Has anyone measured or studied the electrical interface to the compressor? My review of the schematics suggest there may be an encoder and three phases. What I can't tell are: power voltage power current or load control signals The reason I ask is that unit may be a couple of kW and possibly sine-wave like. I have an approach using miniVCI but before starting my investigation, I thought I'd look around and ask. Thanks, Bob Wilson
One day on the interwebs I came across a fascinating PDF of "University of Toyota course 071 Toyota Hybrid System" and it has an extensive section on the air conditioning. It seems to show that Gen 2 had a simple 3-ph motor with all the drive circuitry living in the main inverter/converter assembly. (The compressor's power cable had a 3-pole plug on the end.) The ES14 compressor introduced in Gen 3 has a plain 2-conductor power connection going in, taking straight 201.6 VDC. All its motor drive circuitry is internal (and conveniently cooled by chilled refrigerant, I bet). As to how it's controlled, I can't find that detail in the UofT document, but I'm pretty sure I remember hearing somewhere that the new compressor just has its own CAN address and you send it commands to pick a speed. You'd think these changes might have made the compressor a bit more expensive and the main inverter assembly a bit less so (containing no A/C drive circuit any more, after all), [edit: and] it seems that [edit: is] what happened. -Chap
