I spoke with Jim, the owner of LogiSystems this afternoon and thoroughly discussed my controller issue. First I will say that Jim has always been very polite, straight forward, and accessible through all of their problems. I have also heard this same thing from quite a few others who have called him about their failed controllers. I truly believe that he has the same goal as I do, which is to have a working controller in my car. I feel no need to be irate with him over this situation.
He did a post-mortem on my controller and found that it had a catastrophic failure. Duh! He said that it was the most badly damaged controller he has seen, even among the ones they have deliberately failed as test units. He did learn that the control board that was the source of the prior LogiSystems problems had not failed - which is a bit of good news I guess. He said that about 100 defective controllers had been repaired with no failures except mine. I have heard of no other failures and several other successes with the repaired controllers, so I do believe him. My controller was too badly damaged to know exactly what went wrong, but he said it looked like a direct short of full battery voltage/amperage across the main busses - which should be impossible in the controller.
At his request, I had also sent him a copy of my wiring diagram. He said the diagram was great and we discussed several aspects of my wiring with respect to how the controller works. We agreed that there should be no reason for this type of failure due to my wiring. So the end result is that we really have no idea what actually went wrong - not such good news. I was hoping for a definitive answer to this problem.
At this point, my thought is that if mine is the only repaired controller that failed, that is only a 1 percent failure rate among the prior defectives, and a much lower failure rate among all controllers they have shipped. This failure rate can probably be expected. I am going to assume that I am just the unlucky bastard who got a bad component or some other unfortunate defect with the last controller. I will further assume that the replacement unit will work as expected. I requested last week that they upgrade my controller to a 750 amp version, which they did and it was shipped out today.
So, I will put on my steel underwear and give Logisystems another try. Perhaps I should sell tickets this time and make an event out of it. In addition to getting my fire extinguisher refilled, I should probably pick up a fire suit and helmet for the next test drive.
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9 comments:
What will be the biggest difference between the old controller and the new 750amp controller?
And it's awesome you're still pushing forward with this. Very soon you're going to have one really amazing EV.
Well, I'm glad that the replacement has shipped. I really want to live vicariously through your soon to be successful EV. You're a very patient man, and I'm sure you'll be all the better for it in the long run.
I gotta say I admire your determination, I would have given up and gotten the other controller (and lose the money probably).
But if this is truly the only that failed, then the replacemùent should be OK.
If I was LogiSystems, I would wanna come over to install and test the new controller in the Duster personally, this is better then all the test benches they can think of...
@ Werner
I was thinking the exact same thing!
Why not invite Jim over (with a bag full of controllers heheh) and let him test yr rig!
Hi there, sad to see whats happening with logisystems, but i have one waiting to go into the car.i don't intend sending it back unless i have to, but in the meantime i need to figure out how to hook up my pb6 potbox to the controller.
can you give me an idea?
i really hope logisystems gets itself together
It's been over a week. Did the controller arrive yet? I'm extremely curious to see how this turns out. Hopefully I'll be testing my full voltage pack in the next couple of weeks. The more work I do, the more work I realize I need to do. But, progress is being made!
LogiSystems sent the new controller out very quickly, as they said they would. I received it 6 days ago. Honestly, I have had the time to install it, but I have not yet been in the proper mood to endure another failure, so I have been putting it off. Hopefully I will get it installed this weekend.
Think of your adoring fans, Bruce!
Still hoping to see this thing running soon (preferably without flames) :)
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