Wheels Spinning! With caveats...

I have 'succeeded' on the installation of my new 120V upgrade to the Honda! Almost...

Yesterday, I got the high-current wiring relocated and connected between the controller, the contactor, and the motor. Today I rewired just about 100% of the low-current wiring inside the panel box that provides power to the contactor and controller.

Then I hit the snag... I reconnected the battery pack, turned the system on, and all of a sudden... Nothing Happened. There was no error code flashing on the controller, just a steady green light. There was no satisfying "chunk" of the contactor closing. There was no spinning of the wheels when the throttle was advanced. There was nothing.

Hmmm.

I did a little debugging, and decided that for some reason, the controller is not pulling the contactor to ground. So as a test, I bypassed the controller and wired the low side of the contactor directly to ground. And that worked. Then the contactor went chunk, and the wheels spun when the throttle was pressed.

OK... so I just have to figure out what's going on that the controller is not controlling the contactor as desired. A question for the community, or the manufacturer, next chance I get.

Here's the engine bay of the nearly-completed 120V upgrade. White box tucked up in the grill is one of the heated, insulated battery boxes. Toward the rear, driver's side is the new controller and converted throttle. And to the passenger side of the controller is the panel box where many of the goodies hide such as the contactor, the fuse, the kill switch, the current shunt, the precharge resistor, etc. The panel box is kind of hiding behind the reflector of my shop light, sorry about that.

Looking inside the panel box. You can't really see much of the high-current wiring in this pic, except the 400-amp fuse (round white thing) and the front of the contactor (black box above the round white thing). The two thick red cables running in front of the panel box are the 2 wires from the controller to the motor, and the black cable cutting the lower right corner of the picture is the "most negative" cable in the car, returning the motor current from the controller to the low side of the battery pack.

All of the low-current wiring (skinny red, black, and green wires inside the panel box) is what I was working on today. The main issue was that the old controller used 72V pack voltage to run it, but the new controller does not use the 120V pack voltage, it uses 12V from the auxiliary power system to run it. In the process of rewiring that, I decided to change a couple other things, too. The relay that used to be pulled by the ignition switch to feed 72V to the controller, I am now using to feed 12V from the main fuse box to the controller, the contactor, and the power brake pump, instead of feeding all those components straight through the ignition switch. It's a cleaner power source... I measured 13.3V from the ignition switch, and 13.5V straight off the main fuse box.

A better view of the 120V controller (Kelly KDH14500B) and the rewired throttle box.