Hacking The Ultimate Tesla Home Solar Battery

Okay, I'm here with Colin Kidder of Sparta, Michigan. Colin's been on the TV payroll, actually, for some time now. What's it been, two years? About two years.

About two years, not full-time. He is part of a family business, K&K Manufacturing, and they do reproduction parts for primarily vintage Mercedes Benz. And I asked him to come down for a week to help us puzzle through the battery issue, and he had it mostly whipped before he arrived.

But we'd already planned the week, so we planned a victory lap, but fortunately, we ran into some interesting problems, so it worked out. Colin's father, Tim Kidder, and his sidekick, Steve the Oreo Man, came down, and they're like a sonic boom with dirt on it. They were all over the place fixing things I didn't even know I had.

But they're on their way to Arkansas to pick up two Mercedes Benz SLs. Yep, I think 190 SLs. 190 SLs.

If you recall, Colin and his family had done an SL 190 59. 1959, I believe. Yeah.

For a guy in California who's in his 80s. He's 91 now, I think. And that's about what he drives it on the roads in California, and loves the car.

So that was a very successful build using the UQM. In any event, so Colin's sort of the principal in the family business there, but does work for us on salary part-time about electronics and so forth. We actually first corresponded for the first time, as I recall, about a device called the Makina.

Josh Sharp Stillwalt and a company they then called Recharge Car in Minneapolis had done a Arduino Mega with two CAN ports on it, I think. And I thought that would be just the thing and got some from them. And in fact, we were going to get a reseller for them.

Got on their forum. This uses a little chipset pair. It's like, I'm going to make up some numbers.

They'll be close enough for government work 2515 and 2551. And they had a library done for it that would send a CAN message and receive it. I got to looking at the spec sheet on this.

And this chip was profoundly more involved than what they were doing. It would do filters and masks and hardware interrupts and was really quite capable chipset. And they weren't taking advantage of most of it.

And so I asked them about their plans about it, and they didn't have a whole lot of them other than the continued development. And it was sort of an open source project. So I said, well, I'm going to take this spec sheet and see what I can do about these filters and masks.

There's so much in here, I can't even make it out. And Colin offered some observations. And we went back and forth, four or five email messages over the course of an hour.

And I said, okay, I'm going to take a look at this. And about three hours later, he sends me an email with the code. It was already coded up.

And I tried it, and it actually worked, and would do all this filters and masks and interrupts and so forth. We corresponded for some time over what he came to call DeweyCAN. Well, it was for this, and we later ported it to an Arduino Dewey.

And that's a little known, but I still think kind of the apex of his software career is actually about CAN drivers for these boards. You've got them for what now? For the Makina or MCP2515, the Dewey and the Teensy board. You just did one for the Teensy 3.6? 3.2, 3.5, 3.6. Paul... Stolfregen.

Stolfregen does a fascinating little board called the Teensy, which now in the 3.6 version is truly astounding. And Colin has ported that CAN driver to it. And he's also written, I think, the definitive piece of software for the rest of us.

A company called Vector has served the CAN design market for a decade. That market being, what, 120 guys worldwide who each paid $10,000 for the base software without the options. And so Colin's done SavvyCAN at this point until we get a SavvyCAN Pro or something.

It's basically a free software program and has one by one, not precisely duplicated, it actually has done some functions in it that I think are truly unique. And it is becoming a standard for CAN analysis for the rest of us. And you have that working on Linux now with... Yeah, it does.

What do they call their open CAN? Oh, SocketCAN? SocketCAN. It does work with SocketCAN devices. Works with SocketCAN devices.

He's even, I think, got them working with old school stuff like Kvassers and so forth. But obviously it works with our UVTV Dewey and Dewey, similar Dewey equipped with CAN boards. So SavvyCAN is, if you don't know about it, you will know about it.

I don't even have to urge you to look. If you get into CAN, you're going to wind up there. So get over it.

It's got a little learning curve, and Colin does not share my passion for documentation. I tried to do a book for him, and he immediately read the book and changed everything in the program. Yeah, there has been some recent changes in the way it works.

So there's a bit of a learning curve, but it actually allows you to do things in CAN analysis that just aren't available. This will be a quick tutorial on how to set up SavvyCAN and capture some traffic and send it out as well. So open up here.

I've got two devices connected, one GVRet, one SocketCAN. So GVRet's the only thing on a serial port. Set that up at 500 kilobits.

SocketCAN, you use the name minus slash dev slash. So, and it is case sensitive. So the SocketCAN device I have is CAN0.

So now all the buses are connected. Easiest way to get some data to demonstrate is to load up a capture file. So we'll go here, CAN captures, Kodacharger.

Oh, it's the wrong type. All right, let's go here. New park drive 0316.

So I loaded up some messages. It shows up here that I'm connected to three buses and what file I loaded. Over here, CAN filtering, you can set none and then just look at a couple different frame IDs or set them all.

So when you capture data, that's what it's going to look like is data in here, which direction we received this, which bus it was on. So data comes in. Easiest way for playback, to playback frames that you've captured is to come in here.

You can set load capture data, playback speed. This is kind of a timer. Every time it ticks, we'll send a new frame.

Operating systems aren't always great at setting the correct speed, but you can usually get pretty close to the speed you have set here. So I've got the captured data. You can actually chain up things here.

So I could play the captured data and then this and loop that sequence between this and this over and over if I wanted to. Come up here. This is playback one file.

I'll clear this out, make it a little easier. Playback the last frame, pause, play backwards, stop, play forwards, and playback forward one frame. So if I want to just send one frame at a time, come in here and click that button.

See that it's actually showing up two every time because I've got buses connected together between the two dongles. So I send here and receive on the other dongle. Buses zero and one are the GVRet device and two is the SocketCan device.

So basically you can see that GVRet was successfully sending to SocketCan every time. Or I can go play forwards here where I have the frames going between each bus. So that's playback forward with five millisecond intervals.

I'll try to go here to one. You'll see that the operating system's not really great at that. But with burst rate you can send more than one frame every time the timer ticks.

So we can go in there and get a little better performance. So now I've got up to about 3,000 frames per second between sending and receiving. And you can see there it actually just popped through the captured data all the way through.

And then it went to drive July 19 all the way through. And because I have loop sequence set, we went back to the beginning again. So it'll just keep doing that ID filtering.

If you don't want to send every frame, you can turn some of off, deselect them all, select them all. Same basic idea as the main capture window. So it'd be the same thing.

You can only send certain frames if you want to. Now I had left, let's pause this a second, I had left selected from file where these files all said that they came in on bus zero. So we sent on bus zero.

But you can also send on any other bus you want or send on all simultaneously, which will probably be a little hard on your computer, but it's possible to do. So I would have got the same basic output here if I'd selected send to bus zero because they all came in on bus zero. So same thing.

We're transmitting. There's a bit of buffering that goes on in the reception system so that we don't have to update the GUI so often. So you'll see that it shows a whole lot of transmissions and then a whole lot of receptions when you're going this kind of rate.

But the timestamps will still be pretty much the correct thing. So that's how you would send and receive traffic, how you could send out traffic that you previously captured. You can either just directly load up a file or send the captured data here.

The captured data is freeze-framed so you can see even though I have a whole lot of frames captured this always stays at the 27,000 that I originally had loaded when I clicked capture or load captured data. So that's just a frozen in time number of frames that were that were captured at that time. So you can clear this out at any time.

It won't mess up the captured data here. So that's the end of this tutorial for starting up SavvyCan, getting it initially set up and loading or transmitting. Meanwhile back at the ranch Josh Sharp Stilwell, Stierwalt, has a buddy Earl.

