Charging Infrastructure

A lot of people ask where do you charge. The answer is nearly for all EV drivers is at home. Some times the next question is do you need special equipment to which the answer is a powerpoint. (more specifically a 15amp powerpoint for the provide cable with the LEAF or I-miev). When out and about we have the following options.

 Commercial Infrastructure

There are two providers of commercial charging infrastructure in Australia, both are American Chargepoint and Blink, there was a 3rd Better place but unfortunately that company went broke.  Blink is yet to setup an Australian office so they are a bit harder to contact.

Chargepoint have a office in every state of Australia and have around 167 charge stations in the country. The chargepoint model is a low risk for them, it requires the person or business that wants a charging station to pay for the capital costs of supply and install of the charger.  It’s then up to the charging station owner if they want to charge the EV driver and chargepoint through the use of their RFID tags issued to drivers then take care of the payment system and charger driver accordingly, at present all the ones in Australia are free to use.

As you can see the blink network is much smaller, with only 5 sites and 7 chargers.  blink doesn’t let the site owner choose the price but instead charge $1USD per hour. I’m still waiting to hear from blink sales on if they have plans to expand in Australia.

Community Infrastructure

What if you don’t want to charge people or just provide a simple power point.  Well for these site there is a great site that EV drivers and Charging spot owners can used to share information.  http://www.recargo.com/search (you might have to pan to Australia) Allows you to sign up and add charge points to there map tell other EV drivers that a charging spot works by checking in (think foursquare and facebook), and upload pictures to help people find charge location.  This has probably been the most useful tool so far when it comes to charging infrastructure, I highly recommend all EV drivers install the app on the iphone or android.

Encouraging Infrastructure

Currently there still isn’t enough charging infrastructure, not because the current EV drivers need it but mainly because it puts people off buying a EV.

In a small effort to make it easier for business to understand what’s required to provide a service to EV drivers I prepared a primer

Electric Vehicle Charging Solutions for Businesses

Hopefully other EV drivers can use this when negotiating with companies about added a charging station to there site.

The EV posts are comming !

EV i miev
July 2013 it arrived

In July we purchased a 2012 I-miev ex-demo (Dec 2012 rego) from booths motor group Gosford for $25000 it’s now November so in 3-4 months we have done ~5000km. it’s had its 1500km service and the next service is at 15000km or 1 year.

Driving a EV is like driving a classic car, you rarely see them on the road and there is a nice community around them.

Like I said this is post number one more are coming !

Kickstarter Field Hockey Game

For years in high school I had my hockey mad team mates telling me how great a field hockey game would be…

Looks like someone finally listerned there is currently a kick starter campaign to get one made http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/urbanwarfarestudios/the-field-hockey-game-pc-mac-linux

Love hockey but thing gaming is a waste of time ….. well think of this as a promotion of the sport well worth your time. I’ve backed it !

pvoutput.org updating

I’ve just got my new 3.27Kw sunpower solar system up and running and started output the results to pvoutput.org

http://www.pvoutput.org/intraday.jsp?id=20008

To upload I’m using the fronius easy card talking serial to a spare laptop ( will replace laptop with a raspi when i get a wireless card for it), because the sunpower inverter is a re-badged fronius i am using fslurp to do the serial commands

The only thing which needs to be changed is my device type is 0x97 Sunpower SPR-3501F-2, which is listed by fslurp as a unknown device.

I’m doing the actual upload to pvoutput using a sh script. fslurp2pvoutput-live.sh

Quad copter update

because I got a comment asking for more info on the last post here is a bit of an updated

I got my quad flying but flying a quad is harder than you think see video below

If you want to fly any model aircraft i recommending finding your local club mine is this one http://www.comsoa.com

not only can you get lessons but they have insurance encase your plane falls from the sky. (remember it’s a flying lawn mower i have scars on my arms to prove it)

Currently i haven’t got a lot of time to fly haven’t in a couple months as miss 2 and the newborn are keeping me very busy.

