Throughout the process of making my own electric military Humvee, one of the questions that I've
gotten the most is, is this even legal? Am I allowed to take my electric conversion and
drive it around on public roads? You've seen me driving this around in a parking lot. It is 100%
mobile and ready to go, minus the cooling system. So it's time to see if we can get legally approved
to drive on public roads. This video is sponsored by KiwiCo. More on them later. Let's get started.
[Intro]
One thing I have going for me that should make this process a whole lot easier is that this beast
was registered and insured prior to me taking it all apart. So I do have a current title. We just
have to get that title changed so it better correlates with what's inside the Hummer now
instead of what used to be there. We've changed a lot over the past year. And the place we find out
for sure is everyone's favorite location – the DMV. For people outside of the United States,
the Department of Motor Vehicles is where people go to get their vehicles registered. Now I have
talked to them already and they said to bring in the original title, plus the receipts of
everything I put in, along with some pictures of the changes that we've made to the vehicle.
And yes, I have kept receipts for this whole project and I do know how much it costs,
but my wallet's not ready to talk about it just yet. Maybe in the next video...or the video after
that. And I'm not going to film while we're inside since it's a government building and I'm not sure
if they are okay with that. But we should know in a few minutes if the Hummer's going to be legal.
So that was infinitely easier than I anticipated. It only cost $10 to transition from my old title
with the diesel fuel to the new title with “electric” written right there next to “Humvee.”
No complaints, no safety inspections, no extra fees or anything like that. Just
$10. Now it's a whole other conversation entirely if that process should be more complicated or not.
Because you know I did just change the entire internal components of a vehicle and I'm still
allowed to drive it around right now. I mean, it's safe, but at the same time, it's a whole
new vehicle. But I'm also not really sure how they would do any safety inspections because, you know,
figuring out how an electric vehicle works requires a whole separate skill set than it would
with a normal vehicle. Either way, no complaints on my end. Ten bucks well spent. And now we can
officially drive around on public roads. There are a few more things I need to do internally
though on my own vehicle and that's getting the components to talk to themselves a little bit
better. Right now everything works but there needs to be more communication through the can network.
I'll get to the can network in a second, but first as a celebration for getting the electric
title for the Humvee, I'm going to offer these shirts at the exact same price I've always offered
them. They fit great, look great, and have all the specs of the military Humvee turned electric,
The Whisper Project, on the back. You might also be curious about insurance since here
in the United States you do have to have insurance before you can drive on the road.
And like I mentioned earlier, this was insured back when it was using dyno droplets
by a company called Progressive. And now that it's powered by the sun I did call them back up
and let them know that I did the EV conversion and changed the fuel type
and they said they didn't care in the slightest. Adding the Tesla batteries as the fuel type did
not change my insurance at all. Now does that seem a little too easy? I think so,
but that's what they said and so we're going to go with it. We are now titled and insured and the
paperwork is there for us to drive around on the roads. I just need to fix a few more things first.
This project has been super complex and a very educational experience for me. Hopefully for you
as well. Because I think education is the solution to all the world's problems. So while this project
is educational and fun for adults, it's nice that KiwiCo has designed educational and fun projects
for children so they can learn the same concepts on a much simpler and fun level. Like this Robots
and Coding crate designed for kids 5 and up. Huge thanks to KiwiCo for sponsoring this video.
I'm a huge fan of the way they take hands-on projects and activities to make learning fun. Each
monthly crate from KiwiCo is designed by experts like industrial designers or aerospace engineers.
There are 8 different subscription lines catering to different age groups and topics, from toddlers
to teenagers, even adults. Since the crates are a great resource for learning at home and provide
hours of educational entertainment, my wife and I have been giving them out as birthday presents
to our nieces. It's fun having different projects every month that expose kids to different concepts
in STEAM – science, technology, engineering, art, and math. Like this crate, without the right code
in place to follow, like a can network, our little robot friend would get lost. Very similar to how
the equipment in my Humvee would be lost without the right guidance in place, but explained in a
more fun hands-on way for kids to enjoy. I'll leave a link down in the description so you can
get 30% off your first month. The kit comes with everything you need for constructive, non-digital
entertainment, helping kids to develop well rounded skill sets for when problems arise in the
future because learning and expanding your mind today does make tomorrow's problems much easier.
You can use my link for 30% off your first month. It's down in the description: KiwiCo.com/jerryrig.
In the last video with my military Humvee that we've turned electric, we were able to leave
the garage and do a lap around the parking lot near my house. But one thing you don't know is
when we went to go turn the key and leave the garage, the Hummer didn't have enough torque
to get over this small little bump in between my lift. We had to pause the video,
get out and program the VCU up the torque so we would be allowed to leave the garage. And I'm sure
that's not the only setting in here that needs to be set before we can drive around for real.
So today we're going to be connecting to all the individual components that make this Humvee work,
program them, make sure they're all working together. It should be interesting.
The first thing we're going to plug into is down here. It is the VCU or the vehicle control unit,
and it's what handles the communication to the motor. Funny enough, it uses a headphone
jack and USB cable and we should be able to program everything from my laptop.
Once we have the USB plugged in, communicating with this thing is rather weird. We have to
pick which communication port it's using. This USB is plugged into com3, and then once we hit
open it brings us up this command window. And even with that command window open,
there's not many people doing this. There are not many tutorials online teaching how it's done.