I don't, I'm sorry Earl, I don't have your last name. As always I send him an email right before we tape this and I haven't got a reply yet. He'll answer later today and I wish I didn't own it.

They now don't call it ReCharge anymore. I think they call it Makina. Makina is an Italian slang term for literally machine but more accurately car.

That's what they refer to their ride as a Makina. And so this was the Makina board. That's now the entity I suppose.

And they have introduced their M2 module. This being the under the hood version and this being the one you just plug into the OBD2 port. And this little device is kind of amazing.

I don't even know what all's in it. Colin what, we just covered MOSFETs. It has GPIO.

I said well yeah but you got to put a MOSFET or something. He says no I think those are in there. He pulls up the schematic.

What all, this is a very dense package. It's a very dense board. It has dual CAN, single wire CAN, two LIN ports, can do K-line and some of the older bus protocols.

I think Ford and GM had their own weird finicky OBD2 protocols. It can do all those as well. It has six GPIO and I think those can both push to 12 volts and pull down to ground.

So they're bipolar outputs. Yeah he's referring to whether you want a high side or low side switch. On our JEVQ we switch on ground.

That's the one you get to pick from. But the other is to switch a 12 volt output out which is somewhat more difficult to deal with the heat. But they have done it where they swing both ways.

Yeah it does. These are prototypes. The actual module will actually host XB.

Yeah I forgot it also has an XB slot on top so you can take any XB compatible board and stick it on top of that. You probably can't while it's in the case like that but if you take it out of the case you can stack it up with an XB on top of it. And they already have plans for a Ethernet XB, a GPS XB, a cell phone XB, of course our favorite Bluetooth a BLE.

And their big super secret project I guess is the ESP32 which is a new chip that came out in 2016 that has us all going crazy because it's got wireless built in and BLE built in and is 240 megahertz or something. Yeah. Goofy.

And so anyway these guys put up a kickstarter program and as of this morning they just went over a hundred thousand dollars of their $25,000 goal and a thousand and forty seven backers and so Collins all breathy over a thousand and forty seven potential savvy can users which will then each email him with a question on how you do X. And after I'm confident that after dealing with that thousand people he'll be back wanting to talk about this documentation again. Yeah I'll probably have to do more butter documentation at that point. Yeah we've been very successful dealing with product support by PDF and it's so that's working pretty well.

So we may use these modules in place of our EV TV Dewey little universal controller box we use for everything. If we can get all this to wire up these are much smaller much denser devices and at $89 I think they're giving them away. So congratulations to Josh Sharp Stillwalt and Earl and the Makina team for a very successful kickstarter program and I may have a bit of film about that.

Let's take a look. Hi we're the founders of Makina. I'm Earl and this is Josh and we founded Makina for car nerds because we are car nerds.

When we started out we were buying parts and bolting them on eventually this got boring because we didn't actually understand what was going on. At least with mechanical things you can see them working but as soon as you add electronics you can't see in. You have to either trust whoever made it or become a car nerd.

We want you to stop just bolting things on. Start understanding and creating that's why we build Makina. Makina lets you into the inner workings of your car.

It's kind of like rooting or jailbreaking your phone. Once you're in the possibilities are endless. Modern cars are controlled by a system of computers passing information back and forth.

Here's what it looks like when your car is running. Somewhere in this mass of data is the engine's rpm and gear selection. If we want to create a shift light all we need to do is isolate those pieces of information and program Makina to tell us when to shift.

Makina not only listens to your car but it can talk to it too. Let's say you want to unlock it from a mile away. Makina can do that.

Makina can also do more complicated things like retune your entire ecu for a new fuel type. The question really shouldn't be what can Makina do? It should be what are you willing to learn how to do? Makina works with most modern cars. Makina is inexpensive, compact, easy to learn, flexible to your situation, wirelessly connectable and most importantly open source.

At its core Makina is an interface that connects to your car through the OBD2 port or a wired connection using every common protocol. Makina's interface mates easily to our processor board which is based on Arduino making it easy to work with whether you're a beginner or a pro. There's something for you to build and create.

Makina lets you get back to the original intention of hot rodding. Make it better, make it fun, make it yours. You can do this and you don't have to do it alone.

In fact there's an entire community of people who love cars and understand technology. Check out the page below for more information. So again congratulations on a really good launch.

I think they've hit the right combination of a lot of things here. I think so. It's almost too much to get your head around without reading through their kickstarter program in depth and I would urge you to do that.

Meanwhile back at the ranch we have been kind of tapped by a whole new viewership that are not terribly interested in electric vehicles. But they are terribly interested in solar and they're in lines of tail because I still don't think these batteries are gonna make much hay in electric vehicles. They are problematic.

Skateboards, scooters and golf carts maybe where you can do a 48 volt. But when you get up to pack voltages the problem is these particular ones are 205 amp hour devices and in the 85 kilowatt packs they're 235 amp hours and they're simply too big. And you wind up with 56 times 16 which is over 800 pounds of batteries.

But you would have an 85 kilowatt pack if you did that. But it's just physically hard to deal with and we start trying to subsect them. They're in a 21 volt module of 255 amp hours.

You said somebody did reconfigure one with a router and a safety helmet. Yeah someone used a router to cut the grid into a finer pattern. I don't remember exactly how they did it but they were able to double the voltage and have the amp hour capacity.

So it was more like 48 volts and 100 amp hours per module. The geometry of the module exceeds my intellectual capacity. I can't work out how it works now.

And he worked out how to route a pattern through it to make it be a smaller pack at higher voltage. If you can make this 42 volts and 100 amp hours now you've got something going there for a car. But we've heard a lot from people in the solar business.

I mentioned on the blog Joe Sidebottom, unfortunate last name, in Florida who's building a 140 kilowatt hour pack. By the way some of our viewers don't like me referring to them as kilowatt packs. They want to hear the full kilowatt hour.

So I guess we're going to have to quit using short-term things that everybody's familiar with ass clown. Yeah I'm sure that I do it all the time too. Everyone just says kilowatts.

You just assume it means kilowatt hours. So anyway Joe actually is parting out Teslas to get the batteries. Guess what he has as a byproduct of that? Drive units.

He's actually sending me a drive unit. He felt so bad about all the bad ones I get. He says let me send you one.

You test it. If it's good send me a check. I said you know what? That works.

And so we have a drive unit on the way. But he's already somehow taken one of our Tesla monitors rigged it up. I guess he had the BMS board for the whole pack and has somehow got all that cobbled together where he can read the voltages with our normal Tesla can monitor device.

We've got better things in store for you Joe. And therein lies a tale. This is the 14 modules out of the 60 kilowatt pack.

And what do we have here hardware wise that you are hooking up to that? This I don't know how well you can see on the video over there but we used an EVTV Dewey board. The one that we made that's an Arduino Due with CAN and EEPROM built in. And I've made a shield here that just fits on top of it.

And the shield has an isolated 12 volt to 5 volt source here. So if we needed a little extra power you don't need extra power for 14 BMS packs. But eventually if you had 62 of them you'd probably need to provide a little more power than your USB port can put out.

So there's an isolated power supply on here. And then really tiny little chips here are logic and gates. The BMS boards here work on 5 volt logic and the Due is 3.3 volt logic.

So we're using little logic gates to transfer for between 3.3 volt and 5 volt logic back and forth. Level shift. Yeah to do level shifting.

So that's pretty much all that board is a level shifter and an isolated power supply. And everything else is in the Due. We feed that with serial just a regular TTL serial output of the Dewey.

Level shift it but we do something else to it too. It's not a normal serial speed. No it's, I had to write a custom serial initialization for the Due because these BMS boards transmit at 612,500 baud.

