This past week had a chance to get back into the electric Bugeye project, now that a bunch of the gas-powered Sprites in the queue have shipped to their new homes. With the power plant, controller and batteries located, FROG-E #1 is almost ready for test driving. Our next challenge is chargers. There will be three on board… one for fast charging from a 220 plug, one for a 110 household plug and one for the 12 volt system battery. The later runs every time the car is plugged-in to either 110 or 220, so that the headlights and other accessories always have juice available.
Above, you can see the 220 charging station receptacle for the fast charge function. We’ll fit that into the original fuel-fill hole, and a flip-up fuel fill cap will cover and hide this electric plug nicely, while providing a water-tight seal.
We have tough decisions to make as we fit these three metal boxes (one for each charger) and still try to preserve as much of the original look and feel of the car as possible. We needed to put batteries and chargers in the boot, but also have to make sure that people can still store some luggage there without interfering with the electrics. Thus two of the three chargers are nested in the right rear wing and a few battery cells are nested in the left rear wing.
I have included the two pictures below so you can see what we are up against. These are rough fitting pictures only, everything will be properly mounted and tidied up. Both sides will be shielded with plastic panels too, to protect the equipment (a panel is already in place on the driver side in the boot). But it gets interesting when you start running high voltage wires around these tiny cars. You can also see in the boot the wires running up from the batteries under the trunk floor, which also need to be shielded when we are done. We are trying hard to keep everything neat and tidy while retaining a storage space in the boot.
We should have the car running this coming week!