Alternator custom VESC hardware: Looking for collaborators

Hello All,

Like many others, I'm going down the path of converting a car alternator to give me a cheap but chunky BLDC to drive a kart.

Alternators are great for this: big solid frame, bearings and shaft, cooling fans. Just all-round heavy duty and built to last.

So far I did a quick proof of concept with a BMW/mini alternator rated to 110A and it was no problem at all, spinning up beautifully on a small RC ESC I had. With this quick success, I'm ready to move forward and build a heavy duty VESC to drive it hard and see what it can do.

My plan is to make a custom FET drive board rated to 200A. I plan to use 24v batteries but will likely design the board for 48v. It will be a circular board to match the alternator (seems to be a very common Denso alternator model, readily available on eBay) and by doing this I can hook up the windings direct to the PCB, and benefit from the cooling of the internal fan. The STM brain will be on a mezzanine board, which I've seen elsewhere so maybe possible to re-use someone else's good work there. I think it will be neat ... an integrated drive/motor with one fat 24v cable.

I'm strong in PCB design and mechanics, but only average in firmware, so I wanted to post here and see if any others were interested to collaborate and help on the firmware side. If I make order 1 PCB then I may as well order 10, so could trade hardware for software. 

Most likely I will start this in February as I've got some experiments to do on hall sensors, so thought I'd start posting early and see if anyone's interested. 

Thanks

Jon