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

[Offroader]

Agreed, the bms should mostly be for monitoring purposes only and use the voltage of the pack and not individual cells. This way there is less risk of it discharging the pack by an error.

With 18650 cells you really should hardly ever need to balance. Lipo packs are a bigger issue because those type of pouch cells get damaged easily and need balancing more often.

I wanted to add I dont know for sure yet how the adaptto bms drains the cells and it may not draw any current if the 4 prong connector is unplugged.

I will keep my eye on this and let you know what I find.

 

[bigbore]

Everyone has their own opinions based on their experiences, it's normal.
I have been using small 2-wheel electric vehicles since 2007 and my homologated mini-scooter is still using a 10S4P LiPo battery that I assembled in 2013 with an LVC of those developed by Methods based on the TC54 voltage detector.

I'm getting along very well with Adaptto's BMS and the other day I noticed how well my battery pack was balanced at the end of the charge. This is the 20S14P battery made with Sony VTC6 cells that I built in mid-2018 and now has more or less 25 cycles.

 

[madin88]

Does anyone have an idea bout this?

Has anyone disconnected their battery wire from the controller with the BMS connected and didn't have any issues?

I have wired an activ precharge circuit which turns off GROUND (negative supply) to the controller each time i turn off the bike after ride.
No issues so far, and also no issues after leaving the BMS connected for some month over the winter..

I never did let the BMS balance the battery as i have set "balacing V" a tick higher as the max charge voltage.
Drift after 2-3 years on 22s11p pack -> 6mV

 

[Offroader]

You are correct, with my BMS connected to my battery but with the controller disconnected from the battery and the BMS the voltage has not dropped on any of cells in about a week now.

 

[Lash]

Thought I'd make a post to help anyone else who may have a bung screen and replace it with another second hand unit.

I managed to buy an older second hand screen (green sides) and installed it on my '2015/2016' vintage max-e that has the black sides on the display.
Turns out they are compatible, the board is the same with the same components as far as I can tell - and says v6.

Some of the color codes of the wires are different though, so if you have to solder any off (like i did) then you will need to pay attention to the colors.

I was unsure if the firmware would be different or something like that, but all the firmware numbers etc appeared to be the same as before, so I can assume the firmware only affects / is stored inside the controller, and does not effect the display. I think the display stores display only related setting such as brightness etc.

Anyway a bit of a boring post but hopefully its useful for someone replacing their screen and are worried about incompatibilities. - They needn't be as far as I can see.

Now its time to replace my (surprsingly sturdy long lasting wuxing throttle) with a domino setup.

 

[ziltoid81]

With 18650 cells you really should hardly ever need to balance.

Only if theyre new.....got 15000 km on my Raptor battery out of samsung 25r and yes they drift more and more.
At some point the adaptto bms cant catch up with the drift and you have to do it manually from time to time.

 

[Allex]

One thing I noticed is that it seems that the BMS drains the 1st cell in each group.

If this happens then your BMS is prolly faulty.

 

[madin88]

Only if theyre new.....got 15000 km on my Raptor battery out of samsung 25r and yes they drift more and more.
At some point the adaptto bms cant catch up with the drift and you have to do it manually from time to time.

Impressive number of km
If a pack starts to drift, it usually means that one or more cells do self discharge to much compared to the other ones.
One reason for that could be that one or more cells in those groups with lower voltage do leak out electrolyte (from spot welding?), or the leakage current inside the cell itself becomes more and more due to normal aging process.
Another reason could be that due to initial differences in capacity, those groups always got discharged to a bit lower voltage and charged to a bit higher voltage each cycle compared to the other groups.

What was the average max charge and min discharge voltage, and did you abuse the pack?

 

[ziltoid81]

Martin its quite complicated.
With 15000km you have a variety of situations.
Sometimes i charge with 2kw, or at work (mainly) with 0,9, but i never ever discharged them to 2,5V.
At 95% of the time the cells are from 3,5 to 3,9V.
The first 5000km i had a max e and was draining the battery heavily, now im good with 8kw max.
One day i will measure the pack to point out bad cells.

I have another pack (10s8p) out of the famous sony us18650v3 for my bbs01 bike and after 4years and 20000km the drift was 0.002V..... i was impressed.
The pack never got balanced, never, the pack didnt had balance wires to this point, i soldered them after 20tkm to monitor the drift, but it wasnt there.

