Bill Johnson Shawnee, Ok bill@billjohnson.

net

Nov 2009, I purchased a Wheego Whip Electric Vehicle. I love this car.

My Wheego uses a Curtis 1238 600 Amp 96V controller. Other than volts and amps, this
is very similar to controllers in Golf Carts and wheel chairs.

My Curtis controller includes a 4 pin square Molex connector similar to those used on
ATC PC Power supplies.

I went to my neighborhood PC repair shop and acquired a connector from a failed PC

power supply.

I found these drawings in Curtis documents;

I’ve found that some technical document vary in their identification of TX and RX, but
found the above pin out of a cable to work fine.
CAUTION; This is NOT an approved Curtis configuration. It worked for me with no ill
effects, however there are a few unknowns; 1) Curtis recommends inserting a proprietary
device (1309) in this line. I do not know what function this is used for however it may
well be “electrical potential isolation” The reader would be well advised to make some
voltage checks in advance before making this connection. Consider adding an optical
coupler for example;

Next, I set up HyperTerm software on my PC and configured to;

Com 1
9600 Baud
N parity
8 data bits
1 stop bit
Flow Control=Xon-Xoff.
Local Echo = OFF

It is my understanding that when running the Curtis 1413 Software, you should configure
a typical laptop Com port as “Enhanced Serial” This would be important to anyone
running Curtis 1413 on a laptop.
---------------------------------------
(The below was captured with HyperTerm set to 96N8!
"Text" "Readaccess" "Writeaccess" "Unit" "Type" "Value" "Min." "Max."
"User Settings" "User"
"Speed Settings" "User"
"Forward Speed" "User" "User" "rpm" "TI_UINT16" 4450 200 4450
"Reverse Speed" "User" "User" "rpm" "TI_UINT16" 1500 200 3000
"Limp Speed" "User" "User" "rpm" "TI_UINT16" 2500 200 3000
"Accel Rates" "User"
"Forward Torque Rate" "User" "User" "Seconds" "TI_UINT16" 0 0
10
"Reverse Torque Rate" "User" "User" "Seconds" "TI_UINT16" 0.5 0
10
"Limp Torque Rate" "User" "User" "Seconds" "TI_UINT16" 0.5 0 10
"Switchback Brake Current" "User" "User" "%" "TI_UINT16" 50 0 100
"Charging & Battery Info" "User"
"Lithium" "User" "OEM" "TI_ENUM8" 0 0 1
"Full Reset Threshold" "OEM" "OEM" "Volt" "TI_UINT16" 3.5
0 10
"One Hour Rate" "User" "User" "TI_UINT16" 90 0 500
"Three Hour Rate" "User" "User" "TI_UINT16" 115 0 500

Etc.

A simple Terminal can view considerable information from the controller. Curtis offers a
software package called the 1413 4401. The distribution for that software is 17MB in
size.

The reader may consider “Google” for a Bit Torrent.

In Control Panel System – Device Manager – Comx I see the following;

Hyper term connected – 9600 N 8 1

Curtis VLC loader running 9600 N 8 1