Well, work has progressed at speed this weekend with the batteries. By yesterday afternoon I'd wired up all the connectors to the loom (BMS side) and had installed it in the car. (That wasn't fun).
By mid afternoon I'd soldered up some of the wires to the back:
I probably stopped last night about 9pm but things continued this morning (sadly I wasn't ready to take the car to the Microcar show and had to press on as I wanted the car to use tomorrow!)
The BMS fitted a treat beneath the seat in the space which originally was taken up by the capacity meter (Booboo, if you ever do this to yours you'll probably remove your capacity meter anyway). I had to drill one extra hole to mount it all.
In a desperate last leg, I finally got all those temperature and voltage sense wires all connected up, along with the shunt wires, relay controls (I had to install a relay inside the transformer box for the charger so the BMS could turn the charger off when it reached the correct voltage) it ended up looking pretty good.
I'm glad the flying spaghetti monster heard my prayers though, as it all seemed to come off quite nicely.
After a quick cup of tea when Kelvin popped by he witnessed the car's first official charge with Liions in place. And lo!.... drum rolls....
Kate kept an eye on the voltages with the serial cable from the BMS going into an old laptop running a terminal program. It was working!
The laptop is only used to datalog while charging. When the car is driving I use a tiny LCD display I installed which keeps me abreast of the battery state of charge and remaining time before it's empty (at the current discharge).
With only two hiccups (one caused by wiring the relay across the mains not the output of the right part of the transformer and one incorrectly wired relay I'm quite happy. I had over forty cables in the end which were soldered and crimped in position. I'm glad it all works!
Stay tuned for some tests tomorrow!
Nikki.