“Tricking” a Regen 2 into charge lockout

Fairtax4me

No, not tricking it out like a it rod, actually getting it to not work when a “smart” charger is connected.

In this case, a Summit II. The lockout is pretty necessary here. I have been called out to a cabin several times at 8 am to find out why a cart “won’t work”
Only to find they were trying to drive off with the charger still plugged in. Good thing for the charger lockout...

So anyways, for several reasons I needed to be able to charge two carts at the same cabin where power supply is somewhat limited. The breaker would trip with two PD3s plugged in so I opted to get two Summit IIs for the lower power consumption (plus they’re just way cool). I did a quick and dirty OBC bypass on one of our Precedents. And I ditched a dead OBC in one of our old Regen 2 carts that had a year old set of Trojan batteries in it.

I needed a way to make a lockout work, and didn’t really have time to wait for a relay to show up so I poked around with a wire diagram for a while and came up with a solution.

I put a 10k resistor on the Red/White wire to the FnR switch, and then spliced a wire between the resistor and the FnR for the lockout control. I used the grey wire from the charge recaptacle, left the fuse in place. So when the Summit II is plugged in, the Red/white wire is grounded via the lockout control terminal in the charger, so no voltage gets to the switch and the cart can’t be driven because the cart controller gets no F or R command.

I tested that theory without the charger first, and it worked perfect. I did have to change a setting in the charger to make sure the lockout was active and then after resetting the charger and plugging back in to the cart... lockout works once the DC cord is plugged in, and the cart will not move as long as the charger is plugged in. It continues to work even if the charger loses AC power, tested by unplugging the AC cord and leaving it for about 15 minutes. As long as the DC side is plugged in, the cart stays in “lockout” and can’t be driven.

Quick and easy, only things required are a 10k 1watt resistor, some spade terminals, and a couple inches of 18awg wire.

BGW

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Sergio

That is pretty clever since the Controller input pins require very little current to operate.

I am curious though, even at 2mA You would have a 20v drop on that resistor, Did You measure the voltage at the FNR when it is if F or R to see how much voltage drop is actually happening?

Fairtax4me

I did measure that, and it’s delivering something around 32-33v to the controller after the resistor. Seems to be fine? It hasn’t shut off yet at least.

I have some 7.5k and 5k resistors laying around but they are all 1/4 or 1/8w and since the power here comes from the tow/run switch I thought maybe the higher watt resistor would be better, even though it’s a 10k. Im thinking it could probably work just as well with a 5k, but again I didn’t want to order and wait for it.

I didn’t think of it at the time (since it works) but at some point I may try to parallel two of the 10k and see what it does. I only have a few of those left.

Sergio

I did a good guess with 20v drop

I have seen this in other Curtis Controllers, maybe it is typical for that Controller inputs as well: ">20.0 V High; <7.5 V Low"

In that case you are way within the High range and You don't want to go any lower value on the Resistor.

You can use a 10kΩ x 1/2 watt resistor as the average power would be around 1/4watt when the charger is plugged in.

If You wire an LED in series with the wire that goes to the charger receptacle, the LED would light up with the plug and even the Blue 3.0v drop LED would still keep the input signal Low.

Fairtax4me

I had thought about an LED as a warning lamp, But I couldn’t find the handful of LEDS I had left over from long ago (when I had more time play around with electronics)
Even checked the resistance on a battery warning lamp (have a spare) and found that to be around 45kohm and I didn’t figure that would actually light up, and probably wouldn’t pass enough current to allow the F/R command.
Then I figured as long as the interlock worked the warning lamp wasn’t necessery.

NoleFan4Ever

I like the innovation....