Quest Nº 14 The Haqeedo saga continues | Fixing a second hand Torqeedo electric outboard

Описание: In this quest we are sharing with you our diy / budget approach to electric propulsion for a dinghy. You will see that it’s possible to fix broken torqeedo outboard motor, some hacking actions using Arduino and other components like dc/dc power supply.
We got our torqeedo 503 as a used unit (second hand). It was not working. For us it was a challenge witch we accepted!
Disassembling battery unit, checking BMS (battery management system), using multi-meter to check the voltage of lithium cells, checking status of bus bars. At the end we made a decision to we rebuild it do it your self way. Cells were too low and out of speck voltage. All reparation was done on our sailboat with no access to special equipment.
As a budget, frugal sailors we decided to go all electric. We can move our home boat using wind power or our electric motor. So not needing to go to the gas station for gasoline is an ideal solution for us. With an electric outboard our solar panels can charge batteries at no cost using the power of the sun for a free boat to shore transport. Not to mention it would mean no oil, spark plugs, cloggy carburetors, impellers and all the rest of messy ice maintenance.

Our old internal combustion engine gave up on us (no cooling).
Torqeedo uses a CAN bus communication to talk with the tiller handle, battery and motor. Like with most of the things those days it’s closed source. There is no available documentation on how to do it yourself. Good thing that there is internet and we were able to find some info about the work done by Ruffalo Lavoisier. He kindly shared his work on github. Using it as a base we had a starting point to work on the code responsible for talking to the motor. After analyzing the code and modifying it to our needs we had a working Arduino sketch to send commands to the motor to send spin direction (forward/reverse) and rpm’s. That was the software layer. Hardware layer also required from us some diy’ing. RS485 converter to plug to CAN bus, OLED display (SSD1306 I2C ) to have some feedback on battery charge status, dc to dc converter to have power supply, resistors to create a voltage divider to have a voltage meter. Everything was coming together. Using a laptop we upload the new firmware to the Arduino to have it in more compact form. It came back from the dead. It was alive!
Torqeedo motor itself is a big'ish brushless motor with permanent magnets. Main housing of it is from some mild-steal material and it was corroded. To stop it from further oxidation we used epoxy to cover it's surface and stop air and moisture.
Battery being a lithium technology doesn’t like to be discharged or charged over the specific range of volts and reverse polarity is something to be avoided. Also as a multi cell pack it needed some equalization mechanism. So it got an active balancers to equalize the cells in the battery pack. Using over-lapping technique we managed to work around the problem of not having the correct balancer for it ( 7s and 3s instead of 8s).
After soldering, wire management and lot of diy’ing it was done :)
Battery box was repacked with new connections and wires. We added an external contact-less switch working with a magnet (hall sensor) to have an option to disable/enable main power contacts. Closing and opening of a circuit was done by a n-channel mosfet salvaged from a starting module from volvo diesel engine. Lot of cable ties. It was close and semi water proof.
So for us it’s no more a torqeedo it’s a haqeedo :) It’s hacked starting from the tiller thru communication CAN bus, battery up to the motor (still in original form). Now we have full control over our motor. We also added an Easter egg in form of some epic music played by the vibration of the brush less motor. Because we can! Low voltage protection is implemented in the arduino code to limit the power fed to the motor in case of low battery.
Now we can enjoy a fossil fuel free dinghy ride :)
Let the force be with you! And bananas!

If you liked it subscribe and share! It’s helping us to stay afloat and make more of this kind of stuff. Maybe even inspire you to come sail with use one day !

Our sailboat Oiysh is a 1985 Bruce Farr design, 40 foot, Australian build retired racing boat that we hope to restore to her former glory with a bit of diy/solarpunkish/small budget twist.

We hope you enjoy watching :D

Source code
https://github.com/yOyOeK1/hackqueedo
https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot

Kudos and huge thanks to
lcdgfx library author/s
as5045 library author/s
responsiveanalogread library author/s

If you'd like to support these videos
our Ko-fi ... https://www.ko-fi.com/svoiysh
our Patreon ...   / svoiysh