Comment by GhettoComputers
4 years ago
Can you explain how much of a difference it is from non state of the art equipment? I don’t know much about electronic vehicles, I assumed that it was just power regulators, and it could be done on hardware like charging through an advanced IC charger. Basically if you replace the chip with another one, what is the greatest cost?
Do you have that replacement might be mitigated through other means?
Do firmware updates matter? I know that there were projects to make a Bluetooth finder with non replaceable batteries not functional when the batteries were replaced, it was tile, it depended on waste, a replaceable battery that was locked, and became non functional to sell more product.
Do you see it being bricked in a forced update like the tiles? Are you sure it’s able to be tuned for the newer battery capacity, or do you see workarounds? I can see a switch that can change it to stock mAh cells to ensure the best compatible with the software, but you also lose efficiency through voltage lowering buck conversion.
The Bosch BMS is a little wonder of engineering, the packs less so. It has a 32 bit NXP CPU, a separate battery managing chip, a bunch of FETs, a DC DC convertor and a battery balancer and whole slew of safety measures (both sw and hw) in a 40 x 60 mm board.
It's one of the most, if not the most impressive BMS I've seen for its size. The packs are a different matter, the engineering of the rear carrier ones is mediocre, the frame mounted ones much better and the PowerTubes are much better still, but far less service friendly.
So far I have not found a way to fool the motor/controller into wanting to play ball with anything other than the genuine article on the other side of the CAN bus.
The battery firmware can be upgraded, but you don't really need to, it just woks. The higher range is not recognized (the battery still reports the Ah capacity of the battery type it shipped with), but the %age state-of-charge is accurate and that's enough to ride by without further monitoring (it's displayed separately, and you have to do a little bit of mental arithmetic to work out how many km you can still go).
There is no loss of efficiency, the batteries are at the same voltage as the originals (and that is something that would instantly cause the BMS to brick itself).