Doc's 24s LIPO charger balancer & quick connect

Doctorbass

100 GW
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Apr 8, 2007
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Quebec, Canada East
OK.. lets's talk about 24s lipo charger :mrgreen:

I finished my setup to balance charge my 24s 3p zippy packs.

The goal is to bulk charge using my 1700W Meanwell compact charger and to finish by balancing and charging the last 14 to 15Ah.

With all these balance connectors and wires and anderson connectors, the danger to make an error and make a plasma blast is high.. so i decided that for my first experience with lipo need to be safe!!

I decided to use a DB37 connector to connect all at the same time all 4x 6s and also the current connectors ( the charger is charging at max 3A per channel at 6s ( 50W) so the pins of these connector aer perfect ( between 3 and 5A depending on the coating on the pin) Gold afre rated 5A and i'm using them.

The battery have a female DB37 and the 200W turnigy 24s charger have the male DB37.

The conversion job was not as easy as i hoped.

ALOT OD SOLDER TO DO !! and since each of the 4 channel have 9 wires that connect to teh battery it's 36 wires total.

I used 3 foot of wires ( 4 x 9 wires AWG#18 cables) so the voltage of the balance monitoring will not have a big error while current pass thru the 18 gauge wires

pin1= negative of the first 6s pack
pin 2 to 6 = balance wires
pin 9 = positive of the first 6s pack

pin10=negative of the first 6s pack
....
..
.

up to pin 36

etc

NOW HOUSTON I got a big problem!!! :shock:

Stay on your chair...:

EVENTHOUGH THIS TURNIGY 4 x 6s CHARGER MEASURE INFINITE OHM BETWEEN ALL 4 individual 6s charger, and appear to be isolated... THEY ARE NOT !!!

in fact.. after i connected everything i had two charger indicating "broken connection" and error message when i tried to charge in 24s all 4 packs connected in serie!!!

I solved that but it took more time...

I know this 4 x 6s charger is in fact 4 individual charger desing in teh same casing. I decided to investigate on the 12V input section and found that it's just a parallel connection to all 4 chargers.

I cutted the traces that link all them and bought 4x 14.5V 5A power supply for 40$ total and connected all individual charger to one power supply.

Well.. after more than 11 hours of hard work i finally ahceived to make it work like i want.

and...
IT WORK GREAT !!!!

I can now monitor and balance anc finalize the charge of all the 24s lipo with safety!!! and monitoring!!


Coming soon: multiplexing the 4 bottons of each charger (16 total) to 4 botton total ( all botton in parallel ( insulated by a relay contact)

So once i'll press to the botton of the charger no 1, all charger no 2 3 and 4 will do the same thing!!

that will decrease again the chance of error on seting up the charger for the charge and make error between every of the 4 chargers.

I have pics as well:

and video coming soon!
 

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Kudos!!! we have now solved the problem. I am ready to take the plunge now 20s balance charging though a 25pin plug.

I imagine the turnigy 4x6 would do also? its cheaper........

Thanks Doc !!!! you are rock and roll now,
 
Yes a turnigy 4 x 6s will do that for 20s.. you can do 4 x 5s if you wish.. but you will need to insulate the 12V input of each 4 charger and use 4 individual power supply.

Here is another updated picture of the battery connector ( the one that show the 4 powerpole connectors:


REMEMBER: the wire 1 and 7 of the balance connector are independent as the positive and negative wire where the current pass.. the current is traveling thru the anderson pp30 connectors

YOUTUBE VID

[youtube]aqLwCllxIqI[/youtube]

Doc
 

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This is great stuff DoctorBass. Love the DB37 connector.

I've been considering doing this for a while, but wanted to see if HK would come up with a quad charger solution that had a higher output than 50w per channel.

Its a bit dissapointing you had to do use 4 seperate 12V input power supplies.

Hobby King has a new 35$ 200W 6s charger. Do you think that it would work if I would be using 4 of them with 4 seperate power supplies (meanwells) ?

