Here you see Mark's leg pressing the accelerator pedal while shifted in neutral, revving up the motor in our test car. As you can see, it doesn't take that much power to make that electric motor spin.

The top window shows RPM measured by an AutoBlock RPM installed under the hood. The AutoBlock RPM converts the periodic waveform picked up by a speed sensor to a digital signal communicated via USB.

The bottom window shows what our prototype AutoBlock AMP is measuring. This AutoBlock senses current flow through a high-voltage cable and once again communicating via USB.

The next step will be to take these values and make some virtual analog gauges move for easier and faster viewing. We could also use these values to calculate EV efficiency by knowing how far the car has moved and integrating the Amp draw over time. All of these features are possible with more advanced software - which we are working on of course.

Ah yes, the joys of product development. It takes a few design iterations to get a product just right.

In the upper left: a little proto-board where a basic circuit and firmware can be tested and tweaked easily. Once we are confident that we are on the right track, we can invest some time and money into a more complicated, more representative, and easy-to-work-with test PCB. (As seen in the middle-ground) Next, we take what we have learned and miniaturize - the goal being to retain all of the needed functionality, but jam it into the enclosure that our mechanical engineering team came up with.

Take a look at the AutoBlock AMP product page for some renderings of what it will eventually look like.

Still to go before releasing into production: iron out some details - finalize enclosure design, finalize PCBs, test LED blink scheme, finish analog voltage output firmware, etc...

stay tuned!

Our newest friend, LincVolt, uses our EVEZSD for connecting and disconnecting the enormous battery pack from the rest of her system. Now her mechanics (and best friend, Neil Young) can be certain that there will be no power going where it shouldn't be during maintenance.

We are proud to be a small part of this exciting project, and look forward to seeing more amazing things from the LincVolt team.

Check out her blog here, and the official page here.