve each of the small issues! Team work!
you know, as an electrician, seeing someone whom isn't savvy on the ins and outs of basic electrician knowledge getting to where you are right now makes me feel pretty good. I went from REEEEEEEEEEE in the last video to feeling semi-confident in your understanding. I was even impressed you didn't swap your leads just to read the cells! I was an acft electrician in the Air Force. So we did a lot with AC/DC wiring and even battery recovery. If you need any other help, you let me know! I am in Indiana and I would be more than nappy to help you with the space van.
Every time you switch the polarity you NEED to calibrate the system and the Hall sensor. Or else it doesn't know what phase to use and where it's going. It could also be the source of the problem and be the random place you leave it. Probably not, but maybe...
Kudos to Tavarish for being aware of just how dangerous high voltage equipment is. Now if he could only use the same good judgement buying super cars lol
I had a co worker killed on an alignment rack because he was goofing off and not paying attention. He was jacking it up from underneath with air jacks and didn’t see he was crushing high voltage wire bundle in orange. It zapped him right through the handles for the jack. Killed almost instantly
The computer’s “cmos” battery just keeps settings such as real time clock and boot settings. Since they used an ancient IDE based drive for booting instead of SATA, you’ll need to go into the bios by pressing delete at startup, go to ide devices, then detect the drive again. Once detected, find a boot settings then select that disk to boot to. Once set press F10 to save and exit, that should help.
That drive is a really early IDE ssd. SSDs are immune to vibration and use very little power. What they hate is beeing unpowered for years and years. The nand memory may be corrupted or lost all of the data. Sometimes they start a self recovery when sitting idle in the Bios for a few hours.
A likely spinning disk in a car that rips itself apart is probably not a good mix. I agree with op that might be worth checking bios settings since the CMOS battery went dead but the POST screen show no master or slave device attached to the ide bus. Unless of course the ide controller defaults to disabled. You could try and get a USB to 2.5" ide adapter and see if you can make a raw image of the contents of the disk for archive and recovery purposes. Also a very quick way to see if your drive is toast would be connect it up to a USB to ide adapter and see if it detects. If the disk is bad, there are services out there where one can achieve swapping platters into a working disk / lifting off solid state memory modules from the PCB / etc. Can be pretty costly. Maybe a couple $1k.
As an IT professional, my advice is to take it to a local PC repair shop. Most folks that have been doing it for years would be thrilled to work on an old piece of gear like that. While the advice here from other people in the field varies wildly in accuracy and truth, they are all equally sure they are right and you will never figure out the right answer from the comment section. I am really enjoying the series. What a fascinating and unique find!
I would NOT take it to a local pc shop. You're rolling the dice on potentially 1 shot at recovering whatever is on that flash drive. Send the drive to a reputable data recovery company. Once it has been determined if the data is recoverable first, then you can gamble with the local shops.
Jesus died for us all, and rose from the grave to defeat death, so we can have eternal life. please give your lives to him, and repent, he loves you!🙏🙏❤️
Interesting to see you bring this back to life. Too bad the people you spoke too don’t have any old schematics of the electrical system or anything. Curious to see what’s next.
they might have something, but it could be under an NDA or similar contract, or it might just be on one of their old laptops that they kept somewhere, but they cannot remember where they placed it. maybe in the near future we will see one of them uploading it all to the internet because they found the computer :P
Jesus died for us all, and rose from the grave to defeat death, so we can have eternal life. please give your lives to him, and repent, he loves you!🙏🙏❤️
Alex, you probably need to reconfigure the settings since you swapped out that 2032. Hit the Del key and then it will take you into the BIOS/CMOS menu. From there you will be able to see if the motherboard is even recognizing that hard drive. Happy to help if you want it, there's probably a lot of smarter guys than me, but I've messed around with quite a few motherbaords and once you're in to the settings menu it's all pretty much the same.
You should clone that disk onto an ssd. (Or pay someone to do it). There’s a good chance whatever operating system and software they were using can be recovered.
Why that Disk already is an SSD? As you can see the whole System is based on IDE instead of SATA that’s the difference… Even if you would clone that IDE SSD to a SATA it wouldn’t make a difference.
@@DarthG3nesis yeah i think some parts must be garbled. since this is a vehicle a harddrive would break very fast if spinning while vehivle is bunping along the road
That little board you found under the steering wheel is the button board for the screen. Power volume channel etc. You can see the little IR reciever for the remote control on there too.
Alex, the issue you're having with the boot disk failure is because the boot disk configuration was lost when the old CR2032 battery failed. You need go into the BIOS (press DEL at bootup), select the hard drive as the primary disk, and disable the prompt for keyboard error so that you can boot the PC without a keyboard in future.. the way the dash LCD is wired up makes me suspect that the LCD is initialized after the PC has booted up from the hard drive. Very interesting project, good luck @LegitStreetCars !
Nope, we can see from the post screen that the SSD is not detected at all so it won't magically appear in the boot devices list either. Sadly the drive is toast and needs to be sent to a data recovery lab to hopefully extract the contents.
@@ThePuuFa In the Jetway manual for this motherboard, it states that the three toggles for HD configuration are None/Manual/Auto and they are set to "None" by default, which *disables the check* to see if a drive is attached to that IDE channel in order to speed bootup (normal back in 2008). There's nothing in this video that leads me to suspect a drive failure yet.
@@d0gZpAw At 25:21 we can see that the bios is trying to detect drives on all ide channels so the manual probably refers to a different board/bios revision or it's just simply wrong. I rest my case.
This has to be the best automotive sleuthing on YT at the moment. I love SpaceVan content. And as to where the money went...salaries, benefits, social security match, etc. There's not $2M in that van itself. Well, that block of plywood holding the screen in place...definitely a $2M block of plywood!
Big tip about lineman gloves, wear consumable leather gloves over your linemans to protect them from mechanical wear. At my work, we use those cheap leather gloves to help protect the linemans, not to add electrical protection but just to help keep the lineman gloves from sharp edges. Great work dude.
Isn't that a potential danger, since the gloves themselves are conductive, you could be shorting voltage to something, either breaking something, or at worst, energizing something you are in contact with?
@@Nevir202 depends on your arc flash rating and cal/cm². Anything too high will require a specific calorie rating for specific work. For the type of work he is doing in this car, the arc flash rating would call for full fr clothing and a flash shield as well. But specifically adding leather gloves over your AR gloves will help prevent a cut which will nullify the arc rating on the gloves.
@@Nevir202 the code is under "NFPA 70E" for what proper ppe to use for what kind of work. Also, leather is an insultator more than a conductor. Now if you have dirty gloves covered in grease and whatnot, that may be different.
The CR2032 battery is a CMOS battery. You need to go into the bios and tell it to use that 2.5inch drive to boot. Press "DEL" or "F8" or "F2" while it's booting to get into the bios, and from there, you should find the boot options.
Alex that connector that you taped up all the wires on at the motor is likely to be an encoder / speed feedback system - usually if you swap the motor direction you need to swap the encoder somehow too - otherwise the controller expects the motor to move one direction, the encoder says it's opposite and the controller will usually trip out on a fault. You'd need to find a wiring pinout and work out which 2 wires need to be swapped.
26:15 - The small battery there is the CMOS battery. It ensures that the settings in the Bios remain stored when the computer is not connected to a power source. If it is removed, the bios settings are erased. But if it was dead anyway, they can be gone (if the computer doesn't get enough power from the car). Every PC got a CMOS Battery btw. The checksum error is normal when you replace the battery/it's empty. just adjust the bios settings and it should no longer show up at startup.
You manage to make a topic that I don’t know much about (electronics) very interesting to watch. Your problem solving techniques and perseverance are inspiring! And the way these videos are edited make for GREAT entertainment! Keep it up Alex!!
