How I charge my ebike from J1772

I just got done installing a J1772 plug in my Electric Enduro frame and am quite happy that I can now charge off of plentiful and usually free J1772 Electric Car charge plugs, as well as keep my ability to charge from a standard wall outlet. It was a pretty simple thing to do, aided by the excellent Cycle Satiator. Any bulk charger that can take both 110V and 220V can use this method. The standard allows up to 30 amps at 220V, so depending on the capabilities of your charger, you can charge quite quickly this way... and usually for free.

Now I can charge at work!

[youtube]2ikpJT1U_Kw[/youtube]

-Jim

I just built a portable J1772 to double NEMA outlet. Means I can use free charging stations for anything: phone and laptop charging mostly though.

Also means I can charge from the standard NEMA sockets at places like cafes and service stations with permission.

Ok nice
Care to explain the costs and items involved? This is a DIY forum mainly for information sharing after all.
Leave the bragging at the door :wink:

Monstarr said:

Ok nice
Care to explain the costs and items involved? This is a DIY forum mainly for information sharing after all.
Leave the bragging at the door :wink:

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What more do you want than what was explained in the video? Did you watch the video? Everything that I used to do it is in there.

You may think it's bragging, that's fine. I wanted this on my bike and didn't find anything readily available, so I figured it out and posted it so the next "me" would be able to easily replicate it.

-Jim

kingjamez said:

Monstarr said:

Ok nice
Care to explain the costs and items involved? This is a DIY forum mainly for information sharing after all.
Leave the bragging at the door :wink:

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What more do you want than what was explained in the video? Did you watch the video? Everything that I used to do it is in there.

You may think it's bragging, that's fine. I wanted this on my bike and didn't find anything readily available, so I figured it out and posted it so the next "me" would be able to easily replicate it.

-Jim

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The bragging was a joke, no offensive intention. Hence the -> :wink:
I am at work so cannot watch the video, will do tonight and check the details.
Thanks for sharing.

kingjamez said:

I wanted this on my bike and didn't find anything readily available, so I figured it out and posted it so the next "me" would be able to easily replicate it.

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You can buy a proper control box that does the status control for you:

http://www.tucsonev.com

Or you could just buy a ready made box:

http://modularevpower.com/J1772_adapters.htm (US Style plugs only)

Technically, since your charger doesn't check the PWM, it's not J1772 compliant. The protocol doesn't really specify what happens if that's the case, but I expect it would not be a problem unless you drew too much current. The TucsonEv control box is officially compliant (see list of compliant devices at the end of the page):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J1772

LOL on buying the ready made boxes. One is $150 the other is $235. I have less than $50 in my adapter.

I never claimed to be J1772 compliant, only that I'm able to use J1772 EVSE's. The minimum spec J1772 amperage is 6 amps. I'm using a Cycle Satiator to charge and it only is capable of 350W so it can only pull 50% of the minimum specs capability. If I ever decide to swap out the charger for something faster, PWM detection is trivial with an aurduino.

The other thing I didn't implement is the proximity detect circuit on the EV side. It's designed to not allow the EV to power the motor when connected to the charger in case you forget to unplug. Since it's very unlikely that I'll forget to unplug and the bike really isn't drivable while plugged in, I skipped that completely.

-Jim

kingjamez said:

LOL on buying the ready made boxes. One is $150 the other is $235. I have less than $50 in my adapter.

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Sure, but you said you couldn't find anything readily available, so I posted two.

Sunder said:

kingjamez said:

LOL on buying the ready made boxes. One is $150 the other is $235. I have less than $50 in my adapter.

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Sure, but you said you couldn't find anything readily available, so I posted two.

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Thanks, you've clearly demonstrated your superior googling skillz. Gold star for you.

kingjamez said:

Thanks, you've clearly demonstrated your superior googling skillz. Gold star for you.

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Seems like you've taken offence to pretty much every single post in this thread, whether from me or someone else... Any reason why? I know you must be proud to have feel like you were breaking ground and leading the way for others, but the reality is, people have been using J1772 chargers to charge their bikes for years now. People have tried it your way, and people have bought it off the shelf, and the consensus seems to be if you're messing around with devices that can fry you instantly without the benefit of residential safety devices, don't screw around with your life to save a few bucks. I'd just hate for someone to find your thread first and be misled that your way is the only/better/cheaper way, when there are resources out there that are far easier and safer, and don't cost much more.

