Monitoring LIPO battery charge with cycle analyst?

[liamcaff]

Hi guys,

Until today I was using a custom made cell-log 8m harness to check the state of my cells while charging my LIPO pack (20s2p Lipo). The harness fell out of my bad today and was ran over by a car...

I don't have any spare cell-logs right now so I was wondering could I use a 4mm bullet parallel adaptor to connect my battery to both my charger AND my 12FET Lyen controller so that I can monitor the voltage of my battery from the Cycle Analyst while charging? At the moment I can't see the voltage I'm charging the pack too so I would be in danger of over-charging (not something I want to do!)...

Any thoughts?

 

[amberwolf]

Sure.

If you have teh CA with external shunt (rather than DP that plugs into your controller's CA connector) then you can put the Y-connector on the cotnroller side of the shunt, and monitor not only voltage, but Ah back into the pack, and amps durign charge. Both of those will show up as negative values, like regen.

 

[liamcaff]

Sure.

If you have teh CA with external shunt (rather than DP that plugs into your controller's CA connector) then you can put the Y-connector on the cotnroller side of the shunt, and monitor not only voltage, but Ah back into the pack, and amps durign charge. Both of those will show up as negative values, like regen.

Cheers for the quick reply! I had been doing more research and found another thread with a similar explanation (think it was you amberwolf)... Unfortunately I have the CA-DP. I know I could open up the controller and start to solder my way around the problem but think I'll just be very cautious with my charging until I source some replacement cellLogs and remake the harness with a 25-pin Dsub connector and 3 Cell logs to monitor my 10 4s hardcase packs. CellLog are not easy to find these days! Soldout nearly everywhere I've looked - and extremely expensive in the 1 or 2 places I've found them for sale... The hunt continues!

Thanks again!

 

[amberwolf]

You can still monitor the voltage no matter where you connect things, it's just the current and capacity that you can only monitor if you feed thru the shunt.

 

[dogman dan]

You can simply turn on the bike, and while charging, see the voltage on the CA display.

This works fine for simple whole pack voltage monitoring.

You can make a plug to use an external shunt with a CA, but the problem with that is your external shunt will not be the same as your controllers shunt.

So if you unplugged the controller at the DP plug, and use the adapter, you'd have to also reprogram the CA shunt value each time. I'd say for now, just use the simple voltage monitor, and pull it off the charger early enough to be sure you are ok.

If you must, get some of those cheapie alarms that are less accurate, but good enough to know 4.2v from 4.3v. Use them while hunting a good deal on a cellog 8 monitor. Tons of them on Ebay, or maybe the hobby king EU warehouse.

 

[liamcaff]

Cheers for the replies guys!

Have 3 CellLogs enroute to me - all going well I should have them early in the week so I can rebuild my battery monitor setup. Am being very careful charging my pack until I can properly monitor again.

L