General information on BMS / Cell balancing as well as battery packs

I have a Bamboo GT. I don't think the battery balances like the Carbon. I've been charging it all week and this is all I have on the hidden battery menu. But it's at 42.1 volts

 

I'm pretty sure the Bamboo and Carbon charge and balance the same (the Carbon simply has a bigger pack) - you should be seeing some useful numbers here - not "1"s - mine shows real info - also see your cycle count - should not be 0 - shutdown both and try again - re-pair remote to board if that doesn't work

 

That's not a correct reading, some thing or whatever is querying your battery is bad. 0.010v of a battery is a dead battery. And appears you still can ride your board, so its not dead. I think some people have bugs or something isn't setup correctly on their boards.

 

I had the exact same problem and tried everything from re-pairing to checking all the connections inside the board. I've seen two other people on the forum with the same issue.

Evolve said it could be an indication of a faulty BMS, so I sent it back to sort out any issues before my 6 month warranty ends. No news from them yet.

 

Anything surrounding faulty BMS needs to be addressed in my opinion immediately for safety concerns. Most importantly that it handles over voltage conditions on the battery cells which can cause a fire if the charger does not shut down after a full charge and the BMS is stupid / malfunction allowing the battery/cell to overcharge over the 4.2V cutoff. This could be just something of no concern, such as the way they're reading from the BMS however its better to be safe then unsure. At least we can read into the BMS to see if its working which is a good thing Evolve did for us.

I also just found a quick and easy way to see if the BMS keeps voltage on from the charger to balance or if the charger completely shuts down after a charge which we discussed earlier in this thread. There's a product called Kill-A-Watt which measures current and voltage coming out of your wall outlet to the Kill-A-Watt unit and then to your charger or AC accessory. From there we can verify if the charger shuts down the voltage or not after the green light turns on. I left mine at work, so I can't do any measurement plus Evolve has my board and is still running diagnostics on it for the dropout issue. On Monday I'll grab my Kill-A-Watt unit and verify my MetroBoard with the 2 amp slow charger and 4 amp quick charger.

 

Curious what they say about yours. I'm happy with the performance of my BGT, so I'm gonna keep is as-is

 

Got my CGT back after exactly 1 week, which is understandable given they're trying to get orders out by Christmas.

They replaced the BMS and updated the remote to the new firmware under warranty (free of charge). All I paid was ~$25 shipping to QLD. The battery readings are now accurate and the cycle counts have reset to 0.

 

Hi,

How do you get the screen with voltage cell ?

Thank you !

 

When the board is on and connected to the remote, tap left button twice to enter menu.
Select and toggle into "More Info".
For Battery Info: Once in the menu, quickly tap right button twice followed by holding the left button until the screen comes up.
For Motor Info: Once in the menu, tap right button twice then left button twice.

 

Awesome, thanks !

 

My Carbon GT shows this. Brand new board, been charging all night

 

I think that's normal and if this is your first full charge could explain why cycle count is zero I guess.

max voltage is about 4.2V per cell

 

Right, and your cells will become closer in the mV spread as you balance more....

 

Yes, I now have a Carbon GT, as of last Friday

 

So as a point of reference, my short board / 10 mile MetroBoard has been feeding 0.18 amps into the board after the charger turned green, so that's indication of it balancing. It begins trickling down over time as the cells balance, right now its at 0.14 amps since some elapsed time. Then it eventually tapers down to a 0.04 trickle charge. I keep my packs balanced so it sat on the charger in the green state balancing for abot 20-30 mins.

On my GT with about 60% SOC and charging from that state I get a 1.19 amps going into the battery from the 2 amp slow charger. Watching as its charging now.

 

Update: It turns out my Bamboo GT had a bad BMS. Evolve USA replaced it under warranty. Now I get this info

 

Not sure wats goin on here but it doesnt look write mind the screen happend in the last accedent.;-)