Brain Transplant

 

After the physical installation of the Scott Drive SD100, what remained was the configuration and customization. I had hoped that Jack Rickard had it dialed in with the correct parameters for the Siemens motor, but no ...

I found that while EV West no longer carried the Scott Drive controller, they still had the software and user manual available for download (they've since taken it down). I loaded the control software and established the communications link from my laptop computer to the controller. So far so good. Then I made the fatal mistake of updating the firmware. That locked the controller up tighter than a drum and broke the communication link. What now?

My friend Ed Clausen had successfully upgraded his BMW from its original DMOC to a Scott Drive, so we compared notes and figured I had uploaded incompatible firmware. He suggested that I contact Dr. Scott Osborne, the developer and principal of Scott Drive, directly for help.

Scott immediately surmised that I had overwritten an EEPROM on the system board. He could send me a new one, but for less than the price of shipping I could buy an EEPROM programmer and flash it myself and avoid transit time as well. Amazon delivered my new EEPROM programmer the next day and after a typically interesting time finding and downloading the associated software I climbed the steep learning curve to become a barely competent EEPROM programmer.

First I had to remove the top housing from the controller. Happily it was well designed for servicing and could be removed without uninstalling the whole controller.

Let there be no confusion over the fact that electric vehicles are actually just big computers with wheels attached. I still had an old chip puller from my IBM Systems Engineer days, so getting the chip out and flashed was no problem.

Scott sent a new level of firmware for my old controller and it updated successfully. When I started to set the configuration, it was clear that the values were way out of range and pretty much random. Scott offered to do a remote link to my laptop from New Zealand and he saw that there were some issues with the firmware, so we'd need to give it another try after he debugged some of the code. Scott had to set up an old controller to test his firmware changes, then sent a new file, set up another remote session and dialed in all the configuration values. A quick drive around the block confirmed it was working well. I'll be fine tuning things for a while, but first impressions are that the Scott Drive is smoother than the DMOC and seems at least as good in torque and regenerative braking. I'll shoot a new drive around video, so stay tuned ...

I must say that Scott was very responsive, given the time zone thing. I've done remote support, but never from halfway around the world. He had every right to tell me to get lost since I bought a seven year old used product that is by now lacking the improvements in the current model, but he was very helpful, even spending weekend time to set up an old controller so he could test his changes to the firmware. Many thanks to Scott for excellent customer service, a real class act!

May 6 Update:

Today's ambient temperature was 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30C), so I ran some errands this afternoon totaling around 10 miles with two stops along the way. The internal temperature inside the car parked in the sunny parking lot reached 110 degrees (43.3C) so I'm guessing it was at least that under the hood. That would certainly put the old DMOC inverter into thermal limiting making me crawl home as a moving roadblock. Not so today! The Porsche ran the same throughout the trip which leads me to declare victory. Obviously I also need to do an extended run at highway speeds to verify, but I'm a happy camper. Still some fine tuning to do, but it looks like the Scott Drive has met my prime objective of making the Porsche a year round every day driver.