Modified grid charger mock-up

The grid charger mock-up modified, to accommodate the cable to the front panel, and to add a circuit board for mounting the controller.

Self-driving car mock-up, passenger perspective

...or, having some fun while replacing the air conditioning evaporator.

Yet another Honda Insight grid charger build

These are my own build notes for a grid charger design by Mike Dabrowski. If you are looking to build one for yourself, check out his site at 99mpg.com, or visit insightcentral.net. I am building mine according to this block diagram: http://99mpg.com/Data/resources/downloads/gridchargerstuff/basicgridchargerv1.pdf  These are my build notes.

I am building mine into an old cable TV set top box. Here's the main board from the box:

I decided to mount the power supplies on the box's main circuit board so that I can wire things easily and then drop the whole thing into the chassis. That meant unsoldering some components and melting off the rest with a heat gun:

I had to unsolder these through-hole components. They will go into my go-kit.

These parts came off with the heat gun. I eventually discovered that some of the through-hole parts could be removed this way. There are many itty bitty surface mount parts mixed in there.

I decided to see if I could reuse the power supply in the set top box. It has many outputs, but I'm only interested in +5V. Sadly, it had no +12V output to drive the Insight's cooling fans, and I was not inclined to change the voltage of one of the other outputs.

This circuit was actually pretty easy to follow.

It needed a load across the 3.4V output and a 150 ohm and 100 ohm power resistor in parallel did the trick. There is no reason for them being different values except that they were the first two resistors I found in the junk box.

Don't mount resistors like this. They will break off, short out and cause fires.

A mock-up of the power supplies as they will be mounted. It remains to be seen if a cooling fan will be needed.