Which is a baud rate I had never heard of. Totally non-standard and way above what you would normally see for serial baud rates. So we had to do special code to make the Due actually get to that baud rate.

It doesn't quite get there. I think that it it's about 600 bits per second off on the setting but it still syncs up and works fine. As we described earlier the individual BMS boards on these modules use a Texas Instrument chip that communicates the BLQ76 sub sub whatever.

Yes bunch of numbers. And it you communicate it with using a serial peripheral interface SPI bus. And this one's at one one meg? It's almost one megahertz.

It's one megahertz is the maximum SPI bus speed on that chip but the 8051 processor on these BMS boards can't quite do one megahertz exactly. So it does some weird number like 963,000. It's really close.

So normally our serial bus would be 115.2 or something. That's what you normally do TCL serial. And so here's the the mystery which is now not a mystery.

The multi-controller an 8051 multi-controller on this BMS board has to talk to the BLQ76 SPI and is doing so at 900 something kilobits per second. As I said the serial bus is normally 115.2. What that puts that 8051 into doing is being a data buffer, a bus translator to go from serial TTL to SPI. But the difference in speeds you have to have a lot of buffer space to do that on any amount of data.

And we're not talking about a lot of data read and write and registers but still. So they've kind of cut the baby in half and come up with a very odd serial speed of 612,500 bits per second for the the serial bus. And that gets them partway to the 900 and something on the SPI bus.

Probably don't have to buffer very much. So it's basically shuttling it back and forth and doesn't have to do much buffering. It'll get some from the serial port, save it up and squirt it to the SPI, take the SPI at the regular rate and then parcel it out at a slower rate.

And we're really talking about reading and writing registers, not transmitting the Gettysburg address. It's about 22 bytes for the normal transaction. So all that works.

The purpose of this, as we've learned, the BLQ76 normally is stacked across the different modules using an SPI bus between the chips. They have a north bus, a south bus and a host bus. And you can hook your host controller to any of them on the host bus and it will pass data back and forth very nicely between all these chips.

Each chip can do six cells. Paolo Alameda at ISIL in Portugal advises me that works fine if you're on the same board. Yeah, that's what he said.

But stringing it through a car, it's a disaster. Yeah, it's a good thing. I guess that makes sense.

I would have never, I wouldn't have known that. But I guess that makes sense why Tesla didn't do it that way then. And then there's how we get to the third major chip on the BMS board is a very neat, I'm very impressed with the spec sheet on this chip, RF isolator with five kilovolts of isolation.

And it can do pretty high speeds too, way beyond what they're doing here. Yeah. And so you wind up with an isolated, buffered serial bus that's daisy chained from one device to the other.

And that's kind of an important point there. I guess the alley I would segue down to get us hopelessly confused is that all the, I want to mention all the would-be BMS designers out there and the problems, some of them they're going to run into that perceptually are difficult for them, is that you're monitoring cells across 360 volts. And so your second cell and your 14th cell are separated in voltage by a lot.

And you're monitoring the cells, you either have to be fiercely isolated from the cells you're monitoring, in this case we're actually powered by them. Yeah, it is powered by them. Or you have to be isolated from the other chips because the common mode voltage, even the stuff designed for this will typically have a common mode voltage tolerance of 60 or 80 volts.

And we're at 300. And so you blow up your BMS, your charger keeps charging, that wipes out your car, and then it takes out your house or your barn. Do-it-yourself BMS is not a good thing.

EVTV started trying to buy a BMS, we moved to trying to design a BMS, and we ultimately wound up with lithium-ion phosphate cells with a strategy to avoid having them all together because they were more dangerous than the batteries. That was true of lithium-ion phosphate cells. Unfortunately, guys, it is not true of these.

These are firecrackers. And Tesla had another fire last week in Shanghai with a sitting Tesla at a charge station, but it wasn't charging and it burnt that thing, the ground, last November. And we have some video of this that I'll put up here.

A couple struck a tree at apparently a good rate of speed, and they got some of the fire on video because it burned for a long time, shooting off Roman candles for an hour, and it burned that puppy to the ground. This is telling me that that car was traveling here along Illinois Street, going entirely too fast when it left the road and crashed into that tree. You see that is messed up there behind me, eventually hitting the WFYI parking garage behind that as well.

Now, it was a navy blue Tesla that was carrying those two victims, both of whom, as we know now, are dead. And take a look at this video. You can see that the vehicle burst into flames because of the collision.

I'm told the impact of the crash disintegrated the car, leaving behind a debris field over 150 yards long. Now, it also left behind several little fires made of battery and magnesium that fire crews tell me they had to work really hard to put out. They actually had to use a combination of dry powder and water to extinguish all those flames.

And almost immediately after doing so, Mark, they then had to work on extricating the male from the passenger side of the vehicle and take him out to Eskenazi, where he was treated, but of course eventually died. Now, as for the woman who was behind the wheel, I'm told she was actually dead here at the scene. But listen to what a witness said he saw and why he still can't believe his eyes.

All I know is that they were traveling at a very high rate of speed, and it frightened me because, you know, to be that close to it, an explosion occurred and debris going everywhere, and I had to accelerate my vehicle to get out of the way from it. And as you can imagine, it probably was a very frightening scene for any driver who would have been out here. A great ball of fire.

You can see where that was right there, that tree you're looking at right now. And I do also want to mention that right now investigators are still working on this, trying to just get to the bottom of exactly what went wrong. Although, according to eyewitnesses, it looked like the driver just apparently lost control of the vehicle, causing this entire tragedy to occur here this early morning.

We're live just north of downtown this morning. Eric Cox. So these batteries are not safe and they cannot be made safe.

And do-it-yourself BMS designers will find their software errors in the smoking hole that it leaves, and that's how you'll mature your product. That said, I'm impressed with the Tesla effort and what they've done to safety these cells. And your best shot at being able to use is to take advantage of the existing BMS that you have, and that's what we're attempting to do here.

Back to the isolated bus, and that's the reason for that is the common mode voltage and one of the perils you run into in dealing with BMS design. They've come up with a very isolated bus with 5,000 volts of isolation and a very simple serial bus to tie it all together to the main BMS board in the battery pack. When dealing with modules, you don't have a main BMS board from the battery pack.

Well, Joe's side bottom does, but most of you don't. And so that's what Colin is designing here. Tell us a little bit about the daisy chain and address assignment, because this is a key element of this.

Here is a big blown-up image of the daisy chain system. Basically, each BMS has 10 pins on it, but there's five from the previous module and five to the next module. So it's all a daisy chain type thing.

Your five volts goes in here, out here, and into the next one, out, into the next one, out. The schematic shows five volts being hooked up to the end of it here and the end of it here. You don't need to do that, but for a BMS, redundancy is kind of nice.

So let's say the wire broke right here. If you have five volts going to both sides, then five volts will backfeed through from either direction. So if you have a split in the red wire in only one spot, that doesn't matter.

So they're doing both ends. I've got the fault chain doing both ends, too, where they don't have it pictured here. But if you hook up to both ends of the pack, then a single split does absolutely nothing to ruin your data.

But transmission coming out from the, in our case, EVTV Due, goes in the RX here, out nine, in, out. So everything's just, every module rebroadcasts traffic that comes into it. It rebroadcasts traffic out of it.

And each module has an address that it knows to listen for. So usually you'd start one, and the next one's two, the next one's three. When you transmit here, you're always sending an address that says, I want to know the voltage and temperature on module two.

So if you transmit from here, module one will get that and say, well, I'm not module two, so I'll just forward this traffic on. So it goes in, immediately comes back out, module two grabs it. Module two says, oh, that is the module.

So I'll grab this message and modify it by putting all of the voltage and temperature readings out on the bus, too. So when it retransmits, all the temperature and voltages are being transmitted, too. So it's a much bigger message now.

