Sid Battery Balancers.

I plan to dig into the data part of the balancers.  Anyhow plan now is to use an ESP32 Arduino with wifi MQTT to keep it separate from the main system, so wondering if someone has made an Arduino sketch even if its just a simple sketch of one cell via serial just curious.  I hate to re-invent the wheel if its already out there.

Sid, was thinking, is there any way to make a balancer like this useing a Coil I can't remeber what they call it, I have one for my wind turbin, it takes any extra power and dumps it to the coil which heats up.  have it made with a one way diode  so you can connect more then one balancer to one of them?

then you can I think increase the amp dump.

A load dump resistor, yes. 

Unfortunately, electricity doesn't work that way.

The only way to make something like that work would be to add isolation transformers to each balancer, so the "excess power" could be isolated from each different cell's voltage potential.  This unfortunately would significantly increase the cost and complexity--and in order to do more than the current 5A capability would cost still more.

Oh well, it was a thought, I finally got several of them going now. might be ordering more of them, battery hook up got those headway 24v 49ah for $250, and I love headway batts.

Since my  adventures with wind doesn’t look too promising. I have these dump loads resistors  but the  12000w 12v wind generator hardly produce anything.therefore no needs for them , we can trade  then again the cost of shipping may not make any sense.

yeah I have a big wild ac wind urbin and it dont' make much either, I've got to get it another 40 to 60ft higher then where it is right now roughly 25ft from ground to really catch some wind. that will happen in summer, going to get a power pole to put in back yard and then strap it on the top with another 20ft of pipe that its already on and it should start making some power. got too many trees blocking the wind and causeing a lot of dirty air. 

What issue are you having exactly?

Is the issue starting voltage, ppt, or simple lack of speed?
Wind is tricky - especially with practically harnessing <10mph winds.

Yeah they are the best for high current I have every tried.  I have built several jump packs with them and sold locally.  I put them in a plastic ammo box with a 4S RC balance charger in there, nothing else fancy besides high end cables.  Great setup I made one for a truck driver recently he was amazed how easy it started up his truck.  Making two more packs right now.  One 16 cells (4S4P) and one 32 cells (4S8P).  Once you get past 16 cells the amps are so high its more about capacity gained.  I don't make a whole lot of profit on them, but fun to build.

Okay so had some time this weekend to play around a bit, this is all on in the manual.  The data output is inverted normal RS232, but the voltage is at the level of one cell.  That has given me a bit of a stumbling block, I have a RS232 converter, but it is made for +-12V signals.  So that drops the output signal too much after the conversion.  To be honest I don't know where I got this one from so going to order a few others and see if I can find one that works.  If anyone out there has any suggestions RS232 to serial converters that work with the balancers please let me know.  Thank you ahead of time!

So what you need is a logic-level serial adapter.  RS-232 is the +/-12v signal...logic-level is what MCUs actually use (0-3.3v or 0-5v).  RS-232 levels for long transmission, but logic-level for any processor usage.  (Note that the RS-232 signals are always inverted from the logic-level signals.)

You can easily find USB-serial breakout boards (assuming you want USB!) that do this.  Ones I recommend are CP2102 and CH340 boards; avoid any FT232 boards, as they're almost certainly Chinese clones that the latest (Windoze) FTDI drivers render completely useless.

If you want a DB-9 "RS-232 level" adapter to the balancers, you just need a MAX232 breakout board.  Has the level conversion and data inversion built-in.

here's a photo of a MAX232 breakout board.  You'll need to provide the +5v supply on VDD; it may be OK with a single cell voltage (3.0-4.2v).  And note that these are NOT electrically isolated--the output will be referenced to battery negative!

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A simple USB-serial board (CH340) with logic-level I/Os looks like this...this being one I like to use:

being USB, it's self-powered by the USB port, and you only need to utilize the GND and RX lines -> the lowest balancer.

3 hours ago, Sid Genetry Solar said:

You can easily find USB-serial breakout boards (assuming you want USB!) that do this.  Ones I recommend are CP2102 and CH340 boards; avoid any FT232 boards, as they're almost certainly Chinese clones that the latest (Windoze) FTDI drivers render completely useless.

Sorry I should have said I am working on a ESP8266 to send the data over Wifi.  I have a MAXRS232 adapter just doesn't work.  Maybe its toast, I don't get any data out from it.  

No worries I will find something once I get this working I will post up my solution, there may be other that want to do something like this. 

Looks like this one below may work, I would mod the one I have but I use it for work so I don't want to mess it up if I need to get it replaced.  Since you said you are using one of those cheap little serial port ones and that works, this one should work the same.  I hope anyway. 

I see data on my Rigol Oscope RS232 decoder, well it doesn't actually decode it for some reason.  So I will need to figure that out yet too.  I built up a quick test sketch with standard RS232 and it worked so I know my scope is working just something is odd maybe its the timing of events not sure.

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1 hour ago, AquaticsLive said:

Sorry I should have said I am working on a ESP8266 to send the data over Wifi.  I have a MAXRS232 adapter just doesn't work.  Maybe its toast, I don't get any data out from it.  

AH........No adapter necessary.

Both the balancers and the ESP8266 are logic-level devices.

I would recommend a ~1k resistor between the balancer and the ESP8266, as the balancer can run up to max 6v--and the ESP8266 absolute max is 4.0v.

I may have inverted the logic level polarity simply to reduce quiescent current on the balancer units; you should be able to handle this with the ESP8266 setup.  https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino/issues/4896

That is what I was thinking, but the problem is the data is inverted so won't work.  I scoped it out and found that problem right away then started digging through my stuff for an adapter. 

Thanks I will check that out I didn't think that was possible the UART pins ignore inverted signals completely from what I understand. 

Ahh this is interesting.  I will try this out.  Cool thanks for finding that. 

Serial.begin(2400, SERIAL_8N1, SERIAL_FULL, 1, true); // true = invert