Using end of life or 'scrap' EV & Hybrid parts and opensource firmware I'm making an electric motorbike, having got tired of making dirty diesel ones! The scrapyards are now filled with slightly broken EVs and Hybrid cars, and almost no one knows what to do with them. As a result the parts they are made from are very affordable and available for repurposing and hacking into your own projects. The project is far from complete so there is nothing to bring to the show as I was hoping but there is lots to talk about and discuss regarding the state of play of hacking scrapped and discarded power inverters. The motorbike project uses a battery from a BMW i3 electric car, the motor is from a Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV & the main power inverter for driving the motor is from a hacked Prius running open source firmware with the motorcycle running gear from used motorbikes and a whole host of other bits connected together in ways never intended. The project is only possible using the work done by the EV car hacking community Openinverter.org and their community forum which have reverse engineered the EV power controllers allowing you to run open source firmware on them with some minor alterations.
Speakers: Russell Couper