Adaptto Mini-E/Max-E Owner's Thread

[madin88]

I repaired the connection. My throttle is still cutting out, I have to repair that too. Occasionally I get a !BMS! error, which leads me to believe that connector is flaky too. I have concluded the connectors on the Max-E are pretty poor in quality.

good to see you got one problem fixed. if you leave the BMS disconnect, do you still get the error?

the small 4-pin connector for throttle and brake seems to be poor quality. on mine the GND connection was bad, but i guess Adaptto buys them like they are (complete with wires). the other connectors are good Imo.

what i also noticed is the solder joints from the wires going into the display could be made better, and the adhesive foil with buttons does not stick very well on the display case. it makes a bump over the edge below the screen again and again and this may cause water can flow inwards. thats what i have seen on a very new controller with display V6.

btw, thanks for sharing pics. on some it looks like there is protective coating on the brain board. can you say more about this?

Also, the new firmware will have support for PAS. But DC-DC mode will only be available in the unlocked version.

Nice. do you know where the PAS sensor will be connected to?

im now considering updating to the latest firmware version to get some new features, like the anti-theif,10k thermistor, updated charge screen etc etc.and hopefully to fix the glitch with the charge.
but am not 100% sure its going to work with no issues :|
anybody out there flashed the latest version and had any trouble?
any feedback much appreciated

RC9d:
when doing autodetect, the motor suddenly starts to run very rough when it wants to spin up from slow to fast -> as far as i know this should have been fixed in this firmware, but unfortunately not!
antithief did not work properly -> turn wirerphc off, let the wheel spin free a few seconds (motor kV will change), turn it on again. this will make it work like it should.

 

[Metallover]

When I leave the BMS disconnected, I do get the error. I only get the !BMS! error maybe 1 in 50 powerups, and powering down/reconnecting fixes the issue, so I'm not too worried about it.

I am on V1-RC8F firmware. I may look into upgrading the firmware this week.

Looking at how I have my wires mounted, my suspension travel could have pulled that wire tight.. If so, no wonder it broke! It doesn't look obvious, but I'm giving that wire a bit more slack now.

There is a conformal coating on the board. You have to scrape it off in order to probe anything. Be careful doing this, the board is fragile! Especially going after little vias it would be easy to scrape a trace right off. I wonder if it would be easier to burn off the coating with an iron..

Additionally the plug I broke/fixed had potting material inside to protect the solder joints and reduce strain on the wires. I had to scrape all that away before I soldered my wires back on. I put some hot glue back in.

I am curious how many layers the brain board is. I feel like it could be 4 layers, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was more than that.

 

[crea2k]

madin88 , the coating is like a horrible varnish, its a complete nightmare, as if you want to test any components you have to remove it first, and replacing components is even more fun as I ended up detail cleaning the area with isopropanol to get it off otherwise it would contaminate the solder and flux once it got hot, it smells and looks just like the sort of varnish that you would paint on a bit of wood, not like your usually green or blue coloured epoxy coating that a lot of boards have on.

Metallover , good to see you got yours working, you dodged a bullet there, as you could have ended up sending it back to Russia argh. The BMS is a seriously temperamental piece of crap, I have taken mine out for the time being and only plug it in when charging as iv been some long distance stuff just lately and need the extra power and it seems to get quite warm after a ride so I presume its swallowing quite a bit of power. The !BMS! warning can show up for several reasons :
1, its not plugged in and you have it enabled
2, its not configured correctly
3, emi from the power lines / halls is interfering with the tx/rx signal on heavy regen / acceleration
4, You have an old version of the firmware where it was even more flak
5, You have a bad connection at one end of the cable

I had similar problems with tight cables with my hall sensors, I think the wires going into the box were too tight as they stopped working once and it was where the connector went into the box from the swing arm, this also happened with my display at the same place, iv since replaced all the cabling and so far so good.

