Electric Vehicle Project
DOLCOM and DOL7 downloads
(At bottom of page, read it anyway)
November 2004
The US_Electricar Prizms and S10 pickup trucks both run the Hughes Dolphin AC Induction system for the motor and drive train. This is without a doubt a hell of a good system. Designed in 1994, the quality of construction is amazing, especially compared to any EV conversions you may run across. All the cables use aircraft quality connections, the motor is a 50kw AC motor (never needs brushes or anything), the controller is a 3 phase AC motor controller that is water cooled and designed such that you don't even need a transmission. Speeds from zero on ice to 100mph are possible.
To monitor the computer, Hughes included a nice little RS-232 port and software called DOLCOM. DOLCOM is a DOS application that will tell you everything that's going on in that little box. What your voltage is, current draw, motor speed and direction and any fault codes that you may have. All nice and neat. The programs are availible all over the place on the web with one little problem.
They don't work on computers newer than say a Pentium II 300mhz system. If you try to run them you'll get some dopey error. I've fixed this. The problem is they were written in Microfocus Pascal, and each program has a timing loop that runs at the beginning. This loop times how long it takes to execute a thousand branches or somesuch. The problem is on a Pentium II or better system it takes less time than one system "tick" (ie: 1/60th of a second sometimes called a "jiffy"). Since it takes zero time and the next instruction is a divide, you get a divide by zero error. Whoops.
My fix was to patch the binaries so this loop always reports a speed of one. Thus the application goes thru the loop (which it never uses anyway; Pascal is like that) and runs perfectly. Download these apps (they don't have viruses), hook up a DB9 serial cable from your laptop to the grey box behind the single battery under the hood (there's a DB9 socket on it), fire up DOLCOM/DOL7 (password is 1234567890) and enjoy!
Let me know if you're using this. The links are here: