I am sure he will reply. He has probably gone to bed . In England it was 10:30 (ish) PM when you posted this. You know how his next video is going to go.."Good Morning All! I seem to have messed up when I was measuring that red wire for current!..." :-) That wire in the end of the clip DEF caused the random reading. Good Call!! It's OK Julian! We know you are looking through your viewfinder. Anyone could have missed that. You need to get that monitor setup. The 4 meter display should be awesome! Cheerio!
How hard is it to use a multimeter and probe each cell pair? You have quite a bit of equipment but no multimeter? Sorry for sounding harsh but this is the second video where all the mystery could be solved with a simple voltmeter. Just measure the voltage of all the cells!
I recall that you have a number of INA219 voltage current meters. Maybe passing each leg through the INA219 of the balancer for reading of voltage, current and direction?
Thanks for this video :) I'm really glad to see you doing these tests, I bought one of these balancers hoping it would work on my 120AH LiFePo4 battery, but until I am able to charge and discharge it, it's not any use. I feel i'll be way too small for that anyway. Getting together the kit to do this is proving rather expensive....... I picked up a 5A version of this board on ebay and again waiting to test. Ordered a 4 cell 18650 holder so will conduct the same experiments as you with this larger unit, I'm hoping for good things. There is a useful unit by ISDT called BattGO that's an 8s meter/balancer designed for RC use that might be less unwieldy than all the separate volt meters. Thanks again :)
Have to say it's pointless doing this until you actually have voltmeters on each cell. You have an ISDT charger somewhere which shows cell voltages, use that as well? Make an arduino voltage logger and you can graph the behaviour of all the cells over time.
The meter input 0V/GND and the meter power supply input 0V/GND are connected together internally in the meter... So unless you like exploding things, it’s best to use separate batteries.
Lol. Thats true. My girlfriend came in while i was playing with my super capacitors, she said "IS THAT A BOMB?" i was laughing so hard i couldn't talk to tell her no its not.
Once I went to a bank with a hard disk packed in antistatic bag in my hand, so it was half transparent. Worried looks on security guys face were priceless.
Hi Julian, can you please do a video of how to make a fully protected 4s2p pack with this kind of balancing and all the protection for portable use. that would be amazing.
I've been looking on ebay for a battery system like that but no luck - I guess it truly is proprietary! Perhaps the popularity of your videos will encourage counterfeits!
Did you ever make the followup video to this one? Will Prowse seems to think these balancers aren't actually transferring power to the lower voltage cell, but rather just automatically bleeding the higher voltage cells through a resistive load on the board. I'd love to see an out of balance pack raise the voltage of the lowest voltage cell using one of these balancers.
This is seen in this video, this particular one appears to be boosting the dodgy cell if you look at the voltage readout. However this board isn't typical, this sort of topology is more complicated.
What happened to your Ryobi multimeters?? why not use them instead of frying your brain trying to speculate what's going on?? or you think the title/video would attract more attention/views this way??
Because the 0V lead of the meter is connected to the battery minus of the meter module. With one battery all the 0V leads are connected together, so you can't connect them to different cells. The best you could do is measure the voltage at each junction from the most negative point and subtract the results. Or use isolating DC-DC converters.
Those AD584 aren't much in the Precision department. + - 5mV out of the box if you have the H version. Only real good thing they have going for them is they're constant. I have two of the beast but no way to measure what they are really putting out. Need someone with a Agilent or some other calibrated meter to find out some day..
@@JulianIlett Yep and understand. I would still like to find someone with a Calibrated meter to see what I do in fact have here some day. These new Cheapo Meters are amazingly accurate compared to what we had to play with back in the days.
@@pulesjet especially when you consider it's done with a resistor divider and an STM8S003 which has a 10-bit ADC, and a cheap 3v3 LDO as reference.. lots of oversampling
that is gezellig ! (Dutch word untranslatable into english but meaning something like sociable perhaps) translate.google.com/?rlz=1C1CHNG_nlNL360NL360&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=nl&client=tw-ob#auto/en/gezellig
You think that's a mess! I have over 1600 cells, I'm trying to get in packs of 100, paralleled, for 7s, bank. That can easily be upped to 14s for a 48v system upgrade. They are 90% LG cells , from 2400-2900 mah. New old stock, the rest are 22f Samsung, with a few 2600 Samsung çells, anything below 2200 are used for other projects, like usb power banks, I have built several, with 2000 mah, to 25000 mah! At the battery, I'm not sure the effiencey, but I dread soldering these, I'm working on a spot welder, I just need to wind the transformer, I found the wire I used was CCA garbage!! 1/0 but it gets soo hot its untouchable, I thought about tapping into my 120v wire feed welder, connect my controller and SSR, to the transformer based welder, I just need to find some bad cells to test it on, I need to get it figured before the days get Short, offgrid requires lots of battery in winter, the lead acid Bank can be used for backup!! Any advice? The timmer I have has a short pulse, so short the led doesn't COMPLETELY light up, its just a dim flicker, it just says 0.001-0.1 sec. Not sure the time scale, it will not work with a mechanical relay on the fastest setting, the relay doesn't have time to make!! Do you think the welder idea would just burn the cells ¿? Good day!!
For future reference Julian, "greeny-blue" has an official name, and it's "aqua." This has been a public service announcement on behalf of pedants everywhere. ;)
To take current readings in each balance circuit you could use several hall effect sensors. www.pololu.com/category/118/current-sensors These can interface with an Arduino and then display the currents on a Serial monitor or a LCD screen. The linked assembled modules are quite pricey but you could have a single board made by that sponsor. What is it? Oh yea JLCPCB. I have used them for some boards and they are good quality. :)
Jesus Christ, JULIANNNNNNN, don’t you know that DC clamp meter is a myth 😬😬😬😬😬😬 You can measure DC current by clamping a coil or a clamp around a wire but in a very controlled connection 🤨🤨🤨🤨😉
Yeah, I was wondering if he was using that mode correctly. Most I've seen require that you put the meter in place, stop the current, then put it in the current mode (or hit a button to calibrate), then energize and read.
Hill's Workbench , the clamp must be very accurately in right angle to the wire, wire must be exactly in the centre of the clamp ring, any adjacent live wire can effect on the measurement because on DC current mode the signal generator in the meter produces a magnetic field in the clamp and it measures the change to that field which I don’t know more about it 😂, and any live wire will interfere to the measurement, briefly it is absolutely different story from AC current measurements which we easily hang the clamp on the wire.
"Ze suspect was clearly building a beumb in his workshop, and intending to post a video of eet on RUclips. Eet ees very fortunate we caught heem in time."
Because you have your green wire partially in the clamp when measuring the red wire amps. 12:16
That was the first thing I saw.
Yes!
I am sure he will reply. He has probably gone to bed . In England it was 10:30 (ish) PM when you posted this. You know how his next video is going to go.."Good Morning All! I seem to have messed up when I was measuring that red wire for current!..." :-) That wire in the end of the clip DEF caused the random reading. Good Call!! It's OK Julian! We know you are looking through your viewfinder. Anyone could have missed that. You need to get that monitor setup. The 4 meter display should be awesome! Cheerio!
If 2 and 4 put current into 3 then they will discharge a bit and be less than 1, so 1 will put power into 2.
1-2 lights up because power is going from 2-3, and so lowering the voltage of 2
How hard is it to use a multimeter and probe each cell pair? You have quite a bit of equipment but no multimeter? Sorry for sounding harsh but this is the second video where all the mystery could be solved with a simple voltmeter. Just measure the voltage of all the cells!
I recall that you have a number of INA219 voltage current meters. Maybe passing each leg through the INA219 of the balancer for reading of voltage, current and direction?
Yeah, there's a triple version of the INA219 - I could hook it up to an Arduino and a little OLED :)
When you put the clamp meter on that red wire, you had the black wire caught in the clamp aswell. Probably canceled each other out.
Green wire sorry, not the black.
1->2 is maybe caused by 2 discharging more rapidly to charge 3. I thing they are all converging to the weak cells
It looks like some sort of contraption from a dodgy 70s sci-fi movie - only without the CRT screens.
If only you had a device that could show a continuously-updating rolling graph of four different voltages on a handy little screen.
Thanks for this video :)
I'm really glad to see you doing these tests, I bought one of these balancers hoping it would work on my 120AH LiFePo4 battery, but until I am able to charge and discharge it, it's not any use. I feel i'll be way too small for that anyway. Getting together the kit to do this is proving rather expensive.......
I picked up a 5A version of this board on ebay and again waiting to test. Ordered a 4 cell 18650 holder so will conduct the same experiments as you with this larger unit, I'm hoping for good things.
There is a useful unit by ISDT called BattGO that's an 8s meter/balancer designed for RC use that might be less unwieldy than all the separate volt meters.
Thanks again :)
as 2 trasfers power to 3, it's voltage drops and 1 has to transfer power to 2 to keep them balanced.
You had the green wire pinched. I'm never letting you defuse a bomb if you're going to snip two wires at once. :P
That wire should be Blue!!
Have to say it's pointless doing this until you actually have voltmeters on each cell.
You have an ISDT charger somewhere which shows cell voltages, use that as well?
Make an arduino voltage logger and you can graph the behaviour of all the cells over time.
I did similar with my ISDT BG 8S. Simple, tidy, did the business.
whenever the third light comes on, the voltage on the meter slightly dropped. it seems it is actually transferring charge from 3 to 4
I’m sure you can use just one battery to power all of the meters as that won’t effect the read out since it’s a separate connection
The meter input 0V/GND and the meter power supply input 0V/GND are connected together internally in the meter...
So unless you like exploding things, it’s best to use separate batteries.
It looks interesting. Just dont carry that around in public..LOL!!
needs a big display counting down the mAh ;)
santiago vindell looks Explosive 💥💥
Lol. Thats true. My girlfriend came in while i was playing with my super capacitors, she said "IS THAT A BOMB?" i was laughing so hard i couldn't talk to tell her no its not.
Once I went to a bank with a hard disk packed in antistatic bag in my hand, so it was half transparent. Worried looks on security guys face were priceless.
@@pvc988 you mean the security guards that load the bags of cash into the truck??.. arent those guys armed??
Hi Julian, can you please do a video of how to make a fully protected 4s2p pack with this kind of balancing and all the protection for portable use. that would be amazing.
I've been looking on ebay for a battery system like that but no luck - I guess it truly is proprietary! Perhaps the popularity of your videos will encourage counterfeits!
Did you ever make the followup video to this one? Will Prowse seems to think these balancers aren't actually transferring power to the lower voltage cell, but rather just automatically bleeding the higher voltage cells through a resistive load on the board. I'd love to see an out of balance pack raise the voltage of the lowest voltage cell using one of these balancers.
This is seen in this video, this particular one appears to be boosting the dodgy cell if you look at the voltage readout. However this board isn't typical, this sort of topology is more complicated.
What happened to your Ryobi multimeters?? why not use them instead of frying your brain trying to speculate what's going on?? or you think the title/video would attract more attention/views this way??
Great info here, what is it you're using to charge the pack ?
"Good afternoon all, I have my....... _THIS._ "
Yep, sounds about right.
I don't understand why each of your four voltmeters could not be supplied by a single 9V battery.
Because the 0V lead of the meter is connected to the battery minus of the meter module. With one battery all the 0V leads are connected together, so you can't connect them to different cells. The best you could do is measure the voltage at each junction from the most negative point and subtract the results. Or use isolating DC-DC converters.
nophead you are completely correct but Joe would have had a more memorable time had he tried wiring it up with lipos
Those AD584 aren't much in the Precision department. + - 5mV out of the box if you have the H version. Only real good thing they have going for them is they're constant. I have two of the beast but no way to measure what they are really putting out. Need someone with a Agilent or some other calibrated meter to find out some day..
Absolute values aren't really important here. I just need all the voltmeters to read the same.
@@JulianIlett Yep and understand. I would still like to find someone with a Calibrated meter to see what I do in fact have here some day. These new Cheapo Meters are amazingly accurate compared to what we had to play with back in the days.
@@pulesjet especially when you consider it's done with a resistor divider and an STM8S003 which has a 10-bit ADC, and a cheap 3v3 LDO as reference.. lots of oversampling
@@DrTune Yep, My cheapo Mastek metter is better then 0.7% accuarte gurranteed. Actually best I can figure it's pretty damn close to 0.1%..
where can I find a lovely little voltmeter like that?
Is it possible to adjust your volt meter at the back for better accuracy? As I have some that have a potentiometer for adjustment.
Not on this one - looks like it's adjusted via the programming header :)
You adjust the accuracy by buying one that costs more
This balancer transfer in both directions
why no Arduino nano and oled display voltmeters?
Hi Julian where did you get the precision circuit board from or can you post a link to it
Mike
I found that to be very enlightening.
Do active balancers like this also work for charging?