But we do have Jeremy who's built his own electric supercar.
You've seen the video on that. And luckily he knows how this works.
-So there are quite a few settings that can be changed.
Yeah, so we're going to change the max torque.
-It was set to 70 newton meters and with a few clicks of the buttons we are not set at
700. So it is super easy once you know how it works. I just have no idea how it works.
Inside of the VCU as well is where you set the regen, or how much power is able
to go back into the battery as you're slowing down using the vehicle's weight and momentum
to recharge the battery. We can set the throttle sensitivity as well as the RPM range
of the motor so if I want to put it into valet mode or something I can limit the RPMs to 2000
instead of 6000. And that would keep people from taking this for a joy ride at full power.
-So another thing this car has that my car doesn't have
is it's got an acceleration limit. So you can actually dial in the amount of
torque you want per second so you will not spin your wheels when you don't want to.
-So with the VCU set and our torque maxed out, let's move onto the screen which has another cable
of its own. This is more of a printer style cable with a USB port. All of these different pieces of
equipment are communicating with each other via a can network, which I'll talk more about
in a second. We're just programming them right now. One thing that you probably didn't notice
during the first drive video is that my screen is only displaying half of the information – the half
it gets from the BMS. Showing battery capacity and amps being used, but nothing with relation to the
motor or inverter. They're not communicating correctly. So I reached out to Andromeda,
the manufacturer of the display, and they were recently bought out by a company called Aptera
Motors. They make a solar powered teardrop shape electric car that can go 1000 miles.
And that might be a story for a different day. But they sent me a new skin and added my motor
and inverter's frequency, the one it uses to communicate with other objects on the can system,
and now it should be able to communicate with my display and accurately show, you know,
the motor temperature and miles per hour. Which is kind of important when driving around.
So right now we are off the ground, the motor is turned on, we are in neutral with
the transfer case so just the motor will spin but not the tires. And that is true.
And it is showing us how many amps we're using, which is barely nothing because just the motor
is turning its own weight. In the parking lot I saw this number get up to about 100 amps when we
were accelerating hard, and the motor's capacity at peak is 500 amps. So we still have a long way
to go and a lot of testing before we max this thing out. Another thing I'm hoping gets changed
is right now everything is in amp hours. We have a state of charge of 80% but most electric vehicles
these days like the Ford Mustang Mach-E, the Rivian, and even Tesla's all communicate with
kilowatt hours and display battery capacity in watts. So while amps gets the point across,
I still want this to be like other electric vehicles. We'll see if this skin fixes it.
So to get my skin working, I come over here, we are working with the EVIC 7.
Now with the screen flipped over and turned on, it should load for a second.
Nice. So it looks like the skin has taken but now we're not reading anything from the BMS or
the motor. So we have a bit more programming to do. One step forward, two steps back.
So once we're plugged into the inverter, we have another set of data points that we can program.
Right now you can see what the temperatures are, how many volts we have, how much torque
we're pulling. And if we go in here to the system configuration, we have the ability to set torque
profiles for how much torque is being provided at a certain RPM. I'm going to leave these all
standard for right now. What we want to adjust is herein the CANbus settings and we want to move the
baud rate to 500 so we can match the screen and the VCU. And with that done it should be set.
And now for the BMS or battery management system. This also plugs directly into
the can network via USB, and already is communicating through that 500 baud rate.
The BMS is in charge of everything related to the battery, you know how much power is coming
or going whether it's charging or going to the motor. As of right now we can see every single
individual cell and what voltage they're currently at, along with temperature. There's a lot going on
inside of the BMS. Now that we have the inverter VCU, screen, and BMS all communicating at the same
frequency, everything should function correctly next time we leave the garage, which I'm not going
to do today because it is getting warmer outside and I'm still worried about the motor overheating.
But that also means it's warmer inside of the garage and it shouldn't take me long to
add the cooling system. Remember, the way all of these components are talking to each other
is through the can network which is actually pretty simple. There are two wires connecting
each of the components from the inverter to the VCU to the display to the BMS and the charger.
And it doesn't matter which order they're in as long as the two wires, the high and the low,
are connected to all of them somewhere in that tree. The two little wires can branch off
anywhere inside of that loop. And as long as all of those components are communicating at the same
frequency or baud rate, they can all understand each other and get along. You know, it's their
own little language of sorts. But let's say the screen was communicating at 250 and everything
else was at 500, the screen would get all lonely and stuff because nothing can see where it's at
and nothing can communicate with it. Reminds me of a fairly sad story. There's actually a whale
right now swimming around in the ocean that can't communicate at the same frequency of other whales,
and so it's just kind of singing to itself. I know it's a sad story and there's really no way
to fix a biological baud rate. And I'm not really sure where I'm going with that, but lucky for us,
this project is all communicating well together and I think we've accomplished quite a lot today.
This 27 year old military Humvee is now a legally electric vehicle.
The next video in this series will probably be about liquid cooling. At the moment we do have
all the liquid cooling setup inside of the battery modules, we just have to string it together
and get the liquid flowing through everything else. So hit that subscribe button if you
haven't already. Turn on notifications. Come hang out with me on Instagram and
Twitter. And thanks a ton for watching. I'll see you around.