The thing with the direction of this bldc motor is one, the order of your high voltage cables as you found out already. The second thing is three halleffect sensors. These determine where your rotor sits. It's very important for the motocontroller to know that. So you either switch the high voltage wires back as you found them and live with switched directions or you try a few combinations of sensor wire order. These are smaller gauge wires normally you would find either five or eight of those. Either two power and three signal or two power and six signal. Latter would be quite tricky to get right. But be warned you might need a few tries to get the order right. Whatever you do, don't switch the high voltage cables when you switched the sensor wires. If you do so the possibilitys cube. And that won't be funny. Good luck to you. Definitely looking forward to your next video
@@forbiddenera yes but he was saying the hall effect sensors need to be switched as well or the motor will try and spin and the controller will sense the motor going the wrong way and get confused and judder like it was in the video. i presume they just swapped the direction in software on the controller but it forgot maybe due to no battery for such a long time
@@EthanShort the direction could be programmed in the controller otherwise the sensor order has the same effect as phase order. Also, why sense something you're experiencing? The sensors aren't there for confirmation of what you think is happening, they're there to tell you what is happening
Hey Alex, the orange/gold thing you taped up is a resistor. They give off heat in order to make resistance. The body should not have voltage, just the lead in, and out. With it all taped up it may be harder to give off it’s heat. Awesome video by the way.
Here is a tip for your "linemans" gloves.... they are supposed to be used inside a pair of leather outer gloves to protect the rubber gloves from punctures and abrasions.
Jesus died for us all, and rose from the grave to defeat death, so we can have eternal life. please give your lives to him, and repent, he loves you!🙏🙏❤️
IIRC the rubber gloves need annual testing as well in addition to proper use with the leather gauntlets. Yeah, there’s zero finger feel at that point. But it sure beats feeling something once then never again.
It's likely a 3 phase motor. Switching the two inputs will make the motor run the opposite way, but there is quite likely a feedback sensor that must output in the correct polarity, or you will get a runaway condition. Chain the vehicle down when doing this or you may get a new doorway in your shop and a very exciting ride.
Exactly! You NEED to also flip around the wiring to the positional encoder for the motor. It won't really make it run away like that, but the problem is that the controller thinks the motor is going in the wrong direction and is trying to get it going in the right once, hence why it is shaking in place. Constantly flipping direction.
@@rkan2 Exactly it does start reversing but when the controller tries to do that the sensor indicates it was actually going more forwards, so it reverses the reverse to fix it, but then it is going backwards instead of fotwards that it wanted, so it reverses again. These motor controllers are not very smart. They just look at the shaft position and calculate what electromagnets to power to make the shaft move towards the desired position. If this calculation is wrong the motor simply will not move correctly, the controller is not smart enough to realize that and just keeps doing wrong calculations.
I haven’t heard the term, “yesterday night” since like… third grade, maybe. These linguistic jewels are one of the many, many reasons that subscribe and watch regularly… and you should too! Alex has genius level comedic timing. Always informative and always entertaining.
The gold thing you wrapped in tape at 16:31 is a 6 ohm 50w resistor. With that kind of casing on it, the typical use is to add load to a car's turn signal circuit, to prevent hyperflashing of the turn signal when you use LED bulbs on a car that wasn't made for them. But they get hot when they're used near their rated current and need the heat sink fins you taped over.
Make sure to check your lineman gloves for any smalls holes because high voltage will find its way through even the smallest pin hole. People usually inflate them for a min to see if any air is escaping to check for holes.
@@kctyphoon DC is nasty and if you get across it, you dopn't get kicked off like AC does. 350V will kill you and you can stew in your own juices for a while before expiring
If anyone can it's you alex..this medusa of wiring you got is nothing but time consuming but if done correctly u may potentially get more than u paid for
The yellow box is a ground isolation detector. It measures insulation and resistance, probably used safety mechanism. That USB device is to feed a video signal into the computer. For giggles, i'd connect a small monnitor to the composite connector going into the USB device, it might be an information screen from the battery management system. Or it could just be the backup camera. The carputer/pc cannot detect a hdd, but it might just need some configuration in the bios to fix that.
You cannot just swap the phase wires on the motor as the small circular connetor is connected to hall sensors or a resolver which gives feedback to the motor controller on the location of the motor rotation. Those will need to be swapped as well, so not that simple. Right now the motor controller is confused as the feedback is reporting wrong values.
I would guess the $2 million would include the man hours as well. Not the equipment in the van but the overall cost, a year of payroll, tools, R&D, rent so on and so forth
$2 million is nothing for such a project, if you are paying $100k/engineer thats $8k per person per month (before benefits, payroll taxes, etc). So you are probably looking at least $100k/month as a basic run rate. Then your looking at the doner vehicle, custom ordering cells (probably after going through some test iterations), fabrication shop fees, supplies. So $2M is probably funding about 6 months of development if they were very conservative.
@@johnnicol8598 this wiring is actually really good for a internal prototype and functioning concept car. this was nto the final product and was not meant for any one outside fo the team to work on it for it;s small stints of driving around
The thin pcb you pulled out from the driver side is a screen controller. If you unwrapped the rest of the isolation tape you will see the control buttons. There should be an on/off button on that pcb.
Great that you could regain the problematic cells and that it greatly helped to resolve the motor shaking issue! Kudos to your cautios way of going forward with this! For the polaritiy change: there are three cables - and while it is indeed good practice to have the middle one (labelled 2) the one that can stay, when you want to change the motor turning direction by interchanging connections, it could as well be 1, or 3 being the one to stay and the other two have to be interchanged. The behavior of the motor just soflty vibrating without turning, would fit such a case. short said: you maybe interchanged the wrong pair. If this motor has this simple Brushless motor wiring. That said- I think it's still more likely, that the change of direction originally happened in the electronic speed controller (maybe some off the shelf frequency converter) settings. Falling back to default settings by losing memory due to sitting with no electric power for years. I would try the connection interchange for the two remaining cases anyways - as it would still be an easy quick fix for commuting a little. But: on the long run, you should try to get documentation about that motor controller, as there could be timing issues using default settings as you let the motor spin faster. In that case it would start to stutter at higer revelations. That knowledge of mine is derived from Brushless motors and controllers of radio controlled models, so take everything with a grain of salt. But I know, that frequency converters commonly have a huge list of possible settings to accomodate to different motors and usecases.
You should measure cells internal resistance before applying voltage. Check the measured value against typical IR values. If it's out of spec you should replace and recycle damaged cells not apply voltage. I learnt this the hard way... Thank god it was just a lithium ion cell with a pressure release and my charger had protection features. Still needed clean pants after that 😃
That brass thing you wrapped in electrical tape is a resistor, you may want to be careful with thermals on it. You added some insulation that may cause it to burn out.
Yeah it's a power resistor, but I wouldn't worry as it's not mounted to any heatsink or in a cooling area. But Alex could measure what the voltage drop of the resistor is when the car is charging and from that calculate the power losses.
It's actually a load resistor. Ironically it's the same one you use when replacing your tail/turn signal lights to LED to prevent warning or hyper flashing.
I am no computer expert but I have dabbled with them before. That battery you replaced is the CMOS battery and also helps the computer to maintain its startup settings. With it having been dead, and with the error saying no disc found, you probably need to set up the boot sequence again and be sure there is a readable hard drive with the software on it.
Hey man, as a gen x computer guy, the one thing I recommend you do is clone/copies that drive and any other computer storage that is unique to that vehicle. You don't want to take the chance of losing or corrupting that information, assuming it is all still good, and not have any backups available. I would also keep multiple backups of that information. I am sure that you are going to want to have one copy to be able to look through and use as a possible test/tune copy, so you are going to need several copies of all the data contained within that van's computer system, at the minimum, just so you know you have it in case you need an 'original' copy of that information. Something else may want to do is, document the systems,especially the computer system, so you can know which parts are completely unique to that concept van..... and which may have been already been available and used in its design. I am thinking mainly of the computer system.... if there are any chips or other electronic parts that were designed and manufactured specifically for that van in case something happens to them or they go bad. At least that way you can decide if they are parts that are replaceable, there is a chance to design a workaround, or it is totally unusable.
@@ukaussi It's a spinning platter disk of the 2.5 IDE variety. Any solid state ide stuff from the era of the car had different packaging then laptop hard drive.
Few options here, before taking it in check that boot priority has the HDD you have selected. When removing the battery you reset the bios and it could have messed up the boot order. Second thing is that I'd try that HD in another computer to see if it can be read. A simple disc cloning program could clone this drive as well if its beginning to go bad. Good luck.
I'd have someone plug that SSD into another computer to see if it is still functioning. It's possible that the data can be recovered and migrated to another SSD.
The SSD wasn't detected. A solution might be to find someone with PC-3000-sata/sdd. Many of the early cheap SSD's were junk and the controllers just crap out. If it was detected and it hadn't run out it's spare sectors I'd consider more simple things like DDrescure or Vivard, which would then force the drive to go through every sector and attempt to repair itself, but without the motherboard detecting a drive, he's kinda hooped there.
@@pXnEmerica It could still be the other end of the power/the power or the sata connector or the motherboard itself. But yeah, it wasn't detected and that's quite concerning.
BIOS showed no drives detected, so it's not boot order. Moving the SSD to an external 2.5" disk reader and plugging it into a computer would be step #1 for me. But also if time is money, just send the drive out to a PC repair shop. That is likely going to be what you need to do anyways, and you will save yourself a half a week of work. The nice thing though is that the car's computer seems to just be a computer... so you can also fully replace/upgrade that once you get the disk fixed.
I had a computer motherboard from that time frame that you had to go into the bios to select autodetect - the bios defaulted to having the autodetect disabled.
Hey Alex, the whole car may have been wired and setup that way from the start. these motors need to know their position for the driver to activate the right coils at the right time. For low speed application like a car you need some kind of encoder to ensure closed loop operation at low speed. That encoder is connected to the driver and is causing the driver to think the car is moving backwards when its trying to drive forwards. seems like there is some kind of protection since it should have tried to runaway(could be the coil timing are causing the motor to stick in place). maybe looking up the encoder wiring and seeing if you can switch that around would do the trick, cross referencing some part numbers will do the trick. I might be completely wrong though, but its worth a try. As for the buttons being wrong, they may have wired it wrong and instead of switching wiring around on the controller they probably just programmed it that way(inverted the encoders). please test this with the car up on the lift.
As you were looking at that old tech I was thinking you needed to talk to JR, then 2 minutes later you were saying you did. That was so cool. I love how all my favorite car UA-camrs seem to know each other.
"Move in the right direction" IS a song by american band Gossip. I really like where this is going. Never expected a whole PC to come out of the car, with such a interesting case.
@Taydrum the leathers are not for extra insulation. They are to protect the rubber gloves from sharp edges, metal slivers, and chemicals which could deteriorate the rubber and ruin them
That coin batt probably kept the cmos in tact. You'll need to go into a system menu to reprogram the boot sequence. Typically hold down a function key during power up. F2, F10 and F12 are ones I have seen for various systems. Good luck.
Great video. Charging cells on a high voltage battery is brave...glad you had the gloves for it. Looking forward to the next learning experience on all the electrics!
Considering the wiring the reverse forward might be the control switch miswired rather than the motor wiring which is three phase and would require proper sequencing.
Awesome build. Keep working out the tweaks . Can’t wait to see more and also stage two GN build I’m from Chicago and grew up building grand nationals till this day enjoy take care
I've worked on quite a few High Voltage batteries, and when single cells drop like that, they're just dead. You can get the voltage up and it'll be stable, until you put some proper load on the HV battery, then those same cells will just flatten right out.
The CMOS battery in the motherboard is used to store the clock and BIOS/firmware info. The disk failure _might_ be because the BIOS doesn't know to boot from the drive, or, that it's configured to boot in a way that doesn't make sense (like RAID when there's only one drive).
For the computer, open it up and make sure the sata/SCSI cable is connected to the motherboard. If that doesn't work try and read the hard drive with another computer. There are adapters that can be picked up for a relatively inexpensive price. If you can read the data from a separate computer, the computers connecter might be damaged. If this is so you might need to replace it. Good Luck!
Yeah and sata and scsi are absolutely not remotely similar especially in cable size..unless you wanna talk about SAS but that's definitely not a thing here 😂
You need to go into the bios and change the boot drive to use the one that is attached, with the battery dying, the memory of which drive to boot from was lost, So when you go in, you should have that option to set it. Or Depending on how old the computer is, while its turning on, if you spam F5 you can get to "Select Boot Disk" and chose the disk that is installed. Let me know if you have more questions, This is what I do for a living. ( computers, not concept cars lol)
It's an IDE SSD. With default settings it should boot just fine, so here, the memory is most likely corrupted. Possibly only the boot sector. That drive should not be touched with any automatic recovery tools. Instead, a copy should be made (e.g. using ddrescue) asap.
@@tcsmember even if the memory is corrupted, the logic part of the drive would be detected, as in listed as a drive present, and then give an error whent trying to boot. It's a really old drive, wich might have gone bad for being unplugged for 12 years or from the computer itself being powered on and off without the safety procedures (rotating the ignition key will power it on and off). That computer will need to be checked and set up from a IT guy, who knows what it needs to be done, I.E. settings in the bios to make it turn back on on power loss automatically, so you don't have to go in the back and press the power button, etc.
26:15 Loving the fact that you have never seen, let alone needed to replace a CMOS battery, so it's novel to you. It's also pretty neat how they stuffed a micro atx board into an amplifier housing.
Loving this collab 1:57 Tavarish was my first auto UA-camr I ever watched and found LSC on recommended channels. Love Tavarish but LSC got my heart lol
This series is *excellent* !! Can't wait for the next instalment. I appreciate that it must be frustrating for you there, but it was very interesting to see what balancing a battery actually means.
21:26 My best guess would be that that usb converter box is for some sort of exterior camera. The interior display appears to be hooked up via VGA. So that USB box would then send a camera feed into the computer that is connected to the screen via VGA. The little PCB, wrapped in tape, that you found under the dash is probably the PCB with the control buttons for the LCD screen.
Alex, it's an amazing feet to get this concept on the road. Absolutely loving the series. Keep it up buddy. Looking forward to seeing it finally run properly and thank you for letting us learn with you.
As someone who works in the metal field I was wondering if you guys had considered possibly getting that bracket refabricated out of stainless steel or titanium something a little stronger I realize stainless would be a little heavier and titanium is costly but it probably wouldn't snap every time you try to run it
Do you have experience with titanium? it reqiures special welding place with helium and others. Basic titanium eq low-grade steel, like 350MPa tensile is like almost cheapest steels. I think the best solution here is some low-voltage cut-off device.
The SSD is dead, it is highly likely you wont be able to recover anything, SSD recovery is highly difficult and expensive. Good luck! Edit: It could had been wiped intentionally as well, or due to SSD flash cell decay it could have lost the data due to expiration of the retention period (SSDs need to be powered on constantly).
In a 3 phase motor, you can change the way it rotates by swapping 2 phases (whatever phases, it doesnt matter). That also works the other way with any random set of phases
I never expected to care so much about a weird electric concept space van. Nicely done. Can’t wait to see what’s next. Also - that van would look sweet bagged, layed out flat on the ground, with Legit Street Cars painted on the side. Just sayin.
Being a PC Repair tech; upon finding the PC in the rear I would have just connected a screen directly to it 🤷♂️, then troubleshoot the screen later. The USB adapter probably runs the reverse camera into the PC.
That circuit board you found connected to the display was probably a control board. If it has some buttons on it, try pressing them - the display might be just not on or set to the wrong input.
Alex, the golden coloured block is a high wattage wire wound resistor and it uses the golden aluminium case as a heat sink. Please ensure you remove the electrical tape when you're done for adequate heat dispersion.
