Introduction, Acknowlegments and Open Hardware License
Welcome to the installation manual for the open-source electric vehicle conversion kit for a Honda Civic! This manual arose out of a desire to create an easy conversion for people new the EV community.
I would like to Acknowledge all the people who helped contribute to this project, from the technical folks to the writers and everyone else who supplied information. Special thanks goes to Bob Bath for creating the CivicWithACord website that was the initial inspiration for choosing the Civic.
All the documentation and designs for this kit are licensed under the Open-Hardware License (OHL) that was written by the Tuscon Amateur Packet Radio (TAPR) organization. The OHL can be found at http://www.tapr.org/OHL In my research to find something similar to the Gnu-Public-License (GPL) for software, this seemed to be the only thing available for a hardware based kit.
This kit is intended to be upgraded and revised by the open-source community to improve it over time. The initial revision of the instructions will probably be very simple and provide just a basic electric car without many frills like power steering and air conditioning. In time, the kit will change and improve with newer battery technologies and more features.
Here are some online links to the latest information:
http://groups.google.com/group/civic-ev-kit - Google Group discussion and latest manual
http://civic-ev.blogspot.com - Documentation on the process that I went through to create the initial kit
Licensed under the TAPR Open Hardware License (www.tapr.org/OHL)
Copyright 2008 Tim Kutscha