Every subsequent module will see that it's not module two and just continue to rebroadcast until you get to the other side, where it comes back and we receive it. So it's kind of an ingenious scheme, rebroadcasting. Everybody sees the traffic, but only the module that needs to pay attention to a message will actually pay attention to it.

And that allows us to do the address assignment. Yeah, the address assignment we're doing automatically. Because these modules are chained like this, what we do is actually send a broadcast that everybody listens to, and the broadcast says, go to address zero.

Just forget what module address you used to have. You're zero now. So every module, in our case here, it's 14 modules.

They're all zero. Now, what we do then is send a message that says, module zero, why don't you set your address to one? So this first one is now module zero. It says, oh, I'm module zero.

Sets its address to one, and it modifies the traffic so that nobody else wants to listen to the message. It sets a bit that basically says, ignore this message, but keep rebroadcasting. So then the next module gets an ignore message, it rebroadcasts, it goes out to the end.

We come back and we receive somebody sent an ignore request, so we know that someone listened to that message and set the address. So then we say, let's set address two. So we send that here.

This one says, well, I'm already address one. I don't need to set an address. So it rebroadcasts it.

The second one gets it and says, oh, I'm still address zero. I'll set the address. It sets ignore, and now the third, the fourth, the fifth all know to ignore it.

They come back. It still says, ignore that. So in this case, there's three modules on this schematic.

We'll eventually get to a point where we say, let's set address four. This says, I'm address one. I don't need to set an address.

Rebroadcast. This says, I'm address two. I don't need to set one.

This says, I'm address three. I don't need to set one. It comes back here.

We see that nobody acknowledged the message, so we know that the modules are all initialized. In this way, every time that the BMS starts up, the modules are perfectly in order according to the daisy chain. So if a module faults, let's say we see an error in module three, we know which one that is because it's the third one on the daisy chain.

A couple of important concepts here. One is it doesn't pass through the BMS board. It is received and rebroadcast is how Colin put it.

This is not a loop where everybody's on a common bus that passes through. It comes in on RX, this isolation chip, and it has to go out TX to get to RX on the next one. And so that's why we call it a daisy chain.

Picture a bucket brigade or something that you have to pass it down. That allows us to do this individual addressing and so forth. He has put in the software to do that every time it addresses it so you can add and remove modules at will and that'll work.

But when you do, if you have one of the connectors, we've sourced the connectors, and in fact, Dylan wired us up a thing. Here I've got a dongle that, never met a connector I liked. This is a duplicate of the connector that's on the board and we do have it looped through.

Yeah, we just loop it through. And so we can plug this in and it doesn't know that it's missing a module because of the dongle. We can also remove that and plug it back into the BMS board and we will do that to illustrate a fault here shortly.

But that's the nature of the thing and we're trying to come up with a scheme where you can test on two modules and expand to, what's our maximum number now? 62. You can have up to 62 modules in your pack. Note, too, that this daisy chain serial loop, and it is a loop, it goes all the way to the last module and the last module terminates back in the Arduino Dewey, making a full loop, has nothing to do with the layout of your cells.

So you can have all 14 of these in parallel all 14 of them in series. You can have two wide and seven long. That has nothing to do with the BMS string.

And so you can mix and match these into whatever voltage and amp hour combination you want. That's not about the BMS serial loop. You have to loop through them all serially, but that does not restrict you in any way from tying the terminals of the modules into whatever configuration you want.

And at this point, I think we've covered the background and I'm going to ask Colin to give you a little walkthrough of some very preliminary software. We're going to add a lot to this, most notably to his shield, a function to turn on and off contactors. And you'll be able to set limits on the temperatures and the so forth voltages that you'll tolerate before you want this to automatically disconnect from your still not burning house.

And thereby retain that feature of your home that it's 72 degrees Fahrenheit instead of 720 degrees Celsius. And there's a big difference. So I'm going to ask Colin to walk you through his basic program, which will be much expanded by the time we get this in a box for you to normal operation with all modules working.

And then we'll pick up from there. So here we are starting up into the BMS. You can see it just says startup, start the serial interface, loaded stored values.

I'm going to do a summary screen here. It says five second intervals, but there's really three. So see the pack status says all systems go.

That means there are no faults. It has found 13 modules because while we have 14 on the desk, we've used the plug that he showed to disconnect one. The total system voltage, if you put them all in serial would be 295.8 volts.

The average cell voltage right now is 3.811 and the average temperature is 13.4 approximately Celsius. So then we have all the modules listed here with the total voltage that the module has the lowest to highest cell voltage right now, and the lowest to highest temperature of the modules. We've found that the temperatures of the modules are taken at pretty much the positive and negative terminals of each module.

So that's where your temperatures are being taken from in the cooling loop. So here are 13 modules. They're all very well balanced.

I mean, there's very little fluctuation between voltages, but there's also a detailed mode here if you use D. Now still the same pack status, all systems go 13 modules, but now you can see every cell voltage. First the module voltage, then the cell voltages. So the cells are numbered sequentially from zero up to 77 here.

So we have 78 cells reporting all their voltages and the temperatures are shown as the negative terminal voltage and the negative terminal temperature and positive terminal temperature. I can show here the module closest to me is 13. So if I go on its negative terminal here, you can see that the negative terminal temperature of that module is in fact climbing when I put a heat gun on it.

So these temperature settings can be used to verify what's going on, make sure that you're not about to burn the pack up and in case of troubles, it will set the fault loop and cut you off. So there's a little bit of heating on the cell terminal. See that it did go up and now because I'm not hitting it anymore, it's dissipating a little bit.

I will stop the capture a moment and we will plug in the faulted module to show what happens there. Bring the serial monitor back up, starting up and immediately you see it says error, one or more BMS modules have entered the fault state. So I'm going to go into the summary mode and see pack status has shown as faulted.

There are 14 modules now that are 314.874 volts. The average cell voltage has gone down and we'll look in here and find out this because module 10 that I've added is at 19.06 volts and ranges from 0.132 volts to 3.812 volts. So the more detailed fault is found below that module is faulted under voltage on cell number 5. So assuming you could get into these packs very well, you could actually try to look at cell number 5 which is second from highest bank of cells, try to figure out what's going on there, why it's low.

I'll show the detailed mode and we can once again verify that. Here's module 10. The first one's 3.8 then 3.81, 3.81, 3.81, 0.13 and 3.81. So that's the bad module, the bad cell on a bad module.

So we even have detailed fault output and the fault status that you see up here, whether it says all systems go or faulted is done by the fault line that you could see on the schematic. The fault line is pulled low when there's trouble and floats high when there's no trouble. So we can easily determine if anything is faulted just based on that fault line and perhaps you could open your contactors if anything faults and the fault line goes low.

That's kind of a fail safe but also any module that's faulted will give detailed faults to tell you what it is, maybe you could actually fix it. All right, excellent, excellent work Colin. We're beyond experimental in actually monitoring things.

A couple of points, you detected the fault when you plugged this in. Tell us a little bit about this hardware fault line. The fault line actually I think is probably the weakest part of this whole design.

You can see that it's daisy chained like everything else, goes in, out, in, out, in, out. So it's a big loop. The fault chain, the way that a module shows that it's faulted is to grab this line and shunt it to ground.

So on this board is the 4.7k pull-up resistor that you see here. I'm pulling the fault line up to 3.3 volts and when a bad module faults it grabs that and pulls it down. It grabs it to about 0.6 volts that it can drag that line down to and that's read as a low value and then I can see on the master board that we're making that it's faulted.