 

Jdrones ArduCopter Quad

So I decided to build a quad mainly the one designed by the diydrones.com people, there are 2 suppliers of the kit jdrones and udrones. one is based in Asia the other in the US.

I decided to be slack and buy the pre-soldered kit, I can solder and it’s not like it was anything hard like surface mount. Big NOTE when they say pre-soldered they don’t mean the entire kit has be soldered you still have to solder 24 bullet connectors and the power distribution board, and for some reason they give you the magnetometer attached by cable not soldered directly to a header on a board like they recommend.

So what I purchased from Jdrones

  • ArduCopter Quad v1.1 KIT, KIT, Pre-Soldered, Tested + Software
  • Upgraded with the 880kv motors 30amp esc and larger props.
  • Also wanted to be able to do low altitude hover so I brought a sonar
  • http://store.jdrones.com/product_p/cbl3psnr01.htm (cable)
  • http://store.jdrones.com/product_p/mb1200.htm (sonar)
  • http://store.jdrones.com/product_p/mntmx12pc01.htm (mount)
  • What I forgot to buy is some headers: http://store.jdrones.com/product_p/conhead20angle.htm and http://store.jdrones.com/product_p/conhead20str.htm

Ok so this isn’t enough to make it fly and yes you’ve just spent nearly a AU$1000 you’ll also need to get a Battery, and a radio. For that I tried the hobbyking.com shop. Note: if it’s not in stock in the Australian warehouse delivery times seem a bit slow.Also LiPo battery’s can not be shipped by air, make sure you buy in Australia for those.

battery: ZIPPY Flightmax 2650mAh 3S1P 40C also need some connectors XT60 Battery charger I’m using a cheap only does 2S and 3S batteries get it from jaycar Lipo balanced charger

Lastly is the radio the most expensive single item after the kit. I’m trying to get my hand on this but apparently the queue is long and the might take months. why so popular you ask well it cost like $60. and something with that many channels cost normally around $200+ so If nothing ships soon I’m looking at buying one of these Futaba 7c and probably from the more local hobby store dune planes

What you need to know about the TX RX radio is basically get 2.4 GHz otherwise the local model aircraft club will not let you fly near them. and you need at least 6 channels and any more than 8 channels is pointless

The diydrone has a very smart and easily programmable flight controller if you want cheap and no as intelligent have a look at kkmulticopter

Getting ClearOS to work with Atheros Communications AR8151 v2.0 Gigabit Ethernet (rev c0)

ClearOS formally Clarkconnect based of Centos…

Start by enabling the Tim S repo

To install the repo first install the public key (yes all RPM’s will now be signed) :-)
rpm --import ftp://timburgess.net/RPM-GPG-KEY-TimB.txt

Then install the release RPM (by default the ‘timb’ and ‘timb-testing’ repo’s will be disabled)

wget ftp://timburgess.net/repo/clearos/5.2/os/timb-release-1-0.noarch.rpm
rpm -Kv timb-release-1-0.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh timb-release-1-0.noarch.rpm

ref http://www.clearfoundation.com/docs/howtos/adding_tim_s_repo

yum --enablerepo=timb install kmod-atl1e

ref http://www.clearfoundation.com/component/option,com_kunena/Itemid,232/catid,28/func,view/id,24438/limit,10/limitstart,50/

last you need to edit the /etc/modprobe.conf
it need to contain an alias for every network card in my case I have a TP-link installed as well so

alias eth0 r8169
alias eth1 atl1e

if you fail to get this to work ifconfig -a will have a odd tmp interface.

Watch Digtal TV on Campus

If your on Campus at Newcastle university and want to watch some TV all you need is vlc media player.

The simple way is just lunch vlc remote it’s sitting on most university computers and select channel and go.

Otherwise just open  vlc select open network media stream and copy address from below

ABC news24  udp://@239.240.240.1:1234

Life is boring if things "Just Work" !