That would make a decent 24s 800W charging solution
 
El_Steak said:
That would make a decent 24s 800W charging solution

Yes and it would work with 4 individual power supply.

Your new solution would make it a bit more expensive but that solution would be enough for fast charging. ( 4 time faster)

My goal was to balance charge the last Ah of the battery. i'm already using a 1700W meanwell psu for the 90% charge time.

Doc
 
Doc, Do you have the balancing connections from the Turnigy batteries connected in parrallel for the parrallel packs, since you have 24s, 3p.
Is this O.K. when discharging the whole pack under heavy load the balancing wires will carry any current difference between non matched cells(from aging). and these wires are thin gauge.
I wanted to do the same thing but this was my worry. what do you think.?
 
rlabib said:
Doc, Do you have the balancing connections from the Turnigy batteries connected in parrallel for the parrallel packs, since you have 24s, 3p.
Is this O.K. when discharging the whole pack under heavy load the balancing wires will carry any current difference between non matched cells(from aging). and these wires are thin gauge.
I wanted to do the same thing but this was my worry. what do you think.?

I thought also about that but the pack are well matched and the difference of voltage from one parallel pack to the next are very low so these balancing wires receive no real voltage difference that could create too high current thru them.

I just took 3 connector jst 7 pins male (from digikey) per 6s 3p parallel group all 3 connector pins are connected in parallel thru a little pcb with AWG20 wire "buss bar" and end with 6" of wire and a female 7 pin jst at the end to connect with the db37 harness.

At teh begining i wanted to open the end of each pack and solder busbar between all 3 parallel pack cell connectors but it was too complicated and teh risk of shorting something was too high. and keeping the original balance connector make the pack replacement easier.

Doc
 
Great work! :)
 
El_Steak said:
Doctorbass, what's the black stuff you are using to secure the balance leads to your JST connectors? Glue? Silicone?


Hot glue!.. simple, efficient and cheap! :wink: it can endure pretty well cold or hot ambiant temperature

Doc
 
Doc, if I wanted to simply Parallel two 6s packs together for 22.2V nominal @ 10AH, would I be able to charge one of these on each output of the stock charger? Gary said I could, but now I am worried. There will NOT be any series connection while hooked up to the charger ONLY parallel output leads and balance leads from each set of two packs. I understand this will take longer to charge but that is fine..
 
Whiplash said:
Doc, if I wanted to simply Parallel two 6s packs together for 22.2V nominal @ 10AH, would I be able to charge one of these on each output of the stock charger? Gary said I could, but now I am worried. There will NOT be any series connection while hooked up to the charger ONLY parallel output leads and balance leads from each set of two packs. I understand this will take longer to charge but that is fine..

Yes it will work. ands for parallelling charger output you DONT NEED TO INSULATE EACH OF THE CHARGER 12V INPUT. it can keep the original connections on the pcb.

for paralleling charger output , EACH CHARGER MUST be connected in parallel ONLY wne they have the same number of cells inm serie :wink:

Doc
 
Very nice indeed!!! Once again you show why you are 'The Man'......Could I Interest you in a barter?...... You build me one of these Turnigy charging systems (I pay for components, you supply skilled labor) and I will build you a very nice 'One Off' fiberglass enclosure that fits the frame Triangle of your Giant Downhill bike perfectly....(not that there is anything wrong with your aluminum one) :)
SK
 
Seriousknot said:
Very nice indeed!!! Once again you show why you are 'The Man'......Could I Interest you in a barter?...... You build me one of these Turnigy charging systems (I pay for components, you supply skilled labor) and I will build you a very nice 'One Off' fiberglass enclosure that fits the frame Triangle of your Giant Downhill bike perfectly....(not that there is anything wrong with your aluminum one) :)
SK

Hmmm VERY Interesting deal!!

I am poor fiberglass builder ( I never tried…)

Where do you live.. ( I just wonder about shipping..)
 