But the problem with this design is that if the fault loop breaks here what happens if this module faults? You'll never see it because we're still pulling up here. So I'm not really sure why they were so lazy with their fault line. That's a really poor design for fault lines.

They should pull the line up when it's fault, when everything's good and have the pull-ups maybe on the board here and not make me do it because any break in the fault chain here will never be detected. But when the lines are all good it does work properly. Along the way, I guess this is the year 2017, did we have a year zero? We did trace out the temperature sensors and Colin has labeled them one and two in his software and I've labeled them zero and one in mine.

But the zero or Colin's one is the negative terminal of the battery pack and the two then is the positive terminal of the battery pack and I didn't know this until yesterday. Yeah we didn't know that until yesterday. We've been on the big battery pack putting a heat gun on the edge of the case and all the terminals were in the middle and we were having a very difficult time getting any motion on our temperature to identify modules.

As it turns out all the terminals face in so they can be strapped together in the battery pack and that is where both temperature sensors are one on the negative terminal one on the positive. So we've learned a lot about these modules and the BMSs and we are hell-bent to have a little box with some contactors in it probably and our shield and Dewey that will let you know you're going to kind of have to build your own daisy chain per the diagrams we're going to provide the connectors and pins but I don't know where you're laying out your batteries so we're just going to have to wing it on that and you'll you will have to wire it up to this diagram and it's kind of a diagram. It's not as intuitive as many buses you may be familiar with.

That said I want to reiterate and we are not safety Nazis at EVTV. We don't tell you about your safety glasses. You should all know about standard shop safety procedures and we don't talk about that much but I'm going to repeat this probably several times.

These batteries are known killers. They've killed people and that's operating in the car with Tesla's system. I believe that we can come up with a box that will give you a shot at using these battery modules successfully and to some degree safely but they're not going to be safe and having been one of the few people ever to actually be in the room when one of these horrible battery fires happened and having survived it although I did decide it was probably time to go home anyway I might as well get the hell out of there.

