Battery upgrade for Giant Explore

[MartinDK]

Hi,

I have this Giant Explore with a 400Wh battery.

https://www.giant-bicycles.com/int/explore-eplus-xc-gts-2016

Battery is showing it’s age so I found an eBay battery with lagrer capacity (17ah).

Problem is that there is a 3rd wire comming from my original battery. When disconnecting that wire the display do not display battery status the correct way (battery status blinks etc). Bike runs fine though.

What Can be done here to make this work with an eBay chips battery? Original Giant battery i double the price and lower capacity of the eBay thing.


Martin

 

[amberwolf]

Problem is that there is a 3rd wire comming from my original battery. When disconnecting that wire the display do not display battery status the correct way (battery status blinks etc).

That is probably a communication wire, sending data from the battery's BMS to the display. If you don't have an identical BMS in the new battery, then the display has nothing to get the data from.

You could try to decode the signal being sent to the display, and setup an Arduino or other MCU to monitor the new "generic" battery's status, and create the same signal to send to the display that the original did, but that's pretty complex.

It is probably easier (and cheaper) to get a basic wattmeter with remote shunt and install the shunt between the battery and the controller, and the display on the handlebars. It isn't the ideal thing, as it adds more stuff on your bars, but it would still give you the battery status, and not have to be an engineering project. :/


It's possible the wire is a simpler signal, like a simple voltage range, but you'd have to measure it with a voltmeter (preferably an oscilloscope in case it's a digital signal) at different states of charge of your original battery, to find out.


Failing all that, you *might* be able to move the original BMS to the new battery, to keep the functionality, but that may not work for various reasons (and would leave you unable to use the old battery without moving the BMS back to it when you needed to do so).