I often repair lipacks for friends and the cells behave at a wide spectrum.
Some drift like hell.
You cant say 18650 are like this or that.
In the end its just a form factor.

 

[Allex]

I have another pack (10s8p) out of the famous sony us18650v3 for my bbs01 bike and after 4years and 20000km the drift was 0.002V..... i was impressed.

This, if you are nice to them they will be nice to you back. Always use the cells under their recommended maximum power drain and you will be fine for years.

If 25r is rated at 20A this does not mean you will get away using them like that. 2/3 of that value or even half of it is much better.
Not only that, the cell layout does play a big role in the cells life cycle as well.
If you really want to take out the maximum amount then get ready to throw the pack away in 200 cycles or so.

 

[ziltoid81]

The 25r are 20s19p, now way i drained them to much.
These are short bursts anyway, all you guys with high power ebikes know this.
You cant go wot for long periods.
With 120A battery drain i have only 6A per cell max. and i never went above that if i remember.


They just behave different than other 18650s.

But with the adaptto bms i had funny behaviors during the journey anyway.

 

[bigbore]

You are having a strange behaviour with the firs cell always greater than the following 3.
I found out that using silicone wires on the 4S JST-XH connectors helps to relief the stress on the BMS.

 

[Allex]

The 25r are 20s19p,

Care to show us your cell layout and how you connected the main wires to the neg and pos?

 

[ziltoid81]

Its fine now, so its not related to any wiring or layout issues, i didnt change a thing on the battery.

Its the bms/setting related.
I got this pattern when i chose the balance v setting to low...... it developed over time back then.
Had this issue a year or 2 ago.
Maybe it was just MY bms..... who knows.

 

[Offroader]

I always have a good laugh when I see how that balanced.

 

[ziltoid81]

Now i can laugh too, but it wasnt funny when it occurred.....the drift only knew one direction...... it got worse and worse.

 

[Offroader]

I didn't balance my pack for almost 3 years, it was never balanced. Here is what the max-e reads.

I do know that 17th cell read a bit higher than all the others when I tested with my fluke.

 

[litespeed]

Looks like an excellent performing pack!

Proof in concept beats pen and paper every day of the week.

Tom

 

[Offroader]

Does anyone know if its normal to get a !BMS! error when for about 1 second when turning on the max-e? It seems to do it every time but goes away in a second and everything seems normal?

I

 

[litespeed]

That is normal.

Tom

 

[Ohbse]

Does anyone know if its normal to get a !BMS! error when for about 1 second when turning on the max-e? It seems to do it every time but goes away in a second and everything seems normal?

All of mine did exactly the same thing. It's just establishing comms to the BMS.

 

[jjluzuld]

Hello,

I am calling this again, cause two winters ago I was posting about my issue with max-e adaptto.
My problem with max-e is that when I leave bike outside for an hour and temp is around 0 or -1c.
After one hour I tried to turn on switch to start bike but adaptto didn't want to start, until i leave bike inside house for an hour or two.
Once I was using hairdryer to heat up a little bit adaptto display and controller itself and speed up a process of booting.
Then when adaptto gets booted again, I get completely reseted distance to 0.0Km, Cycles, i mean all of the statistics to zero, capacity of battery to 10ah. Than I have to go to settings and update back the capacity etc, and same circle again when bike feels cold...
Did anyone have similar issues with minus degrees? Or what could be the cause, any help I would appreciate.
Battery is LIPO 20s 84v 20Ah

Thanks

 

[bowers]

I tried connecting a PAS to my Mini-E for the first time today. Pretty sure the PAS is soldered correctly. (Red + | Yellow - | Blue signal)

I'm getting the HALLS! error message when starting the controller with the PAS connected and the throttle won't respond. Has anyone experienced this?

 

[Offroader]

Can someone explain how the BMS balances the cells? I didn't see any thing mentioned in the manual or any options on the display to balance the cells.

I'm not sure if its always balancing or if it only does it at certain times?

 

[kdog]

Pretty sure it balances when turned on, and, over the balance threshold voltage as set in BMS settings (adjustable ). 'Balancing'shows up on the display when you check the battery screen during this time.