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Old 05-31-2012, 07:12 AM   #91
splee777
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Default Re: How does 48V 2001 Club Cart OBC function?

The schematic of your cart is pretty much identical to mine, with the exception that your OBC has a 3 pin plug on the Red, Brown and Yellow wire. The fuse on the Grey wire doesn't have anything to do with power to the OBC. The grey wire controls the relay in the charger. The OBC gets power on the Red and Black. You don't have any pictures of the board components after striping as much of the epoxy away?

Well, since I have nothing to loose, I will research and attempt a deconstruction regardless.

Good luck on your new cart. Sorry to hear electric didn't work out for you. Your mileage is probably not what the carts were designed for, though I'm still surprised that the batteries wore out in just 2.5 years. I would have expected that they last longer than 1000 cycles but I guess under heavy use, that's probably what you can expect. The batteries in my cart are about 10 years old and I"ve managed to baby them along. They won't go 25 miles though!
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Old 05-31-2012, 07:49 AM   #92
scottyb
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Default Re: How does 48V 2001 Club Cart OBC function?

Deep discharging batteries can drastically reduce their useful life.

Discharge to 25% capacity can result in a 1000 cycle life
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Old 05-31-2012, 07:59 AM   #93
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Default Re: How does 48V 2001 Club Cart OBC function?

FYI.... earlier model OBCs had two fuses... One on the grey wire by the charger receptacle, one on the red wire on the solenoid. Same 3/8Amp fuse in both locations.
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Old 05-31-2012, 03:19 PM   #94
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Default Re: How does 48V 2001 Club Cart OBC function?

Quote:
Originally Posted by splee777 View Post
...You don't have any pictures of the board components after striping as much of the epoxy away?
I will show you some pictures of the components. I would say about 10% ( a dozen or so) of the components were obviously physically damaged during disassembly. Many of the rest were probably destroyed by the 1500 watt heat gun I used to soften the epoxy in order to chisle it away. The heat gun was used because none of the solvents I tried made the slightest dent desolving the epoxy of the OBC - isopropal alcohol, paint thinner, turpatine, acetone or lacquer thinner.

My purpose was not to repair the OBC, but to see if it had the right components to match up with the Lester/Club patents on how to build an OBC. I wanted to find out how it FUNCTIONED (title of this thread) after my initial responses, while illuminating, failed to produce anything from the technical people that designed such things or had access to the enginnering information (vs practical experience or commercially available maintenance manuals).

I had the advantage of working on Z8 based Programable Controllers which used many of the same components as were in the OBC, so I could make a pretty good "educated guess" on what parts of the patents they implimented. It turns out - a great deal of the patent was used in the product.

For the not feint of heart, look up US Patents 687805 and 6114833 for more information on the technology and likely operation of the Lester/Club OBCs and how they controlled their battery chargers.

If they upload correctly, below should be some pictures of the components and the printed circuit board (PCB) in the Club rev 1.33 OBC.

Photo 1499: Top side of PCB. The blue toroid is part of an internal DC ampmeter. The large black wire to the batteries goes through it.

Photo 1501: A Zilog 8-bit microprocessor (uP) is the CPU of the OBC. At the time it was designed, this was a very good uP and gave the OBC the potential for quite sophisticated programming. It was rugged, low powered, had internal memory for progam code and temporary storage during executation.

Photo 1502: The OBC had voltage regulation for it's own circuitry. Note the insullation on the wires were melted by the heat gun.

Photo 1505: This is a (broken) fragile thin film resistor ladder network probably used to to help digitise the battery current and pack voltage readings.

Photo 1495: This is the primary conductor tracing side (bottom) of the PCB. Initially I had hopes of tracing out the circuit schematic, but the difficulity of cleaning the top side of the PCB down to see the "top side" traces to completely map the schematic were enormous - as it was very difficult to clean the epoxy away around the ICs and descrete resistors, caps, diodes, transistors, etc. Also I realized that even if I could do all this and identify the part that was initially defective, I had also destroyed many more parts in disassembly, making repair totally infeasible for me.
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File Type: jpg IMG_1501.jpg (236.2 KB, 0 views)
File Type: jpg IMG_1502.jpg (147.8 KB, 0 views)
File Type: jpg IMG_1507.jpg (103.1 KB, 0 views)
File Type: jpg IMG_1495.jpg (207.1 KB, 0 views)
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Old 05-31-2012, 03:36 PM   #95
splee777
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Default Re: How does 48V 2001 Club Cart OBC function?

Thanks DrBob! I knew someone with your background would have documented everything. That is exactly what I needed to see. Now that I know where the red wire goes and the general layout, I can concentrate on just tracing the power feed into the unit. That way, I won't have to depot the whole thing.

I guess the old Z8 must not have any security feature to prevent the reading out of the OTP memory, hence the potting.
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Old 05-31-2012, 04:30 PM   #96
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Default Re: How does 48V 2001 Club Cart OBC function?