 

[crea2k]

@metallover
good to hear you got a couple things sorted.

i notice the BMS error signal can be perhaps caused by glitch in older versions of firmware, although, i have the old RC7b version and so far no issues with that.
i think int was mentioned here on the russian forum...http://electrotransport.ru/ussr/index.php?msg=316466


the only issue iv had so far has been that sometimes(more often lately)after starting charge for a minute or so,the charge current will ramp back down low or even off, well before the battery is full. this can be fixed by re-starting the charge(turning the psu off and on again)and its back to normal again

could be fault of my settings in the charge setup,suply v drop etc. or(less likely) the psu, so not sure if its the controller or not at this stage....

im now considering updating to the latest firmware version to get some new features, like the anti-theif,10k thermistor, updated charge screen etc etc.and hopefully to fix the glitch with the charge.
but am not 100% sure its going to work with no issues :|
anybody out there flashed the latest version and had any trouble?
any feedback much appreciated


good to see they have been working quite hard on improving it the firmware, with all the updates so far.

From what iv read this is due to the vdrop not being set high enough, try 5volts and go from there

 

[crea2k]

I got my Max-E working finally!!

It turns out I had a bad connection in the hall sensor/temp sensor connector on my Max-E.

I opened up the controller and saw nothing was blown up. All of what I believe were the protective resistors all measured the same. I plugged it into the bike and lone behold, when I applied 0V or 5V to the three hall inputs straight on the PCB, they all worked!

I repaired the connection. My throttle is still cutting out, I have to repair that too. Occasionally I get a !BMS! error, which leads me to believe that connector is flaky too. I have concluded the connectors on the Max-E are pretty poor in quality.











Where that plug comes into the Max-E. Red=5V Black=GND purple=temp sensor green,yellow,orange = 3 hall inputs. Note the three resistors "318" I believe are the protective resistors. Crea2k pointed them out to me.




As a EE student, I love the design of the controller!

Whats wrong with your throttle ?

 

[Allex]

Are you sure that you are using the BMS right?

"It is better to balance the cells when they are fully charged.
Say that your highest cells are 4.17 and the lowest ones are 4.12 at full charge. In this case you need to balance them. Inside BMS menu, you set "balancing to 4.12, save it and exit, after this your BMS board will discharge the higher cells(4.17) down to the lowest (4.12) Inside the infographic menu you will see that status changed, from Battery OK to Balancing.
Why is it better to balance at a top charge? Simply because batteries dont hold so many WHs between 4.1 and 4.2V. In result the above balance process can only take a few hours instead of few days. This time depends of course on how big your battery is.

If you don want it to balance your pack, set the balancing to 4.2 because your voltage never exceeds this value during a charge."

 

[Offroader]

Allex, how well does the Max-E balance the cells?

Like how long would it take to charge to 4.10 with balancing vs without balancing the cells? Are we talking a significant difference?

Another question, if I set to balance charge my back to 4.10, will it be able to hit exactly each cell at 4.10, or will it charge until the highest cell is 4.10 and than discharge to the lowest cell?

I know it depends on the pack size some of the question but maybe you can give me a general idea on your pack.

Thanks

 

[ridethelightning]

+1
the finer details of the bms operation are very interesting for me too, and infomation is thin on the ground.

 

[liveforphysics]

18 of those monster to247 fets.

That is a power stage capable of smoking perhaps all bicycle hubmotors made.

We are living in the hayday of ebike hotrodding.

 

[Allex]

Madin: About PAS, Sorry I do not know yet.

Offroader, it balance pretty damn well, down to millivolts, here is my cells, I stopped the balance after hitting 0,002V in difference.
BMS is capable of draining around 3Ah in 24h. So worst case - If you have a big pack that is extremely out of balance it could take several days to complete a balance. In this case it is better to charge up the lagging cells with a R/C charger and after that balance the small change. Typical balance, if I have a drift of 0,04V takes 1-3 hours. But in normal cases, if you have a healthy battery you only need to balance your pack from time to time. Like with 18650 cells, maybe once per 1-3 month. If you have lipo probably once a week. Greg could probably chime in here with his LiPo experience

To make BMS work effectively, you have to set your charge voltage a bit higher than your Balance voltage.
If you set your charge voltage to 4,15 and Balance at 4.10 it will start to balance as soon a cell hits 4.11V. So charger is pushing the cells up and the BMS will try to discharge it to the given Balance threshold.
What Else… The controller powers BMS, so the controller needs to be on while balancing.

