Upgrading a Motorino XPd

[inedible]

Got myself a 2014 Motorino XPd a couple months ago and I've been pretty happy with it so far. However, the SLA batteries (4x12v 20AH) it ships with give pretty awful range, and I've had to push it home once after a 30km ride.

So all along I've been planning on grabbing some lithium batteries, but I can't afford $1200+ for a ping or HK pack, and I'm too concerned with fire to salvage 18650s from dead battery packs.

I stumbled across the Nissan Leaf Battery thread, and I'm super impressed how cheap these are per watt-hour.

I've decided to pull the trigger on these 4 modules, take them apart and rewire the cells to 16S1P for a total of 60V and 33AH. I'm hoping this ought to let me go at least 60km on a charge, and the voltage increase might get me to 55km/hr to help with crossing large intersections and left turns etc.

 

[inedible]

I'm pretty much a complete noob, but I think I know what I need. Let me know if anyone sees any glaring problems here:

Batteries:
16S Nissan Leaf LiMn2O4

http://www.ebay.com/itm/261471239423
Notes: I plan to shell these out of their cans and strap together a single 16S pack. Not sure about how I'm going to compress/protect it yet. I'm thinking shrinkwrap, then foam, inside a metal box.
Price: $611 shipped

Bulk Charger:
BMSBattery Alloy Shell 1200W LiFePo4/Li-Ion/Lead Acid Battery EV Charger

http://www.bmsbattery.com/alloy-shell/29-alloy-shell-1200w-lifepo4li-ionlead-acid-battery-ev-charger.html
Notes: These are the options I'm specfiyng. I think they set the voltage for you? So I'm asking for it to be set at 4.1V per cell to increase longevity of the pack:
Battery type: LiMn2O4
Charge voltage: 65.6V
Charge current: 18A
AC plug: NEMA 5-15P
DC plug: IEC 60320-1-C13
Price: $139 +shipping

DC-to-DC Converter:
DC84V 36/48V/60V/72V to 12V 360W 26~30A converter

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/321333812148
Notes: I know 360W is probably overkill, but at some point I'm going to want to plug a 200W AC inverter into my lighter socket. Better to overdo it I think.
Price: $74 shipped

I'm also planning on getting a BMS at some point. I'm not sure it's necessary at first. I think I should be able to get away with a couple dozen charges before needing to balance the cells. Please correct me if that's wrong.

BMS:
BestTech Power HCX-D131

http://www.bestechpower.com/592v16spcmbmspcbforli-ionli-polymerbatterypack/PCM-D131.html
Notes: I'm probably only going to use this while charging. I understand leaving it connected drains some cells. Probably going to leave it connected, then put a switch on the common wire so I can leave it connected, but flip the switch when I charge.
Price $58 +shipping(?)

For my controller, I think I'll try using my existing 48V one. After replacing the capacitors, I've been led to believe it should work at 60V. A guy on a different forum seems to imply he's run his at 60V fine without any changes, and even 72v for short periods. Long-term I want to buy a better controller, but I still don't know what's best. I've read good things about these infineon ones everyone seems to use, but I'm not sure if something better is out, or around the corner.

Let me know what you think, or if I've made any grave errors! Thanks for looking!

 

[inedible]

Alright, so all the parts have arrived in the mail, or well, most of them did a couple weeks ago, but I haven't bothered to update this thread yet.

I've decided against that BMS, and I think I'll probably get this one instead: http://www.foundingpower.com/chanpinzhanshi/houbeidianyuanchengtao/73.html

I like that it has this pretty looking LCD display:

It's pretty much perfect for my 16s nissan leaf battery pack. It handles exactly 16 cells, has four thermal sensors, I have four batteries. Pretty much an ideal fit.

It'll have to wait though, I'm broke after buying all this stuff. I just hope the cells stay fairly balanced while being bulk charged for a month. I do have a friend's Hyperion EOS0606i, which I can use to charge/balance up to 6 cells at a time, but seeing as it's only 50W and this battery pack is 2kWH, that's really not ideal.