Interesting work, shame you don't have another device capable of reading voltage. :(
This might be one of those powerbanks which you don't want to take to airplane with you on next holiday...
This seven segment meter buying link please
just in time to watch your video before Seon time :) 15 minutes later: pretty interesting ! I wonder how do you know if the balancer is any good ?
I'll be there at Seon time :)
that is gezellig ! (Dutch word untranslatable into english but meaning something like sociable perhaps) translate.google.com/?rlz=1C1CHNG_nlNL360NL360&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=nl&client=tw-ob#auto/en/gezellig
Anyone know where he gets those battery connectors (holder components) that he's using?
I probably should not be watching this in an airport, at least based on the thumbnail, but here I am...
what diodes did you use ?
You think that's a mess!
I have over 1600 cells, I'm trying to get in packs of 100, paralleled, for 7s, bank. That can easily be upped to 14s for a 48v system upgrade. They are 90% LG cells , from 2400-2900 mah. New old stock, the rest are 22f Samsung, with a few 2600 Samsung çells, anything below 2200 are used for other projects, like usb power banks, I have built several, with 2000 mah, to 25000 mah! At the battery, I'm not sure the effiencey, but I dread soldering these, I'm working on a spot welder, I just need to wind the transformer, I found the wire I used was CCA garbage!! 1/0 but it gets soo hot its untouchable, I thought about tapping into my 120v wire feed welder, connect my controller and SSR, to the transformer based welder, I just need to find some bad cells to test it on, I need to get it figured before the days get Short, offgrid requires lots of battery in winter, the lead acid Bank can be used for backup!! Any advice? The timmer I have has a short pulse, so short the led doesn't COMPLETELY light up, its just a dim flicker, it just says 0.001-0.1 sec. Not sure the time scale, it will not work with a mechanical relay on the fastest setting, the relay doesn't have time to make!! Do you think the welder idea would just burn the cells ¿? Good day!!
I think it would give more bang for buck with a dial gauge on each cell and whatever you do dont cut the red wire.
For future reference Julian, "greeny-blue" has an official name, and it's "aqua."
This has been a public service announcement on behalf of pedants everywhere. ;)
Not cyan then?
@@Mark1024MAK Cyan would be a particular shade of aqua, I believe. :) It seems to me that it has more blue than green.
Julian snaps and builds this device hahaha
One display, and many switches. No need for a bunch of displays.
To take current readings in each balance circuit you could use several hall effect sensors.
www.pololu.com/category/118/current-sensors
These can interface with an Arduino and then display the currents on a Serial monitor or a LCD screen.
The linked assembled modules are quite pricey but you could have a single board made by that sponsor. What is it? Oh yea JLCPCB. I have used them for some boards and they are good quality. :)
Did you get these components from "BANG" Good? ;-)
Could you reverse engineer it?
I'would love to understand how those works!
Ahmed Mohamed would be proud of making that.
Ah, the kid whose parents tried to sue the school for $15 million.
@@Okurka. Tried, and failed, to sue just about everybody but..... it was never about the money
were is the bomb squad..! it looks the part
did anyone till you not to mix batteries?
I think around 1,000 people have told be not to mix cells. I'll still do it :)
Jesus Christ, JULIANNNNNNN, don’t you know that DC clamp meter is a myth 😬😬😬😬😬😬
You can measure DC current by clamping a coil or a clamp around a wire but in a very controlled connection 🤨🤨🤨🤨😉
Yeah, I was wondering if he was using that mode correctly. Most I've seen require that you put the meter in place, stop the current, then put it in the current mode (or hit a button to calibrate), then energize and read.
Hill's Workbench , the clamp must be very accurately in right angle to the wire, wire must be exactly in the centre of the clamp ring, any adjacent live wire can effect on the measurement because on DC current mode the signal generator in the meter produces a magnetic field in the clamp and it measures the change to that field which I don’t know more about it 😂, and any live wire will interfere to the measurement, briefly it is absolutely different story from AC current measurements which we easily hang the clamp on the wire.
a good excuse to buy a 4 channel Rigol...;-)
what would Inspector Clouseau, think that was.... :o
"Ze suspect was clearly building a beumb in his workshop, and intending to post a video of eet on RUclips. Eet ees very fortunate we caught heem in time."
Do you have an email address ?
Don't bring that thing near an airport or government building, then again your not in the US so maybe nobody would care.
Scamscum cells. Definitely one of them is dodgy. Completely normal.