Hey Alex, I would highly recommend talking to the engineer & Rich before following advice from your comments. While I understand the assumption about the connectors being backwards causing issue of drive and reverse being backwards, the motors in electric vehicles are usually AC motors rather than DC. And even if it was DC, it would not at all be a surprise if said motor had electronics built into it that may or may not be able to survive reverse polarity. That's just my 2 cents, though. Keep up the good content and please do stay safe
Hey Alex, Ive been watching since your turbo diesel MBs days (have 3 in the driveway). My wife's a hospice nurse so we need good economy and reliability. Youve helped me keep her 09 e320 going at 265k now! I enjoy the diy stuff (will upgrade my w211 diesel to AMG Brakes this summer) and she loves your adventurous projects- (bright idea van, supercharged escalade wife wagon, the audi rescue). Pls keep up the good work! Your content is inspiring and informative! Oh, she wants to know "where is Peter?" Anyway thank you for what you're doing for us! We appreciate the instruction and entertainment ! And I'll be re-doing rear brakes on our squealing ml500 tomorrow! PS we lived in Andersonville when I was in grad school- we loved it and miss it alot, especially during summer! Anne Sather= da bomb.
@LegitStreetCars: The battery pack looks extremely similar to the pack GM used in the Chevy Volt, they kept the cells and the welded interconnects, but removed the water cooling parts. That might be a source of replacement modules.
Hmmmm... As you mentioned i also have a hard time to find the 2 mill put in this car.... But thanks for taking the time to make the videos and share them...
I wonder if the motor issue is related to the low voltage connector on the motor. The fact that the insulation was broken might mean they were touching and causing errors in the encoder signals. Also, as others have mentioned here, you should wear a leather glove outside the rubber glove just to prevent punctures/damage to the rubber gloves! Amazing video as always Alex and good luck with this project!
That looks like an old Lilliput Screen with a Carputer.. I used to have one in my car... The Little board you found under the dash is the Lilliput screen controls.
You should check every cell with the orange plug removed. The reason is that the motor controller likely has large capacitors, so a dead cell could have very large internal resistance and you could be reading a backfeed into the pack where the good cells are subtracting from and showing a normal voltage on a dead cell. The capacitors are also why rich said it could spark on reassembly. A hidden bad cell because of a backfeed from the caps can be why the motor gremlin keeps reapearing .
There is an encoder on the motor. It phasing is backward. You need to change both the motor power, and the encoder to change the reverse/forward direction.
I dont know if someone already mention it, but that small board that you connected to the lcd that leads nowhere is the buttons of the LCD like Power Button, volume up, down, Menu button for brightness, etc etc. you should see if any of those turn on the small lcd screen. Is worth a shot.
That taped in PCB connecting to the screen has buttons underneath, the normal control buttons of a screen, so one of the buttons under that tape would probably take it out of standby :)
What are you guys working on this week?
Get 3 Armor Shield IX Ceramic Coating Kits for $99! (Normally $75 Each!)
avl.kg/legit4july
I am working on my physics exam 🙂
Working on my first gen sequoia, and a Santa Fe I got to flip.
I THINK IT IS EVERYTHING IN THE WAITING TIME BETWEEN POSITION 2 AND "STARTING - KEY PURE IN LAST POSITION, 5 MIN. WAIT AND START NOW - THE DIVICES NEED TIME TO START
As for the PC, that Drive is either Bad or it was formatted. That is a very old, very expensive (back then $2K+) IDE (Flash Memory based) SSD. Its MFD is likely around 2008/2009. Because of its age, and the technology it was made with it is likely no longer recognizable because the older Flash memory needed... i'll call it anual voltage... meaning it needed some power every so often in order for it to keep its information, as it was older silicon/early SSD tech I would likely say it is probably toast. Even a recovery service may not be able to get the info back.
As for the Display, that little board you plugged back in would have the buttons on it to turn on and off, and change settings of the display. Older displays like that didn't always just come on when you put power to them. So you may need to take off the electrical tape and try the likely 4 or 5 buttons to get figure out the power button and turn the display on.
OR, see if you can feel the bumps of the small buttons, while the tape is still on, and press them to see which one is power and if it will turn on.
Still fixing my 04 dodge ram 2500 4x4 w/5.9 cuCummins!! Just vacuumed & charged the AC and it blows cold. Had front end damage and fixed all but needs a bumper then done w/ that part!
The battery is a CMOS battery, but as far as the disk boot error you may need to go into the bios and tell it where to boot from. It may have lost the BIOS settings from the CMOS battery being dead and doesn’t know where to boot from. It would be odd for the SSD to be dead, but it could be corrupted of course. However, it is IDE so it may be a 2.5 HDD, but either way I hope you recover the data.
could be jsut a missing hard drive since yeah it wasn't detected in any of the channels. Interesting note that a core 2 duo t2300 is what's powering the system!
Not where to boot from but potentially the drive configuration itself. The drive isn't even SATA, it's using an IDE connector (and isn't being detected at all as per the POST screen).
SSDs lose their contents/corrupt data if unpowered for too long (couple years). This one isn't even being detected at all anymore (see 25:25 4x "none" on all IDE channels) so there's nothing to set in the BIOS for it to work. that drive's done for
@@Knaeckebrotsaege Unfortunately that is probably the case.
@@JonathanGray89This
The Composite video to USB device is a USB video grabber. It's for video INPUT, so probably for video in from either the BMS or a reverse cam. The circuit board at 24:24 is the front panel PCB for the LCD monitor. Under the tape you will find all the buttons for operating it, ON/OFF, input select, brightness etc. The LCD monitor in front is an off-the-shelf unit modified to fit the dash.
Imagine if the screen is just turned off at that pcb and all he needs to do is turn it back on
Yup it’s probably just off
Great information 👍
He needs linus's help. An LTT collaboration would be awesome.
@@bgee461 depending on the firmware in the monitor, it might very well default to being off after the 12V supply voltage has been removed, yes.
Honestly, I think the best part of this whole series is the buy in and involvement of everyone in the comments! Thousands of individuals coming together to solve each of the small issues! Team work!
you know, as an electrician, seeing someone whom isn't savvy on the ins and outs of basic electrician knowledge getting to where you are right now makes me feel pretty good. I went from REEEEEEEEEEE in the last video to feeling semi-confident in your understanding. I was even impressed you didn't swap your leads just to read the cells!
I was an acft electrician in the Air Force. So we did a lot with AC/DC wiring and even battery recovery. If you need any other help, you let me know! I am in Indiana and I would be more than nappy to help you with the space van.
Every time you switch the polarity you NEED to calibrate the system and the Hall sensor. Or else it doesn't know what phase to use and where it's going. It could also be the source of the problem and be the random place you leave it. Probably not, but maybe...
Kudos to Tavarish for being aware of just how dangerous high voltage equipment is. Now if he could only use the same good judgement buying super cars lol
I had a co worker killed on an alignment rack because he was goofing off and not paying attention. He was jacking it up from underneath with air jacks and didn’t see he was crushing high voltage wire bundle in orange. It zapped him right through the handles for the jack. Killed almost instantly
@@brettconv83damn I wish that was me
@@aliabdallah102💀💀💀
@@aliabdallah102 you could diy it if you want to I have a tutorial
More Ev's on the road the more these types of accidents will happen. Ppl are just not aware or understand how dangerous electricity is!!
You need to go into the BIOS on the machine and make sure that the IDE channels are set to AUTO. Save settings and try rebooting.
The computer’s “cmos” battery just keeps settings such as real time clock and boot settings. Since they used an ancient IDE based drive for booting instead of SATA, you’ll need to go into the bios by pressing delete at startup, go to ide devices, then detect the drive again. Once detected, find a boot settings then select that disk to boot to. Once set press F10 to save and exit, that should help.
It's not like 1990's ancient though. It should be autodetected at boot, but it's not, so sadly the drive is likely toast.
@@ThePuuFayea it should detect it with ide. Just may not be set for what order to boot from.
I also think he only needs to adjust some bios settings in order to boot fine.
That drive is a really early IDE ssd. SSDs are immune to vibration and use very little power. What they hate is beeing unpowered for years and years. The nand memory may be corrupted or lost all of the data.
