>>> SMART<<< . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . >>>Not Smart<<<<
Provided for those of you who couldn't tell the difference between a thirty thousand dollar Daimler/SWATCH Smart Car and the "It's not a copy" Chinese alternative. Hey, if you're not into cars confusion is more than possible. I get questions in that direction almost every day.
One drives nice the other is electrically powered.
Next test! Which is which?
In other news: The new charge port, new (slightly more) vandal-proof cord assembly and the various internal interconnects are in and working. Looks OK, works pretty good. I got the port and cord installed such that the car end of the cord politely unplugs itself if you're an idiot and drive off while still plugged in. We won't go into how I know all about this...
This saves me from having to build some sort of interruptor circuit to keep you from driving off while still connected. Not that the original vehicle had any such thing.
This is a view down behind the passenger seat facing rearward. You can see the back of the charger (yellow) and the patch cord plugged into the Watt Meter. That and the 'Lux' thermostat are both connected to the three outlet (internally lighted!) cord that runs down to the Charge Port inlet in the back bumper, which you can just see at the top of the photo. The cord leading away from the vehicle looks black because of the heavy duty casing I put on it to try and reduce problems with people dancing around back there after distributing broken glass throughout the area. Not that that's ever happened...
The temperature sense lead (not shown) and the 'switched' line plugged into the thermostat both run down to the battery compartment. More on that later.
The cool thing about that LUX thermostat is that it's heavy duty enough to switch the charger if you wanted to. You can ignore the temperature settings and get it to switch based on time of day and day of week. Very handy for TOU electrical metering. Could also be used to keep the equalization charge from happening if you only wanted the 'bulk charge' phase (and happened to know how long that takes).
See, anybody can do it. Ya pull up, take the cord off the wall and jam it in. It's a good idea to look at the display to see if it's really working, but that's really all there is to it.