Sunder said:

Seems like you've taken offence

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Really, dude? PM him if you're going to play psychologist. The rest of us just want to see badass EV charging.

Personally, I think those preassembled J1772s are ridiculous ripoffs that don't belong on this forum, except to be laughed at and avoided.

flat tire said:

Sunder said:

Seems like you've taken offence

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Really, dude? PM him if you're going to play psychologist. The rest of us just want to see badass EV charging.

Personally, I think those preassembled J1772s are ridiculous ripoffs that don't belong on this forum, except to be laughed at and avoided.

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Sure, but it's nice to have that option, isn't it? Been a few times where I've done things the "hard" way, building from scratch, taking away several weekends, when something was available premade for an hour or two wages more, because my first search result was someone who claimed that nothing was available commercially, so here's the plan.

One example was a 150v waterproof charger. Another forum had a poster saying "I couldn't find a water proof charger that does 150v, so here's how I connected 4 x Meanwells with diodes to isolate them". After I bought the parts, another poster linked up some Elcom waterproof chargers that were $150 more, but twice the charge rate. Also turns out the other design method put excessive strain on the last charger, and it dies after a few months.

In that case, I would have appreciated if the second poster had responded faster, and linked a commercial solution. Then I could have made an informed choice.

If Jim wants to show off his home made one, all power to him, I'll either leave a positive comment or none at all. BUT if he wants to represent it as "the only way" and lead others to endanger themselves and the public, waste time and possibly money, I want to set the record straight, and if he wants to be sarcastic about it, I'll respond.

Sunder said:

If Jim wants to show off his home made one, all power to him, I'll either leave a positive comment or none at all. BUT if he wants to represent it as "the only way" and lead others to endanger themselves and the public, waste time and possibly money, I want to set the record straight, and if he wants to be sarcastic about it, I'll respond.

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Dude, what is wrong with you? "Set the record straight" ??? WHAT? When did I say this was the only way? I said I couldn't find anything, and what you linked to doesn't integrate in with an ebike AT ALL. Mine does, and uses THE STANDARD for activating J1772's AC connection.

Furthermore, what in the world are you talking about in "endanger themselves and the public, waste time and possibly money"? Where does that even come from? You are so melodramatic, and that's as kind a word as I can come up with. Please link me to a thread where "the consensus" was that using something like I have is in anyway unsafe.

J1772 is nothing more than a well orchestrated wall plug. If you think it's dangerous to plug a charger into the wall, then what on earth are you doing in an online forum that talks about people going fast on 2 wheeled vehicles with 100+ volts of lithium batteries between their legs?

Why are you so hostile Sunder?

Flat Tire:
Thanks man. I was about to delete all of my posts until you posted. You are spot on in that the commercial solutions are laughably expensive for the required logic. Plus having one of those big blocks on a bike just to plug it in? Not practical. They are probably good solutions if you were building an electric car, but totally useless for mounting on a bicycle.

-Jim

Alright, I can see you've taken this very personally. But before asking what's wrong with me, seriously, look back at who snapped at Monstarr for joking about bragging, look who wants to sarcastically give "gold stars" out, look who's getting emotional about this whole thread.

If you can't tell a the difference between a 2400w wall plug that is protected through an RCD that can detect unbalanced currents in the milliamp ranges that can cut off in milliseconds, and a 6600w unprotected power source, maybe you shouldn't be playing with this stuff...

I'm going to leave you to it... At least if people find this thread, they know there are commercially available options... Even if you can't find them (Apologies, I do now see that you said that you couldn't find them, not that they are not available).

Goddamn, paging Freud.

Sunder said:

If you can't tell a the difference between a 2400w wall plug that is protected through an RCD that can detect unbalanced currents in the milliamp ranges that can cut off in milliseconds, and a 6600w unprotected power source, maybe you shouldn't be playing with this stuff...

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What makes you think that EVSE's don't have an RCD? Mine does.

I'm happy to have a "real" discussion about the safety of my implementation.

-Jim

Look, I think in hindsight, the best way for me to have approached this thread would have been:

"Good work, nice solution. But for anyone else not as confident playing around with 6.6kw of unprotected power, be aware that there are some reasonably priced pre-built converter boxes, that would allow you to keep your standard wall plug for most charging, but let you charge with J1772 wherever you find them".