Sometimes they start a self recovery when sitting idle in the Bios for a few hours.
A likely spinning disk in a car that rips itself apart is probably not a good mix. I agree with op that might be worth checking bios settings since the CMOS battery went dead but the POST screen show no master or slave device attached to the ide bus. Unless of course the ide controller defaults to disabled.
You could try and get a USB to 2.5" ide adapter and see if you can make a raw image of the contents of the disk for archive and recovery purposes. Also a very quick way to see if your drive is toast would be connect it up to a USB to ide adapter and see if it detects.
If the disk is bad, there are services out there where one can achieve swapping platters into a working disk / lifting off solid state memory modules from the PCB / etc. Can be pretty costly. Maybe a couple $1k.
It's Freddies goal to be in at least 1 video from every single car UA-camr on the planet lol. Dude is everywhere.
As an IT professional, my advice is to take it to a local PC repair shop. Most folks that have been doing it for years would be thrilled to work on an old piece of gear like that. While the advice here from other people in the field varies wildly in accuracy and truth, they are all equally sure they are right and you will never figure out the right answer from the comment section. I am really enjoying the series. What a fascinating and unique find!
I second this opinion!
I would NOT take it to a local pc shop. You're rolling the dice on potentially 1 shot at recovering whatever is on that flash drive. Send the drive to a reputable data recovery company. Once it has been determined if the data is recoverable first, then you can gamble with the local shops.
Jesus died for us all, and rose from the grave to defeat death, so we can have eternal life. please give your lives to him, and repent, he loves you!🙏🙏❤️
Yes, do this
As a certified EV tech, I advise he return the van to people he bought it from.
Interesting to see you bring this back to life. Too bad the people you spoke too don’t have any old schematics of the electrical system or anything. Curious to see what’s next.
they might have something, but it could be under an NDA or similar contract, or it might just be on one of their old laptops that they kept somewhere, but they cannot remember where they placed it. maybe in the near future we will see one of them uploading it all to the internet because they found the computer :P
Jesus died for us all, and rose from the grave to defeat death, so we can have eternal life. please give your lives to him, and repent, he loves you!🙏🙏❤️
Alex, you probably need to reconfigure the settings since you swapped out that 2032. Hit the Del key and then it will take you into the BIOS/CMOS menu. From there you will be able to see if the motherboard is even recognizing that hard drive. Happy to help if you want it, there's probably a lot of smarter guys than me, but I've messed around with quite a few motherbaords and once you're in to the settings menu it's all pretty much the same.
Absolutely correct.
exactly this, in bios config you have to see if the booting order is correct and the hard drive its even recognized
Yup 100% check the boot order
it should have recognized and populated the drive in drives and boot devices by default. but its worth checking out of course.
It's reporting a disk error, so a corrupted disk seems more likely. Might still be fixable, though
You should clone that disk onto an ssd. (Or pay someone to do it). There’s a good chance whatever operating system and software they were using can be recovered.
it was already on a 16gb ssd as far as i could tell from the video
Why that Disk already is an SSD? As you can see the whole System is based on IDE instead of SATA that’s the difference…
Even if you would clone that IDE SSD to a SATA it wouldn’t make a difference.
@@DarthG3nesis yeah i think some parts must be garbled. since this is a vehicle a harddrive would break very fast if spinning while vehivle is bunping along the road
ssds lose data over long periods of time without power, its very likely there is nothing on the drive anymore, its not even being detected.
@@guesswho2778 some do, but not all of them
That little board you found under the steering wheel is the button board for the screen. Power volume channel etc. You can see the little IR reciever for the remote control on there too.
Alex, the issue you're having with the boot disk failure is because the boot disk configuration was lost when the old CR2032 battery failed. You need go into the BIOS (press DEL at bootup), select the hard drive as the primary disk, and disable the prompt for keyboard error so that you can boot the PC without a keyboard in future.. the way the dash LCD is wired up makes me suspect that the LCD is initialized after the PC has booted up from the hard drive. Very interesting project, good luck @LegitStreetCars !
Nope, we can see from the post screen that the SSD is not detected at all so it won't magically appear in the boot devices list either. Sadly the drive is toast and needs to be sent to a data recovery lab to hopefully extract the contents.
@@ThePuuFa < what this guy said - but the JEDEC standard is only ~2y without power so i probably wouldnt bother with recovery
@@ThePuuFa In the Jetway manual for this motherboard, it states that the three toggles for HD configuration are None/Manual/Auto and they are set to "None" by default, which *disables the check* to see if a drive is attached to that IDE channel in order to speed bootup (normal back in 2008). There's nothing in this video that leads me to suspect a drive failure yet.
@@d0gZpAw At 25:21 we can see that the bios is trying to detect drives on all ide channels so the manual probably refers to a different board/bios revision or it's just simply wrong. I rest my case.
@@mycosys You're probably right but it would be a real shame if the original software is lost forever so at least it's worth a try, I guess.
This has to be the best automotive sleuthing on YT at the moment. I love SpaceVan content. And as to where the money went...salaries, benefits, social security match, etc. There's not $2M in that van itself. Well, that block of plywood holding the screen in place...definitely a $2M block of plywood!
Big tip about lineman gloves, wear consumable leather gloves over your linemans to protect them from mechanical wear. At my work, we use those cheap leather gloves to help protect the linemans, not to add electrical protection but just to help keep the lineman gloves from sharp edges. Great work dude.
Isn't that a potential danger, since the gloves themselves are conductive, you could be shorting voltage to something, either breaking something, or at worst, energizing something you are in contact with?
@@Nevir202 depends on your arc flash rating and cal/cm². Anything too high will require a specific calorie rating for specific work. For the type of work he is doing in this car, the arc flash rating would call for full fr clothing and a flash shield as well. But specifically adding leather gloves over your AR gloves will help prevent a cut which will nullify the arc rating on the gloves.
@@Nevir202 the code is under "NFPA 70E" for what proper ppe to use for what kind of work. Also, leather is an insultator more than a conductor. Now if you have dirty gloves covered in grease and whatnot, that may be different.
The CR2032 battery is a CMOS battery. You need to go into the bios and tell it to use that 2.5inch drive to boot. Press "DEL" or "F8" or "F2" while it's booting to get into the bios, and from there, you should find the boot options.
Systems of this vintage will boot first detected ide drive generally. No drive was detected, thus no boot device to set
Ctrl alt delete it works everytime
@@forbiddenera None of mine ever did. I always had to choose from which HDD to start, if it isn't the regular C drive or IDE 1.
@@forbiddenera Not true. The bios most likely needs to be added to the boot order since the memory was erased with the dead battery.
Alt F4😂😂
Tavarish saying "Join the club" in that exact tone.... My day is done! You did my day!!!!
Alex that connector that you taped up all the wires on at the motor is likely to be an encoder / speed feedback system - usually if you swap the motor direction you need to swap the encoder somehow too - otherwise the controller expects the motor to move one direction, the encoder says it's opposite and the controller will usually trip out on a fault. You'd need to find a wiring pinout and work out which 2 wires need to be swapped.
I think you're onto something it definitely is acting like the motor phases are out of sync now
Thats right. Sometimes they have encoder bearings. Most EV Forklift inverters are labeled, U V W . In the video I cant see that.
26:15 - The small battery there is the CMOS battery. It ensures that the settings in the Bios remain stored when the computer is not connected to a power source. If it is removed, the bios settings are erased. But if it was dead anyway, they can be gone (if the computer doesn't get enough power from the car). Every PC got a CMOS Battery btw.
The checksum error is normal when you replace the battery/it's empty. just adjust the bios settings and it should no longer show up at startup.
You manage to make a topic that I don’t know much about (electronics) very interesting to watch. Your problem solving techniques and perseverance are inspiring! And the way these videos are edited make for GREAT entertainment! Keep it up Alex!!
Your patience and dedication is extremely inspiring. Keep up the good work.. I like this series because you’re teaching us to never give up..
