Still fussing with shift alignment but I should have that finished today. I have to climb in and out of the lazarette to get to the couplings and aft mount bolts, and go in from the salon to get the forward bolts and I am getting tired of that. Weather permitting, I will motor a couple miles tomorrow to a beach where I always clean my hull and prop, and give her a good scrape. There is a lot of growth down there, and test data would be meaningless the way it is. I do not like the meter setup that Kelly provides. The current meter reads in percentage of a user configurable percentage of max rated current. I want it to read amps out of the battery. Correspondence with Kelly was pointless. They like doing it that way cause it is easy for them. Same with the charge meter. I tossed them both. Ordered a 100a ammeter (I don't anticipate ever running over 100a) and shunt, which I will install at the battery terminal. As for state of charge, I just measure the open circuit voltage with a digital voltmeter for now. I will figure out a more elegant solution later. One thing I like about the Kelly controller is it is programmable by the user without an expensive doodad. You listening, Sevcon? One thing I don't like about the Kelly controller is, NOT SO. I don't use windows. I use Ubuntu. And the interface is RS232, not USB. The Kelly configuration program is a Windows executable. Asked them is they think maybe they should port the app into linux, their reply was WE don't use Linux here. So I bought a cheap windoze laptop for one use, programming the controller, and a serial to USB adapter. I don't mind spending the money so much as having a useless piece of crap taking up space until and if I ever want to change the configuration again. Not having a Linux version and not having a USB interface is most inconsiderate. They don't seem to care about the finer points of customer satisfaction. The customer is supposed to cater to them, instead, apparently. Documentation is a little sketchy, too. But the controller is nice and cheap, available in a kit with controller, contactor, and fuse mounted on a nice aluminum plate, and no extra equipment is needed for configuration. Except a windoze computer and serial to USB adapter. If Sevcon controllers could be configured with a proper Linux computer and no special dongles or doodads, I wouldn't mind paying the extra price to have a sine wave controller. Anyway, things are going well, and I hope to have some test data to post within a week or so.
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