 

[crea2k]

I balance my packs probably every 2-3 weeks,I don't ride every day though, probably only one evening a week and then at weekends, iv taken my packs out of the bike and balanced with with 3x rc chargers, as they seem to work a bit quicker. I think it might be due to my have a lot of my packs in parallel, im not totally convinced that the bms can see the individual cells, so I balance with the rc charger more out of a safety measure more than anything else.

 

[Allex]

Like with all batteries with build in BMS, you cannot monitor the cells in parallel group as they share same voltage, so what you can see and monitor is every serie in your big pack. If one cell goes shenanigans this affect the hole parallel string and the bad cell will drag down the rest and you will see this on the display. This is really useful, because you can understand why you pack starts to behave abnormally - something you don't see on the regular BMS boards inside the batteries.

 

[Offroader]

Thanks for the info Alex,

I guess time shouldn't matter that much for balancing because you can leave your controller on and balancing all night.

I assume the Max-E BMS works like a battery medic, in that it can only discharge cells to balance.


What is nice about balance charging is that you can have a lot of bad cells and still use the pack for a long time with those bad cells. I remember I had like 4 or 5 bad lipo cells that eventually needed to be replaced, but since I balance charged it wasn't a problem.

 

[Allex]

Well, all almost all BMSes work like that, they only discharge and not top of the cells. So nothing different with this one. Only thing that it does not have is it's own powerstage so it does not "shut down" the pack when you reach a limit. It only says to controller to not send power to motor. So you you are this situation, you can always decrease your limit and still get home.

 

[madin88]

i yet have no bms and also do not charge with the coil (i charge with a normal charger through controller), but i wonder how HVC, max Charge voltage and single Cell voltage value act to each other?
What i know is HVC does cut off regen and i love to set this value a bit higher (1-2V) so i can use the e-brake also with a fully charged battery. If only charged to 4,1V there is enough room for this.

 

[ridethelightning]

thats a good tip maddin.
i havnt thought of that before, and so have only been using my disc brakes to decend the big hill where live when fully charged.
i also normally only charge to 4.1v

 

[crea2k]

Im not sure if google translated it right but im sure one of the regen settings accounts for this problem, so instead of using the current for regen it instead applies current to the motor trying to put it into reverse. Im not sure if this has been added yet or if they were just talking about it, it may be in there now, but not sure without playing with it at full charge.

 

[ridethelightning]

ah yes. the reverse thrust feature/active regen
i think its in the later firmware versions

 

[Allex]

Single Cell voltage value simply protect the cells not going below LVC when you use BMS while your total pack voltage may be above the set value.

 

[crea2k]

There is now another firmware update available :

v1-RC9e - Fixed bug sensorless operation at low speeds when the system is wire r phc. On older firmware from the start of the controller sometimes gave high current that triggers the hardware protection and shock in the motor. - Mode 2WD: pererebotan completely, with old firmware is not compatible. Slave controller now uses the same profile as the main. The speed limit of the main controller is betrayed slave. - To account for the current consumption of the second controller in 2WD mode, you need to install the slave controller traction setup -> slave No to "0000" will also make recovery and back up on the slave controller. Regeneration is disabled on the slave controller disabling the regen, and back up - the main controller option "traction settings" -> "2WD backwd" - mode DCDC converter is now available only in the unlocked firmware

http://adaptto.ru/firmware/v1-RC9e/

 

[crea2k]

Not sure why they have made the dc/dc converter unlocked only now for, as that was a feature before, very odd .

 

[Allex]

This is due to a few cases where controller burned when users used this function the wrong way. So they leave this option to experts only.

 

[ridethelightning]

how exactly does the dc/dc converter work, and in which firmware version is it in the locked firmware?
where does the controller have the dc out connection? or is there a separate unit sold for this purpose?

 

[crea2k]

I think you use the charging coil or something like that.

 

[xenodius]

Yes, you use the charging coil and a load instead of a PSU.

I thought about rigging up a swappable unit to run a cheap battery-powered lawnmower off my pack that I saw at a garage sale, but it's not worth incorporating that into my bike. =)