The thing with the direction of this bldc motor is one, the order of your high voltage cables as you found out already. The second thing is three halleffect sensors. These determine where your rotor sits. It's very important for the motocontroller to know that. So you either switch the high voltage wires back as you found them and live with switched directions or you try a few combinations of sensor wire order. These are smaller gauge wires normally you would find either five or eight of those. Either two power and three signal or two power and six signal.
Latter would be quite tricky to get right. But be warned you might need a few tries to get the order right. Whatever you do, don't switch the high voltage cables when you switched the sensor wires. If you do so the possibilitys cube. And that won't be funny.
Good luck to you. Definitely looking forward to your next video
You realize you can just swap any two pairs of a bldc and it just goes opposite direction right?
@@forbiddenera yes but he was saying the hall effect sensors need to be switched as well or the motor will try and spin and the controller will sense the motor going the wrong way and get confused and judder like it was in the video. i presume they just swapped the direction in software on the controller but it forgot maybe due to no battery for such a long time
@@EthanShort that's not how it works
@@forbiddenera so when it attempts to spin the motor and the hall sensor it wasnt expecting activates what else would happen?
@@EthanShort the direction could be programmed in the controller otherwise the sensor order has the same effect as phase order. Also, why sense something you're experiencing? The sensors aren't there for confirmation of what you think is happening, they're there to tell you what is happening
Hey Alex, the orange/gold thing you taped up is a resistor. They give off heat in order to make resistance. The body should not have voltage, just the lead in, and out.
With it all taped up it may be harder to give off it’s heat.
Awesome video by the way.
self clearancing model
Came to the comments to look for this. Exactly.
@@canadianthought me too !!
Here is a tip for your "linemans" gloves.... they are supposed to be used inside a pair of leather outer gloves to protect the rubber gloves from punctures and abrasions.
He’s also suppose to air test them every time he uses them and make sure they’re not expired. Hopefully they rated for what he’s workin on
Jesus died for us all, and rose from the grave to defeat death, so we can have eternal life. please give your lives to him, and repent, he loves you!🙏🙏❤️
@@jesusisking1741🙏=💩
IIRC the rubber gloves need annual testing as well in addition to proper use with the leather gauntlets.
Yeah, there’s zero finger feel at that point. But it sure beats feeling something once then never again.
It's likely a 3 phase motor. Switching the two inputs will make the motor run the opposite way, but there is quite likely a feedback sensor that must output in the correct polarity, or you will get a runaway condition. Chain the vehicle down when doing this or you may get a new doorway in your shop and a very exciting ride.
Or a violent shaking when it finds it's going the wrong direction and tries to reverse to compensate
Exactly! You NEED to also flip around the wiring to the positional encoder for the motor.
It won't really make it run away like that, but the problem is that the controller thinks the motor is going in the wrong direction and is trying to get it going in the right once, hence why it is shaking in place. Constantly flipping direction.
Shouldn't it just start reversing then?
@rkan2 I believe reverse was fowrard when Alex took it for that one block drive.
@@rkan2 Exactly it does start reversing but when the controller tries to do that the sensor indicates it was actually going more forwards, so it reverses the reverse to fix it, but then it is going backwards instead of fotwards that it wanted, so it reverses again.
These motor controllers are not very smart. They just look at the shaft position and calculate what electromagnets to power to make the shaft move towards the desired position. If this calculation is wrong the motor simply will not move correctly, the controller is not smart enough to realize that and just keeps doing wrong calculations.
I haven’t heard the term, “yesterday night” since like… third grade, maybe. These linguistic jewels are one of the many, many reasons that subscribe and watch regularly… and you should too! Alex has genius level comedic timing. Always informative and always entertaining.
The gold thing you wrapped in tape at 16:31 is a 6 ohm 50w resistor. With that kind of casing on it, the typical use is to add load to a car's turn signal circuit, to prevent hyperflashing of the turn signal when you use LED bulbs on a car that wasn't made for them. But they get hot when they're used near their rated current and need the heat sink fins you taped over.
This^ 100%
While the computer comments on this video are mostly wack af, at least some of the other stuff is smart.
With an EV this is possibly a pre-charge resistor to stop massive arcing across the relays.
Make sure to check your lineman gloves for any smalls holes because high voltage will find its way through even the smallest pin hole. People usually inflate them for a min to see if any air is escaping to check for holes.
True, but he’s not having to worry about 13,000 or 18,000 volts. This high voltage and that high voltage are not the same thing.
@@kctyphoon DC is nasty and if you get across it, you dopn't get kicked off like AC does. 350V will kill you and you can stew in your own juices for a while before expiring
And he should really have keepers on them to protect them from getting ripped/holes.
First of all, they are meter reader gloves. He wouldn't know how to act with some class 3 or 4 LINEMAN gloves lol
Do you think I'll ever get this back on the road and functioning like it did originally?
Definitely can, might take another 12 years but you’ll get it one day
No. Too much time and money to do it. And it’s really not that cool. Pass it on.
X doubt. You are very skilled but that is a prototype and it will provide an endless amount of unknown issues, imo.
If anyone can it's you alex..this medusa of wiring you got is nothing but time consuming but if done correctly u may potentially get more than u paid for
Wrapping that high current resistor in electrical tape wasn’t the best idea as it needs to dissipate heat.
I like this series because you’re teaching us to never give up.
Helps there are tax breaks for this project and also funded by yt money
The experiences you have with thinking you've found a solution for it to uncover a new problem is so relatable
love watching these guys videos especially because they work with eachother tavrish rish etc its a amazing group of auto friends
The yellow box is a ground isolation detector. It measures insulation and resistance, probably used safety mechanism. That USB device is to feed a video signal into the computer. For giggles, i'd connect a small monnitor to the composite connector going into the USB device, it might be an information screen from the battery management system. Or it could just be the backup camera. The carputer/pc cannot detect a hdd, but it might just need some configuration in the bios to fix that.
You cannot just swap the phase wires on the motor as the small circular connetor is connected to hall sensors or a resolver which gives feedback to the motor controller on the location of the motor rotation. Those will need to be swapped as well, so not that simple. Right now the motor controller is confused as the feedback is reporting wrong values.
^this. Also, it's three phase AC, correct? So really there isn't polarity like with a DC motor.
@@Aaron482193 phase DC. Imitating a 3 ph AC
Time for us to start learning these details! Unfortunately this type of tech (electrical) being forced on to us so I don't want to be ignorant to it!
Really interesting series Alex!
@@Aaron48219 still the hall sensor or similar will be looking at the spinning direction/speed of the motor..
I would guess the $2 million would include the man hours as well. Not the equipment in the van but the overall cost, a year of payroll, tools, R&D, rent so on and so forth
$2 million is nothing for such a project, if you are paying $100k/engineer thats $8k per person per month (before benefits, payroll taxes, etc). So you are probably looking at least $100k/month as a basic run rate. Then your looking at the doner vehicle, custom ordering cells (probably after going through some test iterations), fabrication shop fees, supplies. So $2M is probably funding about 6 months of development if they were very conservative.
It sure didn't go to the guy that wired it. At least I hope not.
Probably built better than the submarine
@@johnnicol8598 this wiring is actually really good for a internal prototype and functioning concept car.
this was nto the final product and was not meant for any one outside fo the team to work on it for it;s small stints of driving around
programming the hybrid system would be pricey
The thin pcb you pulled out from the driver side is a screen controller. If you unwrapped the rest of the isolation tape you will see the control buttons. There should be an on/off button on that pcb.
jep agree with that observation
Great that you could regain the problematic cells and that it greatly helped to resolve the motor shaking issue! Kudos to your cautios way of going forward with this!
For the polaritiy change: there are three cables - and while it is indeed good practice to have the middle one (labelled 2) the one that can stay, when you want to change the motor turning direction by interchanging connections, it could as well be 1, or 3 being the one to stay and the other two have to be interchanged. The behavior of the motor just soflty vibrating without turning, would fit such a case. short said: you maybe interchanged the wrong pair. If this motor has this simple Brushless motor wiring.
