Hi All
I’m glad to see a bunch of other people interested in this idea!
Production time will be about 10 days from the time they get paid, shipment by sea to LA will be similar once it’s on board which may take a few extra days. So I would say about a month.
As for the other parts needed-- At the surface I’ll be using a benchtop DC power supply I picked up on on eBay. It can do 120vdc up to 4.5 amps. For the vehicle, I got a Vicor step-down DC power converter designed for an input of roughly 72 volts (it can handle anything from 50 to 100+) stepping down to 15, boostable to 16.5, but it is limited to no more than about 250 watts of output. I’m still not sure how I will implement current sharing between the battery and this DC supply… if anyone has any ideas I would love to hear them.
I do appreciate @BayDynamics 's point about running data over power, and that’s exactly what the Fathom-X interface parts were designed to do, but I think they were intended for AC power and perhaps don’t work so well with DC. I know BR has done some experiments of that sort and wasn’t totally happy with what they found. Maybe I (or someone) could get an electrical supply place to loan me/them two spools of 1,000 feet of 18 or 16awg wire and we could do some tests… if we could do without the twisted pair that ought to make the tether a bit cheaper and thinner, in fact it might even be a ready-made thing we could just buy!