What's New at Electric Blue:
December 29, 2009
Happy New Year!
Visit Connect Tech
International for all your electronic manufacturing needs.
Specials
Winter is here! Electric Blue has solutions for heating your car in
the winter.
Our Blue Heat provides hot water that can be circulated
through the existing heater core in your car's dash board. The existing
heater controls will then work as they were intended.
The Blue Heat
requires 120V AC, which can be provided by our Blue Flash inverter.
Normally, the Blue Heat sells for $375 and the Blue Flash sells for
$449. Save $75.00 when you buy both during our November special.
We
recently became a
distributor for Elite Power Solutions. We are
offering their Lithium Iron Phosphate cells, which are comparable to
Thundersky, for 20% off retail. To make a sweet deal even sweeter, if
you buy 20 or more, we will throw in free shipping! For a given
capacity, these cells are 75% lighter and 50% smaller than an equivalent
lead acid cell. When replacing lead acid, you can use a lithium cell
60% of the capacity and get the same range. For example, if you want to
replace a 100AH lead acid battery, you only need 60AH to get the same
range. This is due to the Peukert effect. For more information, please
see Tech Talk #1 about this on the General Info
page. Information on our
lithium batteries is on the product page. All the batteries we sell are
in stock.
Product Updates
We have had very good response to our Blue Window dashboard computer.
But its 200V maximum input voltage was a problem for people using 240V
or even 330V batteries. So, we have a new version that will operate at
400V. It has slightly different components and software to handle the
high voltage. Pricing is the same as the 200V model.
New Products
When you use lithium batteries, you need to carefully manage their
charge level. Because the amount of power you get from the battery is
limited by the cell with the least amount of charge. We have some new
products that can help with this.
Battery balancers will balance the charge in each cell. They
do
this
by putting a small load on a cell when the voltage rises above 3.7V.
The normal cell operating voltage is 3.2V, so there is only a load
placed when the cell is charging. The balancer will bring the charge
level down to a known point after a few charge cycles. This will assure
that all the cells get to the same amount of charge.
A battery monitoring system (BMS) looks at each cell voltage
and
temperature and alerts you when one or more are out of spec. We call
our BMS the Blue View. It consists of two parts: a Computer and a
monitoring sender for each cell. The computer outputs composite video
which can be displayed on a monitor or DVD player. You get a summary
page which shows an overview of the battery system including Volts,
Amps, and how much capacity is available in the battery. There are also
detail pages which show each call voltage and temperature. The system
will accept 256 cells. There is one sender for each cell in the
battery. They are wired with ordinary 4 conductor telephone wire.
There is no addressing of the senders and the same wire goes to each
one. This makes the wiring very easy. The senders will operate from
2.5V to 18V which will accommodate most battery types.
New Faces
Patty Gross
joined us in October. She
is our new Account Manager and
is
responsible for sales and customer service. Patty is a true renaissance
woman. She is long time car buff and is actively involved with a couple
of classic car clubs. When weather permits, you will see riding her
motorcycle or driving her '66 VW bug. She is also a professional
musician and singer. One of her greatest virtues is patience. This is
most evident when she is teaching the staffers here how to play the
piano. Whether you need advice about components, installation, or
music, she is here for you. But be warned, her laughter is contagious!
University Sponsorship
Electric Blue Motors is sponsoring 4 electrical engineering students
at
Northern Arizona University, Nicholas Negrete, Jeremy King, Christine
Kuhlman, and Daniel Eichenberger in their senior Captone project to
convert a Land Rover to Electric. We are providing the facility,
equipment and guidance for their project. They are also sponsored by
Northern Arizona University, Arizona Public Service (our local electric
company), Universal Power Group (batteries) and Highway 85 Graphics. As
part of their project, they will be designing their own DC motor
controller which may become a future Electric Blue product. Their
design will be smaller and significantly less expensive than similar
controllers on the market. For more information, visit their website:
http://www.cefns.nau.edu/Research/D4P/EGR486/EE/10-Projects/motor/.
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