How about we pretend I said that, and leave it there.

That's good advice for when he's selling them, Sunder, but as of right now, guess how most of us are powering our chargers? That's right, not from "intelligent" EV charge plugs but straight out of the good ol unprotected wall...and mine has a lot more than 6KW available if I don't use the 110.

So to de-hijack this thread, for those charging at public stations do you ever leave your bike unattended and if so under what circumstances?

Sunder said:

Look, I think in hindsight, the best way for me to have approached this thread would have been:

"Good work, nice solution. But for anyone else not as confident playing around with 6.6kw of unprotected power, be aware that there are some reasonably priced pre-built converter boxes, that would allow you to keep your standard wall plug for most charging, but let you charge with J1772 wherever you find them".

How about we pretend I said that, and leave it there.

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That would have been appreciated.

Not to continue to argue... but .

The prebuilt converter boxes do not offer any additional safeties. The proximity detect clearly isn't implemented. As described, my system can't pull more than the minimum spec so is safe at every J1772 EVSE made. I'm an electrical engineer and for the life of me I can't see any safety advantage by using one of the prebuilt solutions.

Furthermore, as I stated at the top of the thread, I didn't modify the Cycle Satiator at all. I can still plug into a standard 110v or 220v outlet.

-Jim

flat tire said:

So to de-hijack this thread, for those charging at public stations do you ever leave your bike unattended and if so under what circumstances?

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This is something that I'll need to worry about. I'm going to have a $3K+ bike, not chained to anything while it's charging. I'll need to come up with something to try and solve that problem. Good thought, I hadn't considered that.

-Jim

kingjamez said:

That all happens in the EVSE, not in the vehicle.

I'm happy to have a "real" discussion about the safety of my implementation.

-Jim

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You're starting to scare me... Yes, it happens in the EVSE, but the RCD is in every residential switch board mandated several decades ago. They're not required and generally not installed in commercial J1772 chargers. Of course, if you use an adaptor like from your Leaf or my Outlander, the home version will trip the HOME RCD. But if you use a commercial one, there's no such protection.

Here's an example.

1. Assume someone follows your instructions but is less capable than you. They crimp the connector, but don't have the attention to detail - one single strand of the wire from the "active" touches the frame of the bike. As it's not currently charging, it's 100% safe.

2. They plug it in to their home charger. 5 amps (or whatever) should go to the Cycle Satiator. But since you have one wire touching the frame,a couple hundred milliamps from the active side goes to the frame. and 4.9 amps goes to the charger. On the neutral side, which is properly crimped, the full 5 amps goes to the charger. The RCD notices this, and kills the connection in milliseconds. No equipment damaged, nobody dies.

3. The inexperienced guy doesn't figure out what is going on, but thinks he'll try it at the local shopping centre. No RCD, the EVSE will keep pumping as much power as it can until it blows a fuse. Boom.

Unlikely? Very. Possible. Very.

kingjamez said:

This is something that I'll need to worry about. I'm going to have a $3K+ bike, not chained to anything while it's charging. I'll need to come up with something to try and solve that problem. Good thought, I hadn't considered that.

-Jim

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Yeah, it's a big issue for me because I have a lot of EV chargers near me including several about a mile from my local MTB trails. But I don't want to have to sit and wait with the bike while it charges!

Was thinking of interesting security features. Streaming audio / video (2 way audio w/ megaphone) from smartphone is a must so you can dress down thieves and deter them with the loud noise. It can be activated by proximity or someone touching the bike, or you can just watch it if you're really paranoid. You can also talk to people admiring the bike if you're totally bored and want to live in the future.

kingjamez said:

I'm an electrical engineer and for the life of me I can't see any safety advantage by using one of the prebuilt solutions.

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Sorry, missed this post. You might have posted while I was writing up the long one above.

For someone who is competent? Probably not a lot. For someone who is an enthusiast? ... See my above post.

Sunder said:

kingjamez said:

That all happens in the EVSE, not in the vehicle.

I'm happy to have a "real" discussion about the safety of my implementation.

-Jim

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You're starting to scare me... Yes, it happens in the EVSE, but the RCD is in every residential switch board mandated several decades ago. They're not required and generally not installed in commercial J1772 chargers. Of course, if you use an adaptor like from your Leaf or my Outlander, the home version will trip the HOME RCD. But if you use a commercial one, there's no such protection.

Here's an example.

1. Assume someone follows your instructions but is less capable than you. They crimp the connector, but don't have the attention to detail - one single strand of the wire from the "active" touches the frame of the bike. As it's not currently charging, it's 100% safe.

2. They plug it in to their home charger. 5 amps (or whatever) should go to the Cycle Satiator. But since you have one wire touching the frame,a couple hundred milliamps from the active side goes to the frame. and 4.9 amps goes to the charger. On the neutral side, which is properly crimped, the full 5 amps goes to the charger. The RCD notices this, and kills the connection in milliseconds. No equipment damaged, nobody dies.

3. The inexperienced guy doesn't figure out what is going on, but thinks he'll try it at the local shopping centre. No RCD, the EVSE will keep pumping as much power as it can until it blows a fuse. Boom.

Unlikely? Very. Possible. Very.

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This is great, I'm happy to have a decent conversation about the safety of what I've done.

How does using one of the pre-made boxes you linked to as "safe" solve the problem of somebody doing an incorrect implementation of what I described? The boxes you linked to don't have GFCI built in.

Even if I grant you the above, GFCI is built into my home EVSE's and they don't require external GFCI circuitry. They call it a charge circuit interrupting device (CCID). I don't know the schematics of the public chargers, but if my home EVSE has built in GFCI (and not for regulatory reasons, it's not required in the US on 220v outlets), I have a hard time believing that outdoor, public, EVSE's don't have a CCID.

For futher information; https://honda.leviton.com/infocenter/evse-fact-sheet
-Jim

kingjamez said:

This is great, I'm happy to have a decent conversation about the safety of what I've done.

How does using one of the pre-made boxes you linked to as "safe" solve the problem of somebody doing an incorrect implementation of what I described? The boxes you linked to don't have GFCI built in.

Even if I grant you the above, GFCI is built into my home EVSE's doesn't require external GFCI circuitry. They call it a charge circuit interrupting device (CCID). I don't know the schematics of the public chargers, but if my home EVSE has built in GFCI (and not for regulatory reasons, it's not required in the US on 220v outlets), I have a hard time believing that outdoor, public, EVSE's don't have a CCID.

-Jim

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Mainly because it's a completely sealed device assembled by what is hopefully a professional. (Well, the complete one is - obviously the Tucson one depends on how you treat the other end of the cable). There is nothing metallic that is human touchable on my box, therefore my body can't be used as a path to ground.

Trying to find a photo of someone who opened up their Outlander charger so they could extend the NEMA side of the cable (it's extremely short - again for safety reasons, but this guy felt it was excessively paranoid and felt it was safe to extend it). It was extremely simple and I couldn't find anything that I couldn't account for in terms of functionality. Certainly nothing that could be an RCD/GFCI. Of course, I couldn't ask him to flip over the circuit board, so I could be wrong.

I find that residential 220v outlets in the US not requiring RCD/GFCI devices a little odd. I thought I read an IET or IEEE paper saying that all residential sockets are required to have it by law, and it's optional but recommended in commercial and industrial premises. I know a few commercial/industrial electricians, and they said most offices have them, but they virtually don't exist elsewhere, especially where high currents are used. Maybe it's just a regional thing?

Putting those two together, I'm actually now wondering if there's an "Australian" version of the charger that doesn't have an RCD in it, and a more expensive "American" version, that does, because they know that RCDs are not required in the US?

Ah, here is what I was thinking of:

411.3.3 Additional protection
In a.c. systems, additional protection by means of an RCD in accordance with Regulation 415.1 shall be provided for:
(i) socket-outlets with a rated current not exceeding 20 A, and
(ii) mobile equipment with a current rating not exceeding 32 A for use outdoors.
An exception to (i) is permitted:
(a) where, other than for an installation in a dwelling, a documented risk assessment determines that the RCD protection is not necessary, or
(b) for a specific labelled or otherwise suitably identified socket-outlet provided for connection of a particular item of equipment.
NOTE 1: See also Regulations 314.1(iv) and 531.2.4 concerning the avoidance of unwanted tripping.
NOTE 2: The requirements of Regulation 411.3.3 do not apply to FELV systems according to Regulation 411.7 or reduced low voltage systems according to Regulation 411.8.
NOTE 3: See Appendix 2, item 10 in respect of risk assessment.

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