I have many years experience with fiberglass. I have worked on a car that will exceed 200mph at Bonneville next year. I live in Arkansas. You are probably more familiar with shipping charges than I am.
 
Hey Doc, do you know if this charger will charge at 4.15V? I tried looking through the manual and I have been told its better not to go to the full 4.2V for longevity of the batteries, but I can't figure out how to do it with this charger? Could I just use the LiLo setting instead? Its max volts is 4.1 and that would be fine with me but I am unsure if it will hurt the batts..

Thanks!

-Bryan
 
LiIo will be fine (its Li io, for Lithium-ion).

I think you can also recalibrate the charger to fool it in thinking that 4.15 is actually 4.20. Somebody posted a how to somewhere on the forum, but I don't remember where.
 
Great thank you for the help!
 
Thanks Doc !!! great information !

I was about to send you a PM but figured others may benefit from the answer if possible.

I unfortunately tried to charge single cells from the same pack, with 2 channels on this charger and since then they have quit working... i'm down to 1 working channel ont his 4x unit.

The display shows voltage up and down but no voltage changes on the cell level.. weird....
 
Ypedal said:
Thanks Doc !!! great information !

I was about to send you a PM but figured others may benefit from the answer if possible.

I unfortunately tried to charge single cells from the same pack, with 2 channels on this charger and since then they have quit working... i'm down to 1 working channel ont his 4x unit.

The display shows voltage up and down but no voltage changes on the cell level.. weird....


have you insulated each 12V input of the single chargers? with seperte psu?

doc
 
Hi Doc

Great setup it matches mine although mine is on a smaller scale, I use the Li ion setting and charge to 4.1V for pack longevity and they also balance much faster at 4.1V for some reason, for folks that dont know you go in to the user settings to select Li ion from Lipo, you cant manually adjust the Lipo termination voltage from the menu.

Biggest problem I have is with bad connections on these JST connectors :evil: I have changed them on some of the leads, I am at a point where I may solder them all the way from the batteries to the 37 pin connectors and ditch the JST all round.

Using my 30A charger I can charge from 50% in less than an hour, I can fit both charger and PSU in my back pack.

Cheers for sharing the video, its very clear and very interesting!! just love your bike also, not bad for a frock motor :twisted:
 
knoxie said:
Biggest problem I have is with bad connections on these JST connectors :evil: I have changed them on some of the leads, I am at a point where I may solder them all the way from the batteries to the 37 pin connectors and ditch the JST all round.

yeah.. these jst pigtail bought from hobbycity was all bad!!! the female plug were all loose!!! I fixed each single connector manually with a little screwdriver to push on the plate that is kind of spring loaded and that is made to apply a constant pressure on the male pin.

that solved the problem.. each change need to be made 24 times... eee sorry... 4 x 7 times!!

Doc
 
4.1 and 4.2V

Well.. when i charge the battery at 4.200V, it's when i balance them only.. balancing to higher voltage ensure You to keep cells well balanced at 4.1v too but it's more for safety. that ensure me that when i charge to 4.100V i have a gap of 100mW for the inbalance possibility.

the charge curve of each cell are not the same from one to another so I max charge at 4.1V for prolong teh battery life and balance to 4.200V to keep the max dynamic of Ah equal over all the voltage band i use ( 3.5V to 4.1V)=0.6V.

well.. not easy to explain... and translate that idea from french to english.. when in french you are not able to clarely explain that same idea!!! :oops:

I mean.. if you balance at 4.100V, it is possible that after that if you charge to 4.200V, all cells will not be at 4.200V.. some wil be higher and some will be lower... that's whi i balance to 4.200V so i'm sure that if the charge voltage increase a bit over the range, i know that at 4.200V they will be ok.

For sure with a charger balancer you dont need to care about.. in my case i bulk charge 4 time out of 5 so there is 4 time i dont balance or watch the HVC durig charging.. so 4.1V is safer to charge to too.

I'm still waiting to get that new V4 BMS from Gary!! that will solve all problems!!!
 
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