Increasing Voltage to 36V controller

thendless

1 mW
Joined
Jun 10, 2020
Messages
11
Hi, I was wondering if anyone can give me any advice on which resistor(s) I should be look at to replace if I want to increase the voltage to the board? I want to use my 12S battery at 50.4V instead of the current max of 42V for 10S. Using my multimeter on a handful of resistors I found that the resistor on the bottom left side, 1502 (beside D4) drops from 42V to 2.5V. Would changing this to a higher resistor value to account for the 8.4V increase be the way to go or am I barking up the wrong tree?

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While many controllers share general design characteristics, there's literally thousands of designs of controllers, so without at least knowing which specific controller model you have, no one is really going to know which specific parts you're referring to. (and only then if they have done this on that model).

Even better is a good set of clear, well lit pictures of your board(s), attached directly to your post (rather than linked offsite where they may not be visible/accessible). Overview of the board, both sides, then closeups of the specific areas your'e referring to, marking the parts you've found, along with any schematic diagram you've drawn up, if any.



Next, a few considerations, in case you havent' thought of them, or run into them later. It might operate fine without changing anything...but it might need several changes.

Are all the max voltages of all the parts in your controller for battery-connected sections able to handle above the max fully charged battery voltage you expect? If not, you'll want to change any of those parts out, or risk failure. :( This is usually the FETs on the big heatsink bar, and the largest can style capacitors.

Some of these parts are the inputs to the low-voltage power supply (LVPS), which is probably the parts you're talking aobut; on some of them they have a wide input range, but most are setup for the voltage they're marked for, with some amount of leeway. There's two basic kinds. One is a simple linear regulator, usually LM317 with a small resistance in high-wattage resistors between it's input and the battery; these would be changed to higher resistance for a higher voltage, proportional to the existing resistance and voltage. The other kind is an SMPS, which will still have some limit to it's input range without figuring out what they did for an input stage, and changing it to whatever is needed for the higher voltage (if any); it might be input resistors as well, or other parts.

There's a few bits in a controller that may need to be changed to make it operate "normally" at a higher voltage. First there's the stuff above, just so nothing fails. Then there's the HVC, so it doesb;t shutdown due to too high a voltage. Then there's the LVC, so it will correctly shutdown for your battery's low voltage cutoff. Both of those are probably controlled by the same voltage divider resistors somewhere near teh MCU chip, though they could be located anywhere, and just have the middle of the divider go to the MCU.
 
Regarding the LVPS issue, you can fix that with this circuit here
https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8457
if what you have is the big power reisstor input going into an LM317 or 7815 or 7812, rather than an SMPS.
 
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