[Woodsmith]

Playing with fire here Woody. Be careful. I would stop at 56, preferably with something automatic monitoring the stop.

Someone who has destroyed more batteries than a video game

Hmmm, that's a point.

I guess, as the batteries were gifted to me I should remember to value them more so then if I had paid with my own money. Destroying them wouldn't be good, or nice, given it is someone else's investment.

 

[Woodsmith]

I put the charger back on today and let it run with a view to regular monitoring.

Then forgot about it over lunch and shopping with Arch and stuff!

Anyway, just ran down to check and the charger had finished it's charge cycle and the pack is at 56.1 Volts. I hope it was ok up to the point of the charger switching off.

Anyway, I checked the cell voltages and they range from 3.48-3.51 volts.

 

[johnsiddle]

The tractor performed really well.

I was able to wind the tines right into the soil to the point where the front edge of the ground anchor was scraping the surface. The limitation was finding many bricks and large stones in the soil causing a loss of traction. The tractor wasn't really heavy enough to put all the power through the tyres and into the ground so I spent a lot of time winding the tool up and down.

With only three tines welded to the anchor each run was done twice, over lapping a bit, to get more break up of the soil. I could have run with six tines without any problem but would have found more bricks!

The soil was still quite firm despite recent rains and so hopefully now we are done it will be better for seeding with wild flower seeds.

The 'knocking' noise is the split link on the drive chain just clipping the chain tensioner bracket.

Overall it ran at 1667Wh/mile and the voltage did sag to 30v at one point but recovered after a short break. Current draw wasn't that high, around 100A on the analogue gauge.
The CA display took so long to cycle around each display range that I had finished a run before I could see a reading.

Brillient.
Well done Woody/Arch.

PS, still looking for affordable lithiums.
regards John

 

[johnsiddle]

Cool! Then you could have an automatic mower with it's own "Home" where it parks to charge. Like those vacuum cleaners for the house.

Miz

You could use all the electronics from one of those robot vaccs and just scale up the motor and batteries......

 

[piotrsko]

I put the charger back on today and let it run with a view to regular monitoring.

Then forgot about it over lunch and shopping with Arch and stuff!

Anyway, just ran down to check and the charger had finished it's charge cycle and the pack is at 56.1 Volts. I hope it was ok up to the point of the charger switching off.

Anyway, I checked the cell voltages and they range from 3.48-3.51 volts.

What did I warn you about????? Cool, sounds like you are good to go.

 

[Woodsmith]

I have finally sorted out wiring for the Cellogs that came with the lithium pack.

I could have spent a little money on buying two of these but decided to visit Maplin's and bought the 10 row plug and pins for half the cost and wired it myself.

The main reason is that I am often dubious about spam and security when sending my financial details to far east sellers.

I now need to figure out the software to read the Cellogs.

 

[DMA]

I have finally sorted out wiring for the Cellogs that came with the lithium pack.

I could have spent a little money on buying two of these but decided to visit Maplin's and bought the 10 row plug and pins for half the cost and wired it myself.

The main reason is that I am often dubious about spam and security when sending my financial details to far east sellers.

I now need to figure out the software to read the Cellogs.

Good stuff Woody!

I assume you're running Windows? I used a program called "Terminal". It's a simple program that you can use to communicate to a serial com port. Here's the website detailing it:

https://sites.google.com/site/terminalbpp/

I used the cell loggers to log the 56 cells in my EV (we call here Eve - she's our first EV!). I knew that some cells were dodgy and needed replacing, but the voltage levels all seemed fine when not under load. So I needed some data on the cells while under load.

A couple of pointers on using the Cell Loggers:

• Be sure to create a log file before you start logging! Otherwise you can't transmit it to the Terminal program afterwards. Let me know if you would like help in how to do this.
• Be sure to disconnect them when not actively monitoring - there is more draw on one of the cells than the rest, so it will unbalance your pack.

When you've connected the cell logger to your PC for uploading the logs, you need to connect to it from the Terminal program first. After you have connected, be sure to press the 'start log' next. Then you select the log file on the celllogger itself (through the menu), and select 'transmit'. You should see the data streaming to the Terminal window.


At risk of semi-hijacking your thread here's some of the logs for Eve.


Driving profile: http://loxley-farmlet.com/clusters.eve.ui.php?date=20150612&clusters=0,1,2,3,4,5,6
Charging profile: http://loxley-farmlet.com/clusters.eve.ui.php?date=20150613&clusters=0,1,2,3,4,5,6&interval=50


And yes, I know, charging cells above 3.6v is bad. There's obviously a problem with the BMS that came with the conversion and I'm tracking it down...


Anyway, once you have the logs in a file, feel free to send them to me and I'll upload them for graphing if you like. I know it's a very manual process (I'm working on automating it), but I found it invaluable to see what was going on.

 

[PStechPaul]

If the output transmitted from the cell loggers is in CSV (comma delimited) format, you should be able to import that directly into Excel or Open Office Spreadsheet and obtain graphs as you have done. But it may be tricky to separate the different cells you are monitoring. I did it for a single cell test with data for time, current, and voltage.