That said- I think it's still more likely, that the change of direction originally happened in the electronic speed controller (maybe some off the shelf frequency converter) settings. Falling back to default settings by losing memory due to sitting with no electric power for years. I would try the connection interchange for the two remaining cases anyways - as it would still be an easy quick fix for commuting a little.
But: on the long run, you should try to get documentation about that motor controller, as there could be timing issues using default settings as you let the motor spin faster. In that case it would start to stutter at higer revelations. That knowledge of mine is derived from Brushless motors and controllers of radio controlled models, so take everything with a grain of salt. But I know, that frequency converters commonly have a huge list of possible settings to accomodate to different motors and usecases.
This is good info! I think you're onto something
That you took the time to do what looks impossible is a sign of your hard work and dedication itself!!
You should measure cells internal resistance before applying voltage. Check the measured value against typical IR values. If it's out of spec you should replace and recycle damaged cells not apply voltage.
I learnt this the hard way... Thank god it was just a lithium ion cell with a pressure release and my charger had protection features.
Still needed clean pants after that 😃
That brass thing you wrapped in electrical tape is a resistor, you may want to be careful with thermals on it. You added some insulation that may cause it to burn out.
Yeah it's a power resistor, but I wouldn't worry as it's not mounted to any heatsink or in a cooling area. But Alex could measure what the voltage drop of the resistor is when the car is charging and from that calculate the power losses.
They get hot hot tho
Yeah, it's a high power resistor/heat sink.
Actually it's likely a shunt, meaning its around 1-0.5 ohm, so it shouldn't get hot.
It's actually a load resistor. Ironically it's the same one you use when replacing your tail/turn signal lights to LED to prevent warning or hyper flashing.
i think that little circuit board might be like the monitor buttons. Pushing one of the buttons might turn the screen on.
I am no computer expert but I have dabbled with them before. That battery you replaced is the CMOS battery and also helps the computer to maintain its startup settings. With it having been dead, and with the error saying no disc found, you probably need to set up the boot sequence again and be sure there is a readable hard drive with the software on it.
Hey man, as a gen x computer guy, the one thing I recommend you do is clone/copies that drive and any other computer storage that is unique to that vehicle. You don't want to take the chance of losing or corrupting that information, assuming it is all still good, and not have any backups available. I would also keep multiple backups of that information. I am sure that you are going to want to have one copy to be able to look through and use as a possible test/tune copy, so you are going to need several copies of all the data contained within that van's computer system, at the minimum, just so you know you have it in case you need an 'original' copy of that information.
Something else may want to do is, document the systems,especially the computer system, so you can know which parts are completely unique to that concept van..... and which may have been already been available and used in its design.
I am thinking mainly of the computer system.... if there are any chips or other electronic parts that were designed and manufactured specifically for that van in case something happens to them or they go bad. At least that way you can decide if they are parts that are replaceable, there is a chance to design a workaround, or it is totally unusable.
computer showed no boot device so drive is probably already dead
@@reprovedrope1424 After the impact drill I'm sure it's toast.
@@russwilliams4678 yeah most likely disks are shattered
@@reprovedrope1424 it is an SSD so no disks
@@ukaussi It's a spinning platter disk of the 2.5 IDE variety. Any solid state ide stuff from the era of the car had different packaging then laptop hard drive.
Few options here, before taking it in check that boot priority has the HDD you have selected. When removing the battery you reset the bios and it could have messed up the boot order. Second thing is that I'd try that HD in another computer to see if it can be read. A simple disc cloning program could clone this drive as well if its beginning to go bad. Good luck.
I'd have someone plug that SSD into another computer to see if it is still functioning. It's possible that the data can be recovered and migrated to another SSD.
The SSD wasn't detected.
A solution might be to find someone with PC-3000-sata/sdd. Many of the early cheap SSD's were junk and the controllers just crap out.
If it was detected and it hadn't run out it's spare sectors I'd consider more simple things like DDrescure or Vivard, which would then force the drive to go through every sector and attempt to repair itself, but without the motherboard detecting a drive, he's kinda hooped there.
@@pXnEmerica It could still be the other end of the power/the power or the sata connector or the motherboard itself. But yeah, it wasn't detected and that's quite concerning.
BIOS showed no drives detected, so it's not boot order. Moving the SSD to an external 2.5" disk reader and plugging it into a computer would be step #1 for me. But also if time is money, just send the drive out to a PC repair shop. That is likely going to be what you need to do anyways, and you will save yourself a half a week of work. The nice thing though is that the car's computer seems to just be a computer... so you can also fully replace/upgrade that once you get the disk fixed.
I had a computer motherboard from that time frame that you had to go into the bios to select autodetect - the bios defaulted to having the autodetect disabled.
Hey Alex, the whole car may have been wired and setup that way from the start. these motors need to know their position for the driver to activate the right coils at the right time. For low speed application like a car you need some kind of encoder to ensure closed loop operation at low speed. That encoder is connected to the driver and is causing the driver to think the car is moving backwards when its trying to drive forwards. seems like there is some kind of protection since it should have tried to runaway(could be the coil timing are causing the motor to stick in place). maybe looking up the encoder wiring and seeing if you can switch that around would do the trick, cross referencing some part numbers will do the trick. I might be completely wrong though, but its worth a try. As for the buttons being wrong, they may have wired it wrong and instead of switching wiring around on the controller they probably just programmed it that way(inverted the encoders). please test this with the car up on the lift.
As you were looking at that old tech I was thinking you needed to talk to JR, then 2 minutes later you were saying you did. That was so cool. I love how all my favorite car UA-camrs seem to know each other.
"Move in the right direction" IS a song by american band Gossip.
I really like where this is going. Never expected a whole PC to come out of the car, with such a interesting case.
I believe Cletus would give you a, “hell yeah brother!” For this. Ok maybe not, but I do!! Way to go Alex and team. Hopefully 1 million subs soon.
Just for future reference, there should be leather outer gloves over those rubber high voltage gloves to protect them so they can protect you
True but I don't think 320 volts can jump 1mm rubber. 10,000 volts definitely, but I think he should be fine
@@Taydrum That wont stop you tearing the glove on one of those contacts.
@Taydrum the leathers are not for extra insulation. They are to protect the rubber gloves from sharp edges, metal slivers, and chemicals which could deteriorate the rubber and ruin them
@@jeremymann8930 yes but as long as they are airtight, there shouldn't be any issues. You're right though, there should be leather covering the rubber
That coin batt probably kept the cmos in tact. You'll need to go into a system menu to reprogram the boot sequence. Typically hold down a function key during power up. F2, F10 and F12 are ones I have seen for various systems. Good luck.
For that BIOS it's the [Delete] key
The intro with Tavarish was a genius mirror image play.
Great video. Charging cells on a high voltage battery is brave...glad you had the gloves for it. Looking forward to the next learning experience on all the electrics!
Like the way you are taking on this project Alex. Keeping us informed with the ups and downs.
Your patience and dedication is extremely inspiring. Keep up the good work.
Pretty cool project, I think it’ll be awesome seeing it on the road one day. I’m sure you can get it Road worthy
Considering the wiring the reverse forward might be the control switch miswired rather than the motor wiring which is three phase and would require proper sequencing.
Awesome build. Keep working out the tweaks . Can’t wait to see more and also stage two GN build I’m from Chicago and grew up building grand nationals till this day enjoy take care
I've worked on quite a few High Voltage batteries, and when single cells drop like that, they're just dead. You can get the voltage up and it'll be stable, until you put some proper load on the HV battery, then those same cells will just flatten right out.
The CMOS battery in the motherboard is used to store the clock and BIOS/firmware info. The disk failure _might_ be because the BIOS doesn't know to boot from the drive, or, that it's configured to boot in a way that doesn't make sense (like RAID when there's only one drive).
This! Battery stores all the BIOS settings. Have to find the disk or controller to boot
For the computer, open it up and make sure the sata/SCSI cable is connected to the motherboard. If that doesn't work try and read the hard drive with another computer. There are adapters that can be picked up for a relatively inexpensive price. If you can read the data from a separate computer, the computers connecter might be damaged. If this is so you might need to replace it. Good Luck!
