Endless Sphere

Hey bro, Apologies, I only saw your pm today. ( how do you get the sphere to send an email when a post has been made to this thread??) You have 12.6 volts at the control board? Okay so the control board is seeing power. Can you tell if there is power at the mcu chip? Like, is it getting about 5 volt...

Sweet

Having trouble installing this - I'm on Windows 7 I followed the instructions for installation in first post as far as: "d) you will see two icons: the XPD program and the XPD icon." I don't see any icon - not either one. I do have the 10 folders: 0.1.0 0.2.0 0.2.1 ... 0.4.1 support ??? :) :lowbatt:...

Hi Storapa,
Lovely build you have here - please tell us you finished it?? I know it’s always the last ‘small’ jobs in a project which can take the most time...

Storapa

Great feedback, so glad it’s working for you

Neat video Andi. I charged my pack lately after it had sat over winter. I bulk charge and don’t use a bms. Cells were all at 4.13V except one, which was 4.14V. I discharged this one bank through a bulb for a few seconds - all good. Shipping to USA for the kit will be around 8 GBP. I finally invested...

A little testing will help us find out what has failed. If you can disconnect the gate wire between the two boards we can test if we have output from the control board. If you don't have a 'scope, next best thing is to try to light an led. Put and led in series with a resistor (200 ohms or so) and p...

All 6 pins are soldered, but the leftmost pin is the gate. It goes to the underside of the board where all of the SMT gate resistors are located. So chuffed to see folks results, thanks again all for posting. Just to say, after sales of 40 plus of these kits I haven't had any folks get in touch to s...

A builder in New York state (Lindley) has got in touch: Hello Paul, The reflow went fine, I used flat 24 ga sheet copper, 6mm wide, instead of round wire. I fired it up today and it works great with the default settings! The hardest part was building the cables. I'm using a single 85AHr RV battery. ...

+1 for kapton tape.
I work for a large defence company and we use it all the time. When building a wiring loom I will cover the wires at a junction with kapton tape. They are thus protected from heat damage when joining braided shielding over the junction using solder. It is tough stuff.

- 95AH 3 Year old car lead acid battery, still very "vital" ? could that be too strong ? No, it should fine I reckon. - 16mm² cables as weld and batteryclamp cables? should i double them to 32mm² ? Personally, I would double them up for a nice fat 32mm if you can. Notger @Storapa You got some nice ...

I nearly bought an a2b off eBay last month as they were at a greatly reduced price for some reason. Interesting to see the battery, 60 cells; I run 80 cells on my raleigh twenty, more than enough for my 36 mile commute.
Looking forward to seeing where you go with this.

Great photos folks, thanks for taking the time :) @valld 35ms sure seems a long time, I'm sure you would benefit from slotted nickel as Ron suggests, as all of the weld current is forced to go down and across the cell end and return on other side of the slot. Although I can't speak from experience o...

The MOSFETs are rated 24v but I wouldn't go anywhere near there. There is a voltage spike at every turn off event. Also, the TVS diodes I supply are dialled in for 12v lead acid.
What is Hilumin??

Hi notger, I did play around with car audio capacitors at early prototype stage. I had 2 Proel caps in parallel, a 2F and a 0.5F. Results were poor. They charged to 15v and then leaked. I never got a good weld. Texaspyro has some info in here somewhere. He found that most brands had a much smaller c...

This battery will blow your welder instantly. Try with 30 Ah instead of 180 and see if it fits you. I'm sure Okashira was using some kind of lithium battery as current source for the JP welder. Perhaps this is how he came to implement flyback diodes, which we have onboard here. I have never tried w...

Hey Andy,

Thanks for taking the time to do this neat little video. Looks like you have it nailed on one battery - must be a large one.

Best wishes, Paul.

Nice :) I'm not quite clear how you attached your electrodes to the ends of your cables? For myself, I wrapped a few turns of 22awg stranded wire around the electrode and cable, and then soldered this up and covered with heat shrink. The electrodes are normal copper wire - any larger than 5mm and yo...

^what he said.
Also bear in mind to come close but not over the holes for the 3 TVS diodes. You should be able to bridge the gap between TVS leg and busbar with solder. We don't rely on board foil to carry any heavy currents.

So far so good. The photo looks like you have a bit too much solder at the FET tab at this stage. You may want to take some of that away, so that when you add your copper wire runs next, you will be easily able to get the wire right up against those FET tabs. For your copper wire runs, use solid 2.5...

Cool, thanks for posting Darren.

As someone without too much electrical experience, I'm sure it will be helpful for others to look over your shoulder as you go along with any questions, problems, observations you may have.

Well, I reckon I'm proving what they say about the British not often capitalising on a good idea.. Seriously tho, I think that someone who is thinking of building their own battery has rather more than half the brain of a slug ! To put this together uses the same skills as a diy ebiker needs: it's a...

I have a few of the schottky diodes which I bought from aliexpress. I wanted to do some testing to see how they compare with the rather more expensive Vishay device. I took a scope shot of gate and drains for turn off of a 10ms pulse. The gate shape looks different from the above shots because this ...

Thank you both
New video is in 1st post now.

Hi folks, I found time over Christmas to do a layout on kicad for the power board. Tesseract should be happy - I got the shcottky and the TVS diodes all on the board. TVS's sit above the surface mount FETs. I finally gave it a proper run at the weekend and it seems to be working as it should with mi...