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[Alan Stewart]

Sevcon bought a battery charging company.

http://www.sevcon.com/media/77451/sevcon_acquires_bassi_english_italian.pdf

One goal is to "integrate battery charger and power management technology with Sevcon’s new GEN5 family of motor controllers to offer a unified suite of electronics for on-road vehicles."

[Erasmo]

Ah so they're going the Renault way. They use the motorcontroller to charge the Zoe:

[Alan Stewart]

I dunno, but integration usually means smaller and cheaper.

[Erasmo]

It's also kind of silly to have a separate charger on a motor when the controller can do the same.

[Ndm]

As we have all seen here the charger seems to be zero's weak point, I don't think I have seen anything about the controller going bad, so we may get faster charging from a proven product, this all sounds good to me

[Doug S]

As an EE, there are a lot of similar components between the charger and the motor controller. All of the power electronics are pretty redundant, and configured similarly. It does seem like a pretty elegant solution, especially since they're never used at the same time.

[kingcharles]

If my memory is correct the Mission motorcycle was supposed to have the MC/Charger too.

I hope Sevcon can get this to market quick!

With all the miniaturisation going on the electric motorcycles will benefit a lot!
Good times are coming for us [emoji3]

[MrDude_1]

This is one of the things I have been waiting for.  There shouldnt be a separate charger and  controller.. They should be one unit.

[Doctorbass]

I am actually using a motor controler that does this for my ebike. The Company called Adaptto witch i represented at the Interbike 2015 last year at Las vegas, are offering complete ebike motor controller with display, BMS and charging wide voltage acceptance solution. as well these are made more for DIY ebike and small electric motorcycle and offer controler up to 14kW or 28kW for the dual controller for 2WD. these can work up to 92V and 350A motor current.

The charging option is in fact using the  controller output phase mosfets to PWM an external LC circuit (coil in serie with capacitor in parallel). This allow charging at any input voltage  from 12V to Vbatt  as the coil  in conjunction with the controller  work together as a boost converter. This is brilliant and simple way that allow you to charge your battery at high power using cheap power supply like the eltek, HP and other server power supply found on ebay for about 20$ per kW

The same principle (PWM acheived by the controller output mosfet  controlling the coil and caps) to get the desired voltage and current to the battery can be implemented to any controller in fact. But this goes for a DC source to convert to  another DC output to charge.

Now to use AC  240V as the input, the 240v is the RMS input  and  the peak voltage is 1.41 time higher witch mean 340V. If you add the safety margin this bring the voltage to abot 400Vdc that the mosfet of the controler need to handle.. At this voltage  the popular cheap mosfet have less current handling for the packaging same size so it require more mosfet.. ex: a 150V mosfet like the gen4 80V model use can handle higher current than a 400V mosfet the same size can do...

The problem with that is the voltage that the controller are designed to work with and the voltage the AC source require  when the controller power stage need to be used for both application... IF the Zero batery could move from  from 28s to 96s, this would be done easy as 96s battery have about the same voltage as the 240V peak + margin are... however i think that at Zero they will remain with <150V for long..


Doc

[mrwilsn]

Mincing words...

Integrate battery charger and power management technology with Sevcon’s new GEN5 family of motor controllers to offer a unified suite of electronics for on-road vehicles

When I read 'unified suite of electronics' I think electronics that are integrated to work well together....like the way things "work with Nest".  In other words...I don't think this announcement necessarily means they will integrate the controller and charger into a single package.  For a motorcycle there are some advantages to having the charger and controller in separate packages allowing flexibility in placement.  If you combine the charger and controller into a single package I'm not sure if you can eliminate enough components to make the resulting package reasonably small enough for use on a motorcycle.

In a perfect world my bike wouldn't have an on-board charger at all.  I would buy a charger that I would mount on my wall in my garage that would use to DC charge my bike battery (and car, etc) and when I am out there would be enough public DC fast chargers to allow me to travel anywhere. No more carrying adapters or cables!

Hopefully this will result in higher quality components that are well integrated together and customers like Zero will have to spend fewer resources integrating a charging solution with the controller and BMS.