Ah, I didn't know JDemo is out of production. I'm not surprised, given its history, but I did think they were still selling kits out of spares. I don't think either Jacob nor Alex wants to support them.
I haven't kept up with Ricky in the past six months, but I sold him the i3 charge port he originally used (he put it in the grille) and we swapped ideas for quite a while. I don't want my charge port in the grille, and I sold him my i3 port because I decided to use a NACS port from an early Model S (more info
here). At one time I had the i3, a Taycan, and the MS charge inlets all here, but I sold off all but the MS port, and I've hacked it up to be driven by the
Foccci board's integrated PWM driver for the port lock.
Last we texted, Ricky wasn't getting along with the ZombieVerter as a VCU very well; I think he went with some other product? I haven't followed along.
I plan on using a Foccci board and the
Clara software, and the DCFC contactors will be in a watertight box located between the front of the HV battery and the rear of the LDU; there's a lot of room there. Since I just had the HV battery down to
replace the HV contactors, I took the opportunity to run the new 50mm² HV cables from the rear bumper area (where excess cable is stored for future use) to the LDU area. There's a couple of pics and a "ten second tour" video of the cables installed run in
this post.
(more complete details on my CCS-on-RAV4 EV is
here)
I do not know if Ricky is still using the LDU tap bolts and 3D printed cover for the LDU connections that he was originally using as proof-of-concept, but . . . it's not remotely weather-tight and is right where running through a good puddle would flood it, so I immediately discarded that location. My tap to the HV pack involves a spare set of MS LDU cables. I use the Model S LDU cables from the RAV4 LDU (they have the same special proprietary shielded cable glands!) and route them to the DCFC contactors box, and from there I use the original RAV4 EV LDU cables to the HV battery. This gives a watertight cable routing that is at least as secure as OEM.
Six fat cables in that junction box: two to HV battery, two to LDU, two to the charge port at the rear. The box is cast aluminum and gasketed.
Mostly, I've been stymied by the hurdles of fitting the MS charge inlet to the original RAV4 EV location. It's tricky mainly due to the weird Toyota design of the quarter panel, and the wheel well basically being open to the interior passenger compartment -- I bought a quarter section of a RAV4 just to drill out the spot welds to look at it more completely (the petrol RAV4 has different panel stamping than the EV version, but the idea is the same). I also got sidetracked by trying to 3D scan the inside of the wheel well, and that was a 3D nightmare rabbit hole that consumed a lot of resources and soured my momentum (and was unsuccessful -- know anybody who rents high-end portable 3D scanning equipment? Because the Creality Lizard wouldn't do the job).
I'm flabbergasted that Fusion 360 or Blender want a much more performant computer/GPU than the server hardware I own. And the learning curves are steep.
My apology to Kcherrick for hijacking their For Sale thread