Teraterm is another terminal application that works well on Win7/8.

 

[DMA]

If the output transmitted from the cell loggers is in CSV (comma delimited) format, you should be able to import that directly into Excel or Open Office Spreadsheet and obtain graphs as you have done. But it may be tricky to separate the different cells you are monitoring. I did it for a single cell test with data for time, current, and voltage.

Teraterm is another terminal application that works well on Win7/8.

They are indeed in CSV format (delimeter character is ';').

Here's a bit of a snippit from one of them:

Terminal log file
Date: 19/06/2015 - 1:46:17 p.m.
-----------------------------------------------
$STARTBULK;510;1000;122
$1;1;;3173;3172;3161;3161;3184;3174;3173;3180;25378;29
$1;1;;3176;3172;3161;3162;3184;3174;3174;3182;25385;28
$1;1;;3176;3172;3161;3162;3184;3174;3174;3183;25386;30
$1;1;;3176;3172;3162;3162;3185;3174;3174;3183;25388;18
$1;1;;3176;3172;3163;3163;3185;3176;3174;3184;25393;29
$1;1;;3176;3172;3162;3162;3185;3176;3174;3183;25390;25
...

Fields being:

?;?;;Cell1;Cell2;Cell3;Cell4;Cell5;Cell6;Cell7;Cell8;CellsTotal;Temperature(?)

The voltage readings are in milliVolts. I'm not sure if the last reading is in fact temperature (value kind of matches...), as it seems to fluctuate quite a lot. The temp would be taken from the loggers themselves, not at the cells, and these were within the car.

 

[PStechPaul]

Only took about ten minutes to get this:

 

[tinkeringgreg]

What ever happened to Woody's tractor the saga just came to an abrupt end?
Its a great story about a good project

 

[johnsiddle]

You have a point tinkeringgreg......

Hi there Woody or Arch, you still around?
the last posting on this was ages ago.

I hope married life is good for you, perhaps that is why you have not posted for a while...

take care John

 

[Maker_of_Things]

Hi Everyone!

Woody here, under a new name.

Sorry I have been absent, much going on, new married life, new business, many new activities in the community, and the login system as it was back then stopped letting me in!

No idea why but my password stopped working, the Admin access stopped working, password renew stopped working, basically I was locked out and unable to do anything about it!
I still get all the emails about spam though!

Anyway I will pop a bit more now...

 

[johnsiddle]

Hi Woody.
Welcome back. I am sure some admin will promote you back to Admin quite soon.
Glad things are going good for you and Arch.
Since you have been gone my car has blown up loads of IGBTs so much so that I decided it had to be the motor.
It came out with a blue comm so I reckon it was definitive. I think it has been faulty from the start but put up with a poor Lead 144v but the Lithium 174v finally started the rot.
I am now in the process of fitting a forklift hydraulic motor with forced cooling and taking advantage of the strip down to design new charge electronics so that I charge the whole pack as one instead of three 58v chargers. It will simplify the wiring as well.
I shall post new pictures later.

How are the projects you had going, the tractor in particular?

Anyway good to hear from you.
Regards John

 

[Maker_of_Things]

Noooooo! Don't make me admin! I have too much to do as it is!

Glad to hear there has been progress on your car, albeit finding what has been wrong and blowing things up. But still, that's the way to learn...


I haven't done anything ore with the tractor, sadly, as it has been at the back of the pile of stuff on the driveway. Beryl is in pieces and I found she was so rotten that she would be completely beyond any viable repair.
However, I am saving her cab and back axle. Maybe also her front axle though that is very worn out.

My current slow burn is to use Beryl's cab to build a 5/8 scale of an AEC Matador timber tractor, one that has been recabbed in the post war ear and fitted with a timber crane and winches.

My collection of DC forklift motors and Curtis controllers are still sitting in the workshop like some sort of time capsule of where I was when I last posted here. The lovely little 48v Lithium pack is still there, charged and monitored.

I am no further with a car project as I just figured technology has moved so fast that I might as well save for a Tesla drive unit from Zero EV.
https://zero-ev.co.uk/ev-conversion-kits/

But it is still weighing up the cost of a conversion to buying a Nissan E-NV200.

 

[Dave Koller]

Just a quick HI! And glad to see you check in - I too am way too busy with life to be here .....
Dave

 

[Maker_of_Things]

Cheers, Likewise too busy with life, work, everything.

 

[poprock]

Surely common sense will be applied by admin and recognise the 290k views of your previous thread..We must depose the black prince and restore Woody to his former glory!!

 

[Duncan]

There are "Admins" and "Admins"
This one knows how to zap spammers and .... that's about all!

I hope one of the more knowledgeable Admins does something - but anyway - welcome back

 

[Maker_of_Things]

Thank you!

It is good to be back, albeit intermittently due to work load. Not sure now how much time I can spend on forums for the time being.

I can't believe I am gearing up to quote for another few months of work in a secret underground military bunker! It's an ongoing job renovating a national WW2 museum. A couple of years ago we built an entire street scene of interactive shops, a road, and the back of a lorry, in 3 months.