It's an impressive fire you will be made a believer of. We have lived BMS free one day at a time for a long time here at EVTV but if we're going to do anything with these lithium nickel cobalt manganese aluminum oxide pin light cells that Tesla uses we want to know what the voltage and temperature of every cell is all the time and more importantly we want some defense electronics that will disconnect the system on any and I mean any anomaly not on a failure not on a fault but if a cell is two tenths off from the other cells it's over and you have to fix it to get the box to work again and that's still not going to make you safe but I would reiterate this is a non-trivial aspect I you know even in a solar installation I would seriously consider an outside shelter of some sort not attached to the home but probably with the ability to heat it in the winter you do not want to charge these cells below freezing ever it causes lithium plating on the anode and the next time you charge it you've got a problem and so that's another serious admonition but I probably wouldn't have these in the house normally we will of course violate that here to have them in the shop uh but we probably won't operate them unless we're in the shop with it and when we go home at night we shut everything down there's no solar charging there's no solar discharging there's no batteries operating in the place that I know about although Bill sometimes charges scooter batteries overnight without my knowledge but it's in operation in a home of course you want to be able to go to bed and still have electrical power I would seriously consider building a shelter specifically for your batteries 25 feet from the house with 10 walls and and route the cables to it and put a little heater in there a little space heater or something that comes on if you get down to freezing and simply to be able to sleep at night and not be sleeping on top of one of these batteries even with a bms and so but I'm very pleased that we were able to soothe out this system and my thanks to Jared Tuma and his people for their assistance in this and I think we'll be able to make modules work for you which should drive the price of them up from probably 1250 bucks up to a couple grand of slab we're never probably going to sell these batteries we'll sell a kit with connectors and pins and our little controller and a couple contactors in it that you can use to wire it up but this should make a new life for Tesla battery modules and it's kind of a double victory this week we have also mastered most of the intricacies of using the entire pack in similar fashion although we call the negative terminal zero and the positive terminal one and we still don't know if there was ever a year zero and so this is a kind of a programmer joke if you haven't done any coding you don't know about this but everybody else has been through this both directions 300 times zero and one which do you start with and so let's take a look at what we've done with the full pack on the Tesla battery front stay with us okay boys and girls part duh of our excellent battery adventure is the entire pack we were having some difficulties with this but I'm a lot more synthetic to this application than I am to putting them in an EV and that has to do with our solar system there is our 50 kilowatt CHAdeMO charge station which we had specially made to work off of DC believe it or not I've had several inquiries from people wanting to buy them to hook up to their three-phase power and therein lies the usual tale they know that they run on three-phase and they need three-phase power but they have exactly what we would be able to get here and that's 208 volt three-phase power 208 volt three-phase power will not run a CHAdeMO charge station worldwide as far as I know as soon as I say that somebody will jump out with one but um 208 volts uh is actually volts rms or root mean square and it has a voltage peak of 1.414 times that which is under 300 volts the CHAdeMO charge stations charge from 50 to 500 volts if they comply with the specification there's a bunch of them out there that will only charge from 250 or so to 500 claiming to be CHAdeMO charge stations which by the way they are not but that's a religious matter what we wanted was one that would both buck and boost but the passive components their cost and size constrain that somewhat and so we have to have a minimum of 300 volts DC into ours which of course won't work with a three-phase power supply although you could rectify if you had 380 three-phase or 440 to a DC value and it would run it our interest of course is to have a battery and to charge that battery via a 13 kilowatt photovoltaic array on a roof and then use that as the input to our CHAdeMO charge station this involved building if you will recall an enormous similarly green box full of lithium iron phosphate cells and when we filled that box pretty much to the brim with lithium iron phosphate cells 108 of them actually we wound up with our voltage but we had about a 30 kilowatt hour pack which poses an interesting dilemma when charging our tesla model s 85 kilowatt pack using our CHAdeMO charger we needed a bigger battery guess who makes a bigger battery tesla and so i have here a full 85 kilowatt 16 module tesla pack in the can we just demonstrated how to deal with the modules that came out of our 60 kilowatt pack i don't want to deal with a bunch of modules tesla made a battery pack it works i want to use it and i want to use it the way tesla uses it and that will be the safest application for it there were some issues it is uh communicates by controller area network messages can messages from the car and it has some hardware requirements and therein lies a tail that i think we've got pretty much worked out there's a couple of minor cosmetic issues that would only matter to me but it we can use this as a battery pack now um i've received a lot of advice about the high voltage interlock loop this is the connector from the tesla model s and as you can see it has two pretty capable blades a centering pin that can be grounded and a small pin right here um i've said i've never met a connector i liked actually i kind of like this one which of course then um we get to phase two which is trying to procure them and they're unobtainium but i'm assured if i could obtain it it would be a fortune thousand bucks twelve hundred dollars something like that for this very excellent connector um and so for general use while i have a couple of these um you most likely won't have the high voltage interlock does of course pass through that connector if your battery is not plugged in it's not going to come on um and what that is is two contacts down in the battery pack that you bridge with that pin and we have found i don't know what this is an eighth inch piece of copper from mcmaster car that if we put that down in there that pretty much bridges those two contacts and completes the loop well as the rest of the loop goes through the car and we've known all along that that was 120 or 180 ohms and had that right from the beginning it had nothing to do with the high voltage interlock loop but i received that suggestion so many times uh that i checked it uh three dozen times and it comes out the same way every time um so that was that um the rest of the issue that we faced has to do with pre-charging and indeed the tesla battery manages its pre-charge in a what i will refer to as an aggressive fashion pre-charge is a function where and we're trying to avoid enormous inrush currents when we hook up the battery to other devices charge stations chargers the inverter and the drive unit the dc to dc converter all have smoothing capacitors on the input and some of them are of significant capacitance if they are empty and we connect it to 360 volts nominally this will cause a current to fill the capacitor and those currents can spike to 10 000 amps or more albeit for very briefly um a millisecond or two until the cap starts to charge and develops a voltage that then counters the applied voltage diminishing the current and so the current uh into a capacitor is initially infinite and then it rolls off to nothing when the voltages are precisely matched in a curve um the way we do pre-charge i'll illustrate on our box we have two contactors and a pre-charged resistor we usually put the pre-charged resistor across the positive contactor and we close the negative contactor and that completes the circuit with our car our inverter input our dc to dc input our charger or a catamo fast charger whatever it is but now instead of a dead short which is what the capacitor looks like to our battery pack we have a 500 ohm 50 watt resistor here and we put a capacitor across the terminals of the still open positive contactor and so the circuit is completed but the current has to go through that resistor 500 ohms if you take 360 volts and divide it by 500 ohms the maximum current you will get is less than an amp but an amp will fill a capacitor pretty quickly actually in four or five seconds three seconds sometimes depends on the size of the capacitor and so we will normally use a resistor like that close the negative contactor let it pre-charge at one amp for some period of time four or five seconds and then close the positive contactor which bypasses the resistor and now we can do full current into our device and that's pre-charged tesla has two contactors in the battery pack and they are managed by its battery management system board but they don't do that they actually time how long it takes to reach pack voltage in the external circuit and if it's not there within a given time window it simply disconnects and won't play anymore and so we were failing to close the contactors if if it gets to full voltage too quickly which indicates nothing's connected even though our high voltage general lock loop is complete it will also not close contactors because it didn't have a successful pre-charge in the time window that it recognizes is valid and so what we found we have to do and we tried it into the uqm inverter tesla inverter a number of things and could not get it to close the contactors we have tried a variety of capacitors and centered on a 500 micro farad 450 volt capacitor across the terminals of our contactors we're going to replace the connector with some one quarter inch by one inch copper bar we've kind of filed to a point here and we can plug that directly into the connector and our capacitor is wired across those two bars and because we have the contactors screwed to the box and the copper bars bolted securely to the terminals of the contactors that's all the stiff assembly and we can plug the whole box into that connector and so we present 500 micro farads to the tesla battery management system and it finds that nominally acceptable um might ought to be 300 it usually takes two blacks at it and then accepts it at at 500 it'll try charge not get the capacitor fully charged and then bump it again and get it there and it latches up and we have contact closure so we can now close the contacts on the tesla battery pack but leaving us with the same problem we still have to pre-charge our inverter or charger or dc to dc converter or all three more generally in a car but even in a solar system our dc to ac inverter has input capacitors and again and our solar charger has capacitors in its output and so we still have to do a pre-charge routine and that's what the two contactors are for once we are notified by can message by the bms that its contactors are closed we then have to do our own pre-charge i'm using a jev q here hardware device we hope to step that down to an arduino dewey and a a shield with some mosfets on it to drive these two gigavac um high voltage contactors and then once the battery pack contactors are closed we will close the negative contactor here charge the circuit which is now live on this side through our pre-charge resistor and for a amount of time that you can determine i like six seconds but nine might be more appropriate i don't know and at the end of that time we will close the positive contactor and and be able to connect to our device it also gives us two levels of disconnect if any of our voltages or our temperatures are out of norms we can open these two contactors and we can also signal the battery pack to open its contactors and and thus remove the battery from the circuit and send it to jack for further analysis for maintenance important point we want it to do this automatically while we sleep disconnect the pack completely and then at 10 o'clock after i've had my coffee we can take a look at the pack and see what's wrong with it and that'll be made easier because it won't be a smoking hole in the ground it'll still be a battery pack with a cell or two off of voltage or a temperature that's out of our range of course we don't want to charge it below freezing ever and so we'll set that two or three degrees centigrade is our lower temperature limit to make sure we don't charge the battery