SATA/SCSI? Dude, that’s IDE 😂
Yeah and sata and scsi are absolutely not remotely similar especially in cable size..unless you wanna talk about SAS but that's definitely not a thing here 😂
I am loving this series!
This van is just a bunch of bushes with candy behind them 😀
How about some solar panels on the roof to slowly charge the cells, try shipping the van to Nevada when it’s 120 degrees. She’ll probably rip it up
You need to go into the bios and change the boot drive to use the one that is attached, with the battery dying, the memory of which drive to boot from was lost, So when you go in, you should have that option to set it. Or Depending on how old the computer is, while its turning on, if you spam F5 you can get to "Select Boot Disk" and chose the disk that is installed. Let me know if you have more questions, This is what I do for a living. ( computers, not concept cars lol)
It's an IDE SSD. With default settings it should boot just fine, so here, the memory is most likely corrupted. Possibly only the boot sector. That drive should not be touched with any automatic recovery tools. Instead, a copy should be made (e.g. using ddrescue) asap.
By memory, I mean the SSD memory, not BIOS
@@tcsmember even if the memory is corrupted, the logic part of the drive would be detected, as in listed as a drive present, and then give an error whent trying to boot. It's a really old drive, wich might have gone bad for being unplugged for 12 years or from the computer itself being powered on and off without the safety procedures (rotating the ignition key will power it on and off).
That computer will need to be checked and set up from a IT guy, who knows what it needs to be done, I.E. settings in the bios to make it turn back on on power loss automatically, so you don't have to go in the back and press the power button, etc.
Been waiting for this upload, such a cool project.. 😎
26:15 Loving the fact that you have never seen, let alone needed to replace a CMOS battery, so it's novel to you. It's also pretty neat how they stuffed a micro atx board into an amplifier housing.
Looks like an industrial pc.
That's $50,000 of R&D work right there!
Loving this collab 1:57 Tavarish was my first auto UA-camr I ever watched and found LSC on recommended channels. Love Tavarish but LSC got my heart lol
I have followed Freddie since his first days so it was great to see him with you on here. This is such an interesting project!
This series is *excellent* !! Can't wait for the next instalment. I appreciate that it must be frustrating for you there, but it was very interesting to see what balancing a battery actually means.
Keep it up, Alex! We're all rootin' for ya!
21:26 My best guess would be that that usb converter box is for some sort of exterior camera. The interior display appears to be hooked up via VGA. So that USB box would then send a camera feed into the computer that is connected to the screen via VGA. The little PCB, wrapped in tape, that you found under the dash is probably the PCB with the control buttons for the LCD screen.
I love that Van !!!
Alex, it's an amazing feet to get this concept on the road. Absolutely loving the series. Keep it up buddy. Looking forward to seeing it finally run properly and thank you for letting us learn with you.
As someone who works in the metal field I was wondering if you guys had considered possibly getting that bracket refabricated out of stainless steel or titanium something a little stronger I realize stainless would be a little heavier and titanium is costly but it probably wouldn't snap every time you try to run it
Do you have experience with titanium? it reqiures special welding place with helium and others. Basic titanium eq low-grade steel, like 350MPa tensile is like almost cheapest steels. I think the best solution here is some low-voltage cut-off device.
If Tavarish can’t help you fix it, we must sacrifice it to the McLaren gods to fix his car loo
So the Bright Idea and P1 are worth the same😂
Not such a good idea
man, you touching that pink fiberglass insulation with your bare hands makes me wince
The SSD is dead, it is highly likely you wont be able to recover anything, SSD recovery is highly difficult and expensive. Good luck!
Edit: It could had been wiped intentionally as well, or due to SSD flash cell decay it could have lost the data due to expiration of the retention period (SSDs need to be powered on constantly).
THat's simply not true. SSDs are not volatile, unless left powerless for decades
That isn’t true and it isnt an SSD
This project has shaken all of you awesome super nerds from your hiding places. Love the input. Very interesting.
In a 3 phase motor, you can change the way it rotates by swapping 2 phases (whatever phases, it doesnt matter). That also works the other way with any random set of phases
I never expected to care so much about a weird electric concept space van. Nicely done. Can’t wait to see what’s next.
Also - that van would look sweet bagged, layed out flat on the ground, with Legit Street Cars painted on the side. Just sayin.
I love to see collaborations between car UA-camrs! I think you should get Mr Dunn in on this too. Experimental electric being his particular area.
Being a PC Repair tech; upon finding the PC in the rear I would have just connected a screen directly to it 🤷♂️, then troubleshoot the screen later. The USB adapter probably runs the reverse camera into the PC.
That circuit board you found connected to the display was probably a control board. If it has some buttons on it, try pressing them - the display might be just not on or set to the wrong input.
You have the patience of a saint, that van would have cracked me by now, keep up the good work.
That was the perfect start to the video. Nice intro with Tavarish
Alex, the golden coloured block is a high wattage wire wound resistor and it uses the golden aluminium case as a heat sink. Please ensure you remove the electrical tape when you're done for adequate heat dispersion.
Hey Alex, I would highly recommend talking to the engineer & Rich before following advice from your comments.
While I understand the assumption about the connectors being backwards causing issue of drive and reverse being backwards, the motors in electric vehicles are usually AC motors rather than DC. And even if it was DC, it would not at all be a surprise if said motor had electronics built into it that may or may not be able to survive reverse polarity.
That's just my 2 cents, though. Keep up the good content and please do stay safe
Hey Alex, Ive been watching since your turbo diesel MBs days (have 3 in the driveway). My wife's a hospice nurse so we need good economy and reliability. Youve helped me keep her 09 e320 going at 265k now! I enjoy the diy stuff (will upgrade my w211 diesel to AMG Brakes this summer) and she loves your adventurous projects- (bright idea van, supercharged escalade wife wagon, the audi rescue). Pls keep up the good work! Your content is inspiring and informative! Oh, she wants to know "where is Peter?" Anyway thank you for what you're doing for us! We appreciate the instruction and entertainment ! And I'll be re-doing rear brakes on our squealing ml500 tomorrow! PS we lived in Andersonville when I was in grad school- we loved it and miss it alot, especially during summer! Anne Sather= da bomb.
@LegitStreetCars: The battery pack looks extremely similar to the pack GM used in the Chevy Volt, they kept the cells and the welded interconnects, but removed the water cooling parts. That might be a source of replacement modules.
I'm so excited that the Space Van is getting better ❤️
Hmmmm... As you mentioned i also have a hard time to find the 2 mill put in this car....
But thanks for taking the time to make the videos and share them...
I wonder if the motor issue is related to the low voltage connector on the motor. The fact that the insulation was broken might mean they were touching and causing errors in the encoder signals. Also, as others have mentioned here, you should wear a leather glove outside the rubber glove just to prevent punctures/damage to the rubber gloves! Amazing video as always Alex and good luck with this project!
That looks like an old Lilliput Screen with a Carputer.. I used to have one in my car... The Little board you found under the dash is the Lilliput screen controls.
You should check every cell with the orange plug removed. The reason is that the motor controller likely has large capacitors, so a dead cell could have very large internal resistance and you could be reading a backfeed into the pack where the good cells are subtracting from and showing a normal voltage on a dead cell. The capacitors are also why rich said it could spark on reassembly. A hidden bad cell because of a backfeed from the caps can be why the motor gremlin keeps reapearing .
There is an encoder on the motor. It phasing is backward. You need to change both the motor power, and the encoder to change the reverse/forward direction.
I dont know if someone already mention it, but that small board that you connected to the lcd that leads nowhere is the buttons of the LCD like Power Button, volume up, down, Menu button for brightness, etc etc. you should see if any of those turn on the small lcd screen. Is worth a shot.
That taped in PCB connecting to the screen has buttons underneath, the normal control buttons of a screen, so one of the buttons under that tape would probably take it out of standby :)