Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

I've been reading ePub books on my Samsung Galaxy S almost since I got it, and it's been a Good Thing.

The screen is large enough to read text fairly quickly - a speed reader could easily scan each line in portrait mode without moving their eyes horizontally at all. Yet it's not too large to be uncomfortable to hold. The Alkido reader supplied is adequate but I prefer FBReader - with a nice serif font (although there's little evidence at all for it being more legible, it does render the italics of some of my books correctly - something I'd originally thought had been an error in the book encoding or the reader), its 'night-time' white-on-black mode, and its better organisation of my library.

Mostly the books I've picked up have been from Project Gutenberg, which my readers probably know well. As my views on 'strong' copyright are also fairly well known it would be otiose to relate them, but I see Project Gutenberg as proof that the doomsday scenarios of the 'strong' copyright lobby paint of the time after the copyright in a work expires - that either everyone will be copying it like crazy and making money out of it, or that it will mean obscurity and lack of recognition for the author - are baseless. Project Gutenberg makes these works available for free and by doing so the authors works are preserved and gain value by their availability, but without any one company profiting from the process. In fact, the 'strong' copyright arguments basically devolve to "but we won't be making any money from it", even though often they aren't anyway.

(Message to Disney: there are children growing up now who have no idea what Mickey Mouse is. Deal with it.)

Anyway, one of my finds was The Green Rust by Edgar Wallace, based on having found that two early Agatha Christie novels - The Mysterious Affair at Styles and Secret Adversary - were available, based on having read through A Study in Scarlet and looked up the subject "Detective and mystery stories". I'd link you to that search but for several badly thought-out reasons Project Gutenberg have decided that looking up a subject or author should have no well-formed, static URL.

Now, Edgar Wallace was a name I recognised from a different context. Many years ago Severed Heads released a track called "Dead Eyes Opened", originally released in 1984 but with a new dance remix in 1994 that became their only really mainstream hit. It borrows from Edgar Lustgarten's audio recording of the crime that I later found out was incongruously called The Crumbles Murders. In it, he says:

Then — I owe a debt here to Edgar Wallace, who edited the transcript of the Mahon trial — …

Yes, it's that Edgar Wallace. Not only a famous court reporter but also an author of many fiction novels, mostly detective and mystery stories, and as the part inventor of King Kong. And I have to say that his writing is quite enjoyable - not as old as Doyle's and with a touch of genre-savvy, and with a bit less reveal-everything-at-the-end compared to Christie. It's strange how these little synchronicities in life come about.

My current "it would be so cool but it will never happen" fantasy project idea:

• An Ultima GTR body and kit - about $23,000.
• Two UQM PowerPhase 200 electric motors, each capable of 200 kw (268 bhp) and 900Nm of torque, one per rear wheel - I don't know what they cost, probably in excess of $10,000 total.
• The controllers that UQM sell are probably just as good, but if in doubt, two Soliton One controllers, one per motor - a steal at only $6,000.
• 134 Kokam SLPB 80460330H batteries, capable of delivering 500-800A, charging at 500A, and storing 100Ah of power. Weighing in at just over 360kg, the whole pack stores 42.8 kilowatt-hours of power. Unknown price, but based on rough guesses from other quoted Kokam prices - probably about $50,000.
• A cooling system for the motors and the controllers. Probably another $2,000. Refrigerated might make sense here.
• All the other bits and pieces that make the car liveable - seats, harness, air conditioning, etc. These are considered "optional extras" by Ultima, but at a rough guess it's probably more than $6,000.

Using direct drive should be sufficient - at a tyre circumference of say 1.8 metres, at 5,500RPM the car will be going about 594Km/hr (unless I've done something grossly wrong with the units of those calculations). But getting a gearbox to reduce the ratio on those motors, say by a factor of two, puts the top speed at a more reasonable 297Km/hr and puts more of the motors peak efficiency within our standard rev range. Still, trying to find a gearbox that can deal with 900Nm of torque is a problem.

As a comparison, the Ultima GTR that has set several world records used a seven liter V8 producing 720bhp (528Kw). I'm delivering 200KW (268bhp) per wheel in a curve that flattens out at around 3500 RPM. A similar car has a torque of around 811 lb/ft - 1100Nm; I can deliver 900Nm per wheel up to around 1250RPM. It's too late and I've spent too much time browsing random stuff on the internet to work out how to convert that into an acceleration time for a 1000kg car on wheels with a radius of about 307mm. It's probably fairly big. So an electric conversion doesn't make it into a GTR-killer, but it's still pretty compatible.

So overall the UltimaWatt project would cost over $100,000. Anybody interested in sponsoring this project ☺?

After I build my tenth Electric Vehicle, I think I'll just start to have a basic knowledge of how to do so.

After all, just today I learnt about the Tritium Wavesculptor, a high-end controller for brushless three-phase DC motors (which aren't really DC motors, they're actually AC, it's just that the simpler controllers just output on-off square-like waves to energise each phase in turn, but that's another story). And they make a battery management system too - one that is actually formed (by chance) for the specific type of cell I have.

I learnt this not in a search for controllers - apart from already having one, I had discovered the EVnetics Soliton One (I refuse to link to EVnetics' site since it's Flash-only, but here's Rebirth Auto selling one for a mere $2,995 USD). Since that was far more controller than I needed - even the Soliton Jr doesn't really work under 240VDC, which is twice my standard pack voltage - I hadn't really looked around for more. I actually noticed a reference to a "Tritium Wavesculptor" in a post on the AEVA forums about converting (of all things) a VW Type 3.

Tritium are an Australian company that's been around and creating EV controllers for, oh, nearly a decade! How is it that I haven't heard of them?

Clearly, this is a field that needs a really good directory of motors, controllers and batteries. And, just as clearly, the market is fragmented - dozens of forums (with names from the normal to the incomprehensible and unguessable), dozens of suppliers, minimal coherence of specification (e.g. some cells are measured in grams per watt hour, some in litres per amp hour, etc.) and dozens, even, of supplier lists and directories on forums, enthusiast and club sites, and elsewhere. I feel the need to create a motor comparison and controller comparison site, if I didn't think I was already struggling for time just to do the things I want to do that are relevant to me right now.

Sigh.