Thursday, May 19, 2016

[Video] Listen to this salvaged Model S powertrain

Hacker Jason Hughes aka wizkid057 is back at it again. After building a storage unit from two and a quarter salvaged Model S 85kWh battery packs for his off grid solar system, finding a hint of 100kWh Model S version in Tesla's software updatesdouble summon and installing Autopilot in his wife's 2014 Model S P85, Hughes managed this Tuesday to get his hands on a salvaged Model S rear drive unit to tinker with.

 "Received this motor this afternoon. First one I've gotten my hands on, finally! :) From scratch, got it spinning this evening. Took me longer to get it down here to my work area (waited on some help... this is heavier than it looks) than it did to get it actually get it hooked up and to decipher the data needed and write the software that makes it spin. Still some work to do in that area to make everything nice and functional, but the hard stuff is done. I've had the unit in my possession for about 12 hours, many of which were spent out running errands and other unrelated stuff.
From the time I had it physically in place and hooked up to the time I cracked the needed CAN messages and their structures: less than 3 hours.
Oh, and the motor was pulled from a car with firmware 7.1, so has the latest security items that would normally prevent this sort of thing... ;)"




Two days later, Hughes was still playing with the motor, making sure it has enough cooling while being pushed to its limits. He managed to get it rolling up to 13,000 RPMs or equivalent to 117 MPH (188 km/h) without any issues so far and could even control regenerative breaking. Now he is working on getting it hooked up to the instrument cluster he had to replace from his wife's hacked Model S P85 with Autopilot. More updates on this project will surely show up in the next few weeks if not days.


"Spent a few more hours with this beast. Hooked up a little cooling loop just to make sure I could run it a bit harder without fear of damage. Took it up to 13k RPMs (which showed at 117 MPH in the CAN data).... got grease from the hubs everywhere...

Got regen working and working well. I can set the maximum regen and discharge currents and power, as well as the max regen output voltage... definitely important since this might not be used with exactly a Tesla pack. Wouldn't want to over charge the battery pack.

Basically finished with the figuring out part. Now I need to make a cheap box that does all of the control and hook it up a an LCD or something and it's a done deal. Probably will use the Tesla instrument cluster for an instrument cluster. :)"


Worth noting a Tesla drive train extracted from a Mercedes B class EV was hacked last year by Michal Elias by replacing the original controller, outputting over 300kW at almost 600Nm.


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