pack below zero degrees centigrade and so that's pretty much our box i've got two leds here for to show me the status of these two contactors and i've got a lit switch here that i push to turn it on without a laptop we would just push the switch and this should work automatically um on this side we have our wiring to our two connectors for xo 35 and 36 and i've got two terminals here you do need 12 volts to make all this work where you're going to get that is none of my business we've got a couple gland nuts here and that's where you feed in your cables to your equipment and so this simply or not so simply plugs in to our high voltage connector our xo 36 and our xo 35 we're going to connect our 12 volts to our 12 volt inputs here and that should let us play next we're going to hook up the laptop and show you what information we can get from the tesla battery pack battery management system stay with us okay i've got a terminal program here on the laptop i'm going to apply our 12 volts here and that immediately closes a relay a standard bosch relay applying contactor 12 volts to battery management system in the pack and it starts to spew very interesting can data in our direction with a lot of a very interesting information and we're going to go over that let me so we're going to bring up cool term and that's our terminal program and we're going to connect to our screen and let's take a look here we've got this is our top screen we have four you can select them with zero one two and three since we did start with year zero and i've got a function to clear the data buffer and erase stored voltages i can toggle the contactor off and on and right now our contactor state is off and open and that refers to the contactor state in the battery management system our pack voltage is 344 volts our current coincidentally is zero amps and that's because we're not doing very much right now in fact we don't have any contactors closed and our average temperature of our pack is 15.15 centigrade our max pack voltage that we have incurred so far is 344.50 volts dc and that has occurred since i pressed the switch our minimum pack voltage that we have seen is 343.7 volts dc our peak discharge current is 0.8 amps and our peak charge current is 0.1 amps and since we've got four contactors that have never closed i don't know where those values come from but they are reported by the battery management system one of the interesting things that the battery management system reports is the total lifetime charge of the battery in kilowatt hours and we have charged 2379.580 kilowatt hours on this pack wherever it came from it didn't have a lot of use and we have discharged at 2269.575 kilowatt hours which they didn't drive it much further than they charged it and in fact if we divide our um discharge by our charge we find that we've got a round trip efficiency of about 95.38 percent that's kind of a fake number we calculate that from those two values kind of depends on whether you're charging or whether you're driving but over time it becomes more accurate and it refers to the fact that it takes more energy into the car than you're ever going to get out of the car and um and we like things like that because it seems like it's all part of god's plan when we get more energy out than we put in it causes a lot of work and consternation here at ev tv but today all is right with the world our highest cell voltage is 3.59 volt dc and that's on cell number three and we have 96 cells on this pack our lowest cell voltage is 3.59 volts which is the same as the high and that's on cell 67 or 31 or 72 and what we find is that our cell voltages are remarkably similar from one cell to the next that's a good thing though always suspicious i'm going to cross my fingers we're going to start by entering a t to toggle our contactors on and you can see a red light signified by the blue hand of death and come on and subsequently a green light what that is is we have received notification from the battery management system that the internal contactors have closed although you heard them close as well and we took that as a sign to close the negative contactor in our box signified by the red light which means stop actually just means the negative contactor was closed you can keep moving if you like and then after a period of about six and a quarter seconds i think we closed the positive contactor completing our charge and are hooked up to our bench over there if i go to screen one this is our cell view and we list all 96 cells by their voltage to three decimal digits why do you want to see your cell voltages to three decimal digits because you can the highest cell voltage again is 3.59 volts at cell three lowest cell voltage is also 3.59 volts dc at cell 49 no wait 91 no 49 no it's 31 again our cells are very similar thing our max pack voltage again and this is since we brought the system up is 394.28 and our minimum pack voltage has been 342.3 that's not the current that's i've put in some software in there to record the peaks so i can see what's going on um screen two is our module view and we list down the left side our modules their voltages and then their temperatures and each module has two sensors one at the negative terminal i refer to as zero and one of the positive terminal which i refer to as one and we get different temperatures at the different terminals this is all subject to change if i can find out if we had a year of zero or if we started with one i may change this to one and two to match colin our max temperature is 15.75 degrees centigrade in module one sensor one which is the positive terminal and that's over here and our minimum temperature is 14.762 degrees centigrade in module 14 sensor zero which would be right here ensuring our 14.762 centigrade our highest cell voltage is 3.59 our lowest cell voltage is 3.586 now in cell 91 and so that's our module view screen three is kind of the money screen it's called pack limits view i do show all the cell voltages there that's somewhat gratuitous to make a pretty screen and give you something to look at but the function of this screen is limit commands and we can enter a maximum cell voltage a minimum cell voltage a maximum temperature a minimum temperature and our pre-charge value and we have to go to our command line and if i enter max cell m-a-x-c-e-l-l equals 4.253 that becomes the new max cell voltage and that's immediately active and i can similarly do min cell equals 2.719 and that didn't take i must have misspelled something you have to spell it correctly 2.719 and there it is and that's entered and i can put in a max temp of 44 degrees and a min temp i have set to two and that's so it'll be just above freezing actually the only one that is peculiar here i would say is your minimum cell voltage if a cell any cell falls below that value you're going to disconnect all four contactors and it happens very quickly and once they're disconnected you have to manually toggle or re-power cycle your box to get them back up why is why is this even interesting well a lot of people measure their their batteries a lot while they're sitting still you may be powering a 10 kilowatt inverter and producing some current and that will decrease the voltage of your pack significantly and every cell in it and so you want this value to be something above where the cells would be damaged but below normal operation the so if the cell was sitting there three volts would be empty but if you were producing 150 amps of output 2.75 volts might actually be 10 of your pack left and so you have to smarten up a little bit or about what your true minimum cell value that you want is and of course pre-charge is simply the delay between the negative contactor and a positive contactor in operation and that's basically our application for the tesla battery pack and a whole lot of information about it and three or four things you can change and so in troubleshooting your battery these informations are available in normal operation you're going to punch the green button watch the red button light and the green button light and walk away your battery pack is operational key element being that whatever you entered is those limits if they are exceeded those two lights go out your battery pack is disconnected and whatever you're doing charging discharging powering your house will see okay let's try powering something on bill the right now we're viewing our main screen would you turn on the charger we have a little chevy volt charger here that is connected to our system and we can see on screen on our jld we have about eight amps 8.1 and on my screen here we're showing eight amps or 8.1 and our voltage is climbing a little bit and our peak discharge current was 38.7 probably some you know closure of you know our pre-charge and our peak charge current was 35.5 a momentary i'm sure and we can see down here our total lifetime charge is 2379.617 but i would predict that that's going to go up to about 6.621 or 0.624 or perhaps 0.628 here momentarily and so we are in fact charging and the pack is reporting that here's our cell view and we can see if any cells are out of line we have a highest cell of 3.6 and lowest cell 3.6 i like that here is our terminal view and with our temperatures and our module voltages 21.572 or so and again 3.602 is our maximum 3.596 is our minimum cell 31 no wait a minute 49 no wait a minute 25 nope it was 91 and so there we go back to the main terminal view bill would you fire up the uqm power phase 100 and see if you can make some smoke down at that end of the bench and we'll observe our stuff we have ignition and we have a negative current of about minus 18 kind of punch it there you go and that got us 471.4 amps of discharge current and on our regenerative braking we got a peak charge current of 131.40 is that your personal best uh try it again yeah 471 and 131 uh punch it and let it spin at max rpm and then let it go real quick yeah and so we still didn't exceed either of those but we can watch the current going out and the current coming back in and we display charge currents the eight amps coming from our charger and discharge currents appear negative on this system and again that's as optional as whether you start with a year zero or year one it's that's why they call it software it's all soft and so that is our power check to check if we can get charge currents in and discharge currents out of the tesla battery pack stay with us well that about wraps up jack and colin's excellent battery adventure i'm just kind of warming up over the leds that bill selected for her box um three waters but i think they're discernible even in daylight i think so um what do you think i think we've got an awful lot done we got modules working we got packing working and that was uh the thing and i was um really kind of braced for a six-month odyssey and determined to get this to work and it's been what three weeks yeah it's only it's been a couple weeks um this is hard guys that ain't that hard it's uh it can be done and um i think we have enabled um batteries um for um everyone and i think that the reuse of vehicle batteries conceptually and generally is a good thing yeah um and that when they really are too tired to run a car there's still a lot of battery left to run a solar system that said um and again i'm not really as known as a safety nazi um but you need to mind that these cells can you're talking about storing a tremendous amount of power an 85 kilowatt pack would power the average american home i think about 60 hours yeah and the thing that's kind of weird with uh a tesla probably uses 50 times what your house does so when you're talking about putting this in your house you're talking about a power source capable of powering 50 of your houses right so that's what's dangerous about it it is so powerful you could put a lot of energy in not very much space i like the full pack i like the full metal jacket is that really going to protect me from a thermal runaway no it's trying to put a forest fire out with a kit moisture from a kiss but it makes me feel good and um and it lets me handle the battery with a little less um providential care and i can let my kids play around it and uh don't have to worry about them touching the terminals or anything that's kind of one of the reasons for the box design you really can't get get to it without taking the box off and then you've unplugged the contactors on both sides so i think they're excellent for solar applications we will pursue this to little boxes you can buy they're not apparently going to be cheap but nothing is and um all the little bits add up and it would have been nice if we could have just sent a can message to the either one of these systems and turned them on it's not to be you really need contactors and lights and switches and and so on and so forth but none of it is uh doctorate level stuff it's just wiring things up many of you can do this yourselves uh it's not that hard um but um for a lot of you it's just going to be easier to