Volts, Current, Action

Another test session at Northampton and we push the demo system further every time.

This time we concentrated on testing the fundamental electrical aspects of the system - though we did also do some vehicle testing.

This week's car. As usual, the cars are unaware of the test and just see a charger

For the electrical testing, some investors are asking specific technical questions, so we will answer them! They'll get a detailed report. Here's just a summary.

• Ramp up to max rated current and sustain for an hour.

  • Our current cables limit us to 200A, so we sustained that for an hour.

  • The cables got warm. As expected.

  • The other components? Well, they got warm because they're beside the cables. Otherwise - all perfect. As expected.

200 Amps sustained. No problem!

Then, one of the other things you should be careful with around electricity is the insulation. The electrons should stay where they are and not leak out. .

• So, we check the circuit integrity at high voltage...ensuring the insulation is all good.

  • We tested the insulation at thousands of volts and got resistance results in the range of >2 G Ohm. That's plenty. As expected.

Insulation Testing

Then, while we can run current through the system as if we're charging at 80kW or 160kW, the power at the site here can't deliver current and power at the same time. So we do charge testing at 22kW with a Tesla or VW or Mini. This time a VW.

And the functional testing runs perfectly. We run sequences to start and stop a charge, we can change the port that the car is charging on, and it all just works. As expected.

SAP's system is perfect, the Node-Red system is perfect, the onboard measurements worked perfectly, and the whole MQTT server system works awesomely, everything just works. There are always wrinkles. For instance some office LANs block wss connections which is annoying, but it's a setting that's not even worth changing for the day. That's what your phone's hotspot is for.

Next up is the final assembly process, probably at Imperial, and then a demo - location TBC!

After several testing sessions, the main thing is that it just works. Any issues we've had are due to things like - for instance - the quality of John or Bob's soldering. And that's hardly going to be a feature in the production units!

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