Discussion
bugs.xdavidhu.mebugs
owenthejumper: Could 'lb' be load balancer?!
MengerSponge: Fun linguistic quirk: Americans tend to call it a "wiring harness", whereas Brits prefer "loom"
LikeBeans: Very cool. Over a year and a half ago I installed a towing brake controller in my Tesla Model Y. Found the location of the plug, how to access and the pinout online (confirmed via a voltmeter..) so the car's side felt straight forward. But then I needed to find a brake controller that can work with the higher voltage (14.4v vs the normal 12v). Then built a cable from the brake controller to the connector that plugs into the car that I found on eBay. I velcro'd the controller under the dashboard. It works pretty well. I towed my small camper several times with it last year with no issues. Yay! However my little project is nothing compared to this post. Love people hacking away. So cool.
silisili: > But then I needed to find a brake controller that can work with the higher voltage (14.4v vs the normal 12v)Not understanding this sentence. Most running ICE vehicles product closer to that 14.4 than 12v. I think a standard controller would have worked fine?
anigbrowl: I have no wheels and I must drift
ferongr: >then I needed to find a brake controller that can work with the higher voltage (14.4v vs the normal 12v)Put a voltmeter on the battery terminals of a regular car at 2000rpm and note the voltage. You'd be surpised (the alternator can produce as high as 15V on some cars).
kube-system: > Turns out that actual cars don’t have individual cables. Instead they have these big “looms”, which bundle many cables from a nearby area into a single harness. This is the reason why I could not find the individual cable earlier. They simply don’t manufacture it.I was really surprised to read this at the end of the article -- how could someone be this deep into a project of this depth and not realize this?! Not only because all cars (...er... all vehicles) are wired this way, but also because Tesla is unique for having really great and free service documents that show just about everything in amazing detail.
serf: you're correct. a '12v ICE' alternator generates up to 14.8-15.2v. Most automotive stuff can operate between 9ish-16ish-v , of course totally depending on the product.of course this is just a modern interpretation. older stuff runs at 6v and some weirdo offbeat cars have a 24v/48v rail sitting around somewhere. Cop cars often had alternators that put out weird voltage ranges for certain equipment, or dual 12v for high amperage output.
londons_explore: Whilst cranking, an ICE car will drop to around 6 volts (then maximum power is extracted according to thevenim's theorem).That means all computers etc will work at 6v.
dogman1050: I love that it has a standard RJ45 ethernet connector.
girvo: It's funny to hear LVDS be described as an "automotive" cable when all of my run-ins with it are for connecting laptop displays to their main-boards! (though that has a very different connector on it, and its a very general term for the signalling protocol from what I remember)
slfnflctd: Not saying there's anything wrong with your perspective (lots of terms get in muddied waters, it's common and not a problem if everyone is on the same page), but this is what I just found on Wikipedia:"Early on, the notebook computer and LCD vendors commonly used the term LVDS instead of FPD-Link when referring to their protocol, and the term LVDS has mistakenly become synonymous with Flat Panel Display Link in the video-display engineering vocabulary."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-voltage_differential_signa...
Dan_-: So what do you call the tubing around the wire bundle? That’s what we call “loom”.
bombcar: I thought I saw an HDMI connector, but maybe I was wrong.
inventor7777: Ha! Reading this comment made me curious, so I went back and looked at the article and there does seem to be a full sized HDMI connector. I wonder if it is enabled, or just for Tesla internal testing?
girvo: Yeah I saw that too which is why I posted my comment, it's surprising to me :) LVDS for display cables was an incredibly term in that context. Even still is sometimes despite them mostly being eDP (embedded-DisplayPort) now, which is quite incorrect hah
toast0: > Whilst cranking, an ICE car will drop to around 6 volts (then maximum power is extracted according to thevenim's theorem).> That means all computers etc will work at 6v.Not necessarily all of them. Plenty of stuff will drop out while cranking; hopefully not the computers that run the fuel injection and ignition, though.
bluGill: I used to work for a company that made third party scan tools. We had racks of ecus disconnected from the car with just a diagnostic connector and power. nothing got to a real car without first trying it on the rack. I remember on time we figured out a bmw (pre obdii) had the bytes offset from the standard documentation (it was a semi-standard protocol that some other cars used at the time), we went from we communicate but nothing is wrong to a very long list of dtcs on that controller. (All our competitors also showed nothing wrong, but the official bmw tool showed dtcs)
caycep: Granted, I think it would be valuable to look at all sorts of automotive ECUs. I always wonder how the tuning industry does their thing; I shudder to think they're just sitting there flipping hex codes directly in running software...
LikeBeans: You are probably right. Surprisingly the first controller I tried didn't work. I assumed the voltage was too high since it worked in my other (much older) car. I found a reference online of people that tried a particular brand/model and that's what I went for. Thankfully my car isn't the model with the internal 18v battery.
wds: How many PoE adapters would it take to charge a Tesla?
bluGill: The specs say no less than 6volts. In the real world when the temperature drops down to -70F or colder and batteries get old the voltage goes well below that: deal with it.
kube-system: Even just a "12v" automotive battery itself is mostly dead if if actually reads 12.0V. Fully charged is around 12.6 or 12.7."12v" in reference to anything automotive is very much a nominal reference.