buy it from us and that gives us oxygen to keep making shows and buying batteries and and attempting these sorts of things so we do appreciate your support of our efforts over the past eight years coming up in may so i hope this you found this interesting and useful i think it's going to enable a whole different segment not so much ev guys maybe lawn equipment guys scooter guys but more the home solar thing and i would have no trouble predicting and would hardly be the first to do so that with the falling price of the panels and now the ability to put down 85 kilowatts of battery storage for 15 grand that we're going to see a running battle between the utility companies which all of you insisted were our friend when we were fighting the oil companies and i predicted then careful that's going to change and it's changing um but i i again i think with all due respect to the global um conspiracist the armageddon guys and the global warming people that it's still an excellent solution to a half a dozen problems to use electricity to drive our personal transportation and to make our own electricity on our own roofs and i think if you'll pursue that good things come in great gobs your kids don't have to go to war our country doesn't have to send a billion dollars a year overseas things smell better you won't be as sick things will be quieter and they're more robust if they take out your power grid well that's inconvenient but if you have enough battery who cares yeah and so that's our mission has been for eight years we don't need alarmist exercises to support that it makes a logical sense to any rational person without extreme measures of construct and logic um so the battery thing like i say um largely thanks to colin and jared um tuma um has been a six month project collapsed to three weeks it'll take another few months for us to get to a final design maybe smaller tighter better components and largely manufactured in china yeah it's probably going to be the uh but we should be up in the web store with stuff you can use and and to deploy these batteries within a few weeks colin thanks for coming down it's always good to see you and your every other year one week stay at ev tv which usually lasts about three days before he gets tired of me and goes home but we've had a successful alliance now for several years and without a lot of friction we both deal with the world by email mostly and rarely speak to each other but are in pretty good communication about what's important and what we should do going into the future and it's worked out very successfully from my point of view um so thanks for coming down and helping with this but it almost turned into a victory lap well you did run into a couple of things yeah i spent some time trying to get it all calibrated and work properly at first it it didn't work out at all and we thought that the pack wasn't responding but it turns out programming errors are like that oh crying crc calculation and yeah you know some addressing issues minor things but important it's like it doesn't work at all until it works that's it just magically works at some point yep so uh stay with us uh they'll we'll have further adventures but the battery ride has been a pretty good one uh i promise you a follow-up to our introduction this is it and i'm not going to do any more show to go with it that's what you get we'll see you next week okay we said that was the end of the show but we got we got more show uh before we let colin hit the road um we need to uh address something we have uh in fact our association pretty much started you were bidding on the azure dynamics auction bidding on those same liquid cooled azure dynamics democ 645s and siemens motors and this i don't know i don't think we got any i ended up buying a siemens motor from a ford ranger huh okay uh when azure dynamics went bankrupt we bought a bunch of motors and controllers and this is what was going into the e-transit connect and we bought a bunch of them we're uh we still have quite a few motors but we have maybe three liquid cooled uh democ 645s left but that's how colin and i met was then we collaborated on how to drive this um democ 645 uh using can messages it's entirely can message driven um it there's not even a throttle hooked up to it nope it's entirely by can message and we were successful and made the decision at that time to instead of doing a controller for it to do a generalized controller where we could modularly add other drives or and it would be very configurable after i'd been through the horrors of the curtis controller for years and the ebnetics controller and uh the um or what was that european um mesdea controller and motor and trying to work out the throttle curves and so forth and it was just a horror um hopefully we've done better uh it's still kind of a lot of things yeah there's still a lot to do but uh um you know we've had very little uh product support problems with the jfq most people understand the documentation understand the ascii screen we had a website screen to configure it for a while um it was slow and clunky but it worked sometimes with some browsers uh and so um uh you know it's it's been a successful run we sold 100 motors and and dmoc 645s uh with jfqs and they're out there in cars i guess they're just driving them and don't want to phone home i don't hear from them very much kind of like being the maytag repairman uh we take a jfq product support request usually by email once a month um and so i'm pleased about that for an organization like us product support is the issue and it always was that was why companies didn't want to sell you stuff we sold you stuff but we have the same problem um how many people can you tie up that if you did ask them a question would know the answer um and i can't hire feral children off the street to do that um and so that's some of the issues we're about out of these i still have some motors left and i come across a guy with like 35 000 of these air cool versions of almost the same thing yep except they're not they have enormous cables and i don't even know how you're going to hook them up to the motor i mean obviously they can be hooked up but this is like uh one aug cable that we use between the inverter and the motor on the vmoc 645 liquid cooled and this is basically the same inverter isn't it it's the exact same guts inside everything excuse me everything here is the exact same the only difference is that this has a big air cooled chunk bolted on and that has a liquid cooled bolted on well one of the cables are different yeah the cables that come out of it are different that's that's it the internal guts of the inverter is the third thing the exact same and that's the firmware in it yeah well yeah they put a different eeprom value and in uh but it's the same hardware they just put a different bit in there that says that it's an air cooled version so our jeff q wouldn't work with it we'd send it a can message and it just tells us something stupid like wrong version yeah it tells you wrong box version that's that's what it says but colin's worked all that out and we had to flash every one of these yes with um the software they didn't have any firmware in them as i recall none they don't no and uh and then the the trick and what's wrapped everybody around the axle worldwide trying to beat us out of the game is we selected a set of just eeprom values you can there's a 90 things you can configure in there and we configured it for a vw thing and that was the configuration yeah and as long as you have the same values i don't even remember what any of them are um the jfk works with it fine and so it's kind of a two-step process one is the eeprom values and one is the firmware and colin has again brilliantly um and some months back i figured out how to flash the firmware into the air cool version so it thinks it's a liquid cool version and we can drive it and our thanks to phil becker's son wolf yeah wolf tronics wolf tronics yeah um kind of an odd fellow but he's a good good engineer um and he uh is sort of backed us into all that uh tearing things up and hooking up logic analyzers and so forth until it got down to oh we can just flash it with the yeah the uh the jfq um uh the water cool version code and it'll work yep and so one of the things colin's gonna do while he's here is train two of my guys to uh quickly uh simply flash the firmware and the eeprom values into the air cools and i think i've got 94 of them um now i have to tell you these are great motors it's actually hardier as an ac induction motor than our uqm i like the uqm because it's short and stubby like it like me and it's 110 pounds instead of 190 yeah but this is your tank version of a good ac motor that is kind of hard to hurt um and that's the inverter we have that drives it and with this flash this will be able to work you're going to have to work on the cables a little bit um to make it work you're not going to have the cooling issues it'll either be cool or it'll quit because it's air cool but they've got plenty of fins on there they do and you could put a fan on that uh if it proved to be an issue and avoid all the issues with cooling although the motor is still liquid cooled um so be aware of that but i think i'm just gonna flush these i'm tired of looking at them um we're about tesla and are gonna be about tesla because tesla as far as i'm concerned is the king of the hill on electric vehicles and i gotta tell you i just don't care about leafs i think the nissan leaf is a fine car colin owns two of them they're powering michigan with nissans uh no doubt about it the volt has this adherence and the bolt by all reports is the car of the year yeah people say they like it i don't think all of them lined up in a row could wipe up tesla's ass i mean i just that that's i've gotten to be overboard on this and the my interest in components is going to be about the tesla if i can put down a 350 kilowatt motor that's dead quiet that that's that's i've got the attention span of a four-year-old and i i aim to exercise it so i'm thinking 1500 bucks you can have a motor and an air cooled and you got to pay shipping and the cables are your freaking problem and a jib queues another six so you're at 2100 with a very sturdy drivetrain that we happen to know works really good yeah but i'm not interested in them anymore and so we're gonna flash i think i've got 94 of those air cools and we're gonna flash them and we're gonna ship them and uh good luck with them if you break it you own both pieces i really don't want to hear a lot about it though the uh we're moving on and so uh it's a bargain for somebody if you want them and uh we're gonna get two guys trained to flash them and i'm not even gonna supervise and they're gonna they're gonna flash them all and then you can come and get them we'll have that up on the website next week and it's not a one-week deal it's till they're gone but there is a limited number of them i don't even know how many i don't know we'll run out of one thing before the other probably run out of the motors before we run out of the yeah there's quite a number of air-cooled d-locks uh i bought them for nothing because we didn't think we could ever make them work and thanks to um mr becker and uh mr um kidder apparently we can and so uh so we will but am i gonna get excited about it no probably not i've moved on it's all about tesla they're gonna ship the model threes supposedly this year i've got 170 kilowatt from the d models already i don't even know how to work and then we're gonna have a similar drive unit in the model threes and um yeah and we still have to do i think i can do a tesla charger now that's 10 kilowatts baby on board and um so we've got a target rich environment and um we got 14,500 square feet of uh space here and i'm down to walking around in a circle and 225 feet of it because of all this stuff so come and get it um and i don't really want to hear a whole lot about it um but anyway colin thanks for um working through that he's actually had it turning a motor and um flashed the thing we know how this works um it's just that for months we didn't care very much yeah as soon as i did it i don't care right he had it turning and i believed him and so yeah but uh believe it or not my uh azure software on a laptop uh the laptop got stolen and i've got all the software on the forum but yep it's just i gotta bring that down and get out a kvasser can thing the only thing that will flash them is a kvasser leaf light because that's what they use there's the song how they have their software written so um it it's uh i never did do anything about it and uh and he agreed to come down and play battery with me but while he's here would you bring your laptop and your uh software and show me how to do this because i don't remember yeah it's been a while since any of us had to do it so we're gonna flash these and uh and move them out uh so put one on each wheel they're cheap at half the price or twice the price and we're gonna get rid of them