DrBob: I've been following this thread with some interest for implications of the following mod I made. To reduce losses in cables as much as possible, I replaced all cables with two ought gage (Not #2, but 00 gauge, about 5/8" OD including insulation) and mounted a reversing contactor (Albright dual solenoid pack) local to the controller to eliminate the long power cables up and back to the F/R switch, and in so doing, I made a parallel run from the batt pack neg to the controller (wiring in parallel the original cable that goes thru the OBC with a 00 cable going around the OBC). Empirically, all appears well; the cart charges in the same profile you have described - I was wondering if you could think of any nagative implications. Since the OBC is not measuring the entire current flow, I was concerned that I may not get a full charge, but installed voltage gauge indicates normal (full) charging. Since the parallel cable is also in play for charging the same as in discharge, I suspect the current sharing between the parallel runs is equivalent in both directions, so that although the OBC may only be measuring a portion of EUs used, it works the same in reverse; that is, when its charging, I get the same ratio of current share so the charger puts back 110% of what it measured during discharge, so based on similar current-sharing in both directions, I come out the same as having all current flow thru OBC in both directions. Is there anything you have learned that would tend to discount that assertion or any other implications? By the way, I'm not convinced that simply removing the parallel 00 cable altogether would decrease performance noticeably, given that the rest of the current loop is all 00 guage. Your thoughts?
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Old 05-31-2012, 06:02 PM   #97
splee777
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Default Re: How does 48V 2001 Club Cart OBC function?

Well, I started removing my failed OBC completely from the cart this evening and found some interesting things. Remember how I said there was no fuse to my OBC? Well, I based that on the wiring diagram I was working off (attached below). In that diagram, the Red power wire to the OBC leads directly from the Solenoid battery connection. But when I dismantled the OBC and wiring just now, I found that there WAS an inline fuse on the Red wire to the OBC! I had seen that fuse, but based on the wiring diagram, it was supposed to be on the Red wire to the positive side of the Reverse Buzzer! It appears to be an error in the factory wiring diagram! I guess I should have wondered why a Buzzer needs a fuse.

So, I'm not going to find any fuse in the OBC, but I guess I'll still go through the process of tracing the power. It could be something as simple as some power regulator components failing. It just seems unlikely that EVERYTHING is fried inside and not consuming even a milliamp of power.
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Old 06-03-2012, 08:17 PM   #98
splee777
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Default Re: How does 48V 2001 Club Cart OBC function?

I spent some time this weekend working on my OBC and wanted to report my findings to the group. As stated earlier, I had an apparently dead OBC and I was trying to trace the power circuitry to see what the problem was. Thanks to DrBobs' prior work at dismantling the OBC, I was able to selectivly un-pot my unit, concentrating on the power feed area. From there, I was able to trace enough of the cicuitry to find out the following:

1) There IS a fusible link in the circuit, but mine was fine. See thumbnail 1 for it's location.
2) There is an onboard transistor that controls power on to the unit. I did not un-pot more of the circuit, but I found that when I artificially turned on the transistor, the unit would power up (yay!) and stay powered up.

At this point, I had to determine what it was that switched that transistor. Rather than un-pot more of the circuitry (a painful process, as DrBob indicated), I decided to read the patent. It turns out that there are some pretty decent psuedo schematics of the OBC in the patent. From those schematics and in reading the patent, it turns out that OBC is turned on when the charger is plugged in (i.e. 48V is present on the grey wire). Once turned on, it stays on for 7 days, after which it commits suicide and turns itself off. Presumably, plugging the charger in at anytime within those 7 days resets the timer. So, my cart has been without batteries for a year, and I never had the original charger, so I never had the 48V powered charger relay feeding power to the grey lead. I had simply charged my batteries by connecting the automatic charger to the + and - of the batteries.So I was never able to power up my OBC and I thought it was dead.

I will reinstall the OBC on my cart and jury rig a charger feed wire to test it out, but I'm pretty confident that it will work and that I have a working OBC.

So, for those of you using non-OEM chargers, just be aware of this behavior of the OBC.
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Old 06-29-2012, 03:16 PM   #99
hclancaster
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Default Re: How does 48V 2001 Club Cart OBC function?

Dr Bob,

As a EE and former design engineer, I really appreciate your approach to understanding the OBC! Thanks for the info you provided!

One thing I find frustrating in the golf cart resources available is the scarcity of electrical schematics, drawn as a schematics, rather than as wiring diagrams. I would love to see one to understand the electronics of the design. Have you by any chance generated a schematic for your cart?

-Cary L
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Old 06-29-2012, 07:46 PM   #100
DrBob
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Default Re: How does 48V 2001 Club Cart OBC function?

Quote:
Originally Posted by hclancaster View Post
Dr Bob,

Have you by any chance generated a schematic for your cart?

-Cary L
No, the only thing I used were the wiring diagrans from Club Car. For this application, they are more useful after you get used to them IMO, as every line corresponds to a physical wire tracable from start to the end.
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