So anyway, I got the batteries a couple weeks ago and set about taking them apart and wiring them in series. Most people seem to take them out of their cans entirely, then I guess they wrap them somehow to compress the pack? I'd rather not deal with that, so I decided to leave as much of the cans intact as possible, that way I can bolt them together for compression, like they were originally designed for.

Here's an album of that process: http://imgur.com/a/ULQfj

Then, while I waited for my bulk charger to arrive, I balanced the cells using a friend of mine's 50W balance charger:

(The signs are for my roommates, who are very special people. They have an uncanny knack for accidentally destroying my stuff through sheer ignorance.)

Next, once all the cells were charged and balanced, I wired everything up like so:

I'm happy to say I never shorted anything out at any point, though I was terrified I would at some point.

Next step was to disassemble my bike and hook everything up. It was a sunny day, perfect to work outside.

That's what the inside of a Motorino XPD looks like. There's surprisingly no photos of this online. If anyone has trouble taking one apart I'm happy to answer any questions.

So this is the stock rat's nest of wires. I mostly took this for reference in case I missed something, but it proved to be less than helpful. I didn't get any photos of the "After", but I was able to clean up the wiring a bit with a liberal application of zip ties.
The unplugged connectors are for the charging port, the alarm, and a random spare 12v line for no reason.

Here we have our patient, ready for the operation. Also shown are the alarm and wimpy stock dc-dc converter.

These 63v caps will need to go. Unfortunately it's a snug fit, the case was obviously designed around these caps. My 100v replacements are taller, so I'll need to attach wires to their leads:

While I was in there I also put some bigass solder blobs on the shunts. I'm not really sure how much to use, so I covered up like a third of them. Dunno what I'm doing here, and I have no clamp-on ammeter to test. No idea what my stock amperage was either. The controller says 40A, but I'm certain my motor wasn't pulling that, as it's rated for 500W.

¯\(°_o)/¯

Just a shot of my workspace. It was really nice to work outside. I should solder in the back yard more often.

The heatsink the FETs are attached to was covered with a thin smear of that really cheap white silicone thermal compound, which I proceeded to get all over everything. I wiped that all off and replaced it with Arctic Silver 5, which ought to help cool a bit.

 

[inedible]

Next: The moment of truth.

I wired everything up temporarily, flicked the switch, and turned it on.

Woo! It worked!

It's hard to see from the glare, but it's spinning the tire at 58km/hr up on the kickstand, and the voltage is reading as 65v!

It really was exhilarating that nothing seemed to explode, everything seemed to work at this point. But, unfortunately, several 12v devices were killed in the process.

I'm not sure what happened, if maybe I shorted something at some point, or maybe my dc-dc converter I bought has a voltage spike on startup or what, but my turn signals, my stereo, and my 12v-to-5v usb converter all died.

The 12v line is reading 13.8v, but my friends who are into automotive stuff more than me say that's normal, typical, and to be expected, that no 12v device should be killed by 13.8v.

*sigh*... I'll have to look at that tomorrow. I don't mind the stereo, but turn signals are fairly important.

Tomorrow I'll be taking the bike to a welder friend to see about extending the battery box to hold these nissan leaf cells. They're almost a perfect fit, but the box needs to be extended by an inch and a half or so.

 

[mistercrash]

There may be two fuses on the wires coming out of your DC/DC. Check those out to see if one is fried.

 

[inedible]

Yep, there's a fuse on the input, which is fine. I'm pretty sure my speedo, headlights, and brake lamp all use 12v, and those are all working okay.

Just my radio, turn signals, and my 12v-to-usb adapter blew. It's pretty odd.

 

[dnmun]

you should consider using a fuse on the output of the converter too. the 12V stuff may have been contacted during the assembly to the pack voltage by accident with a loose wire.

also if you have a BMS now that protects those leaf pouches then it should protect against short circuits so you don't need that circuit breaker either. you may be able to turn off the battery at the BMS also.

 

[inedible]

Not a bad idea. Fuses all around.

Still no BMS yet. I'm just bulk charging these in series. I'll update you when the fire happens.

 

[dnmun]

there will not be a fire but you should use a BMS in any case to protect the battery. it is impossible for you to balance it as a BMS can.

i use a BMS on my 44Ah 21S lipo pack and the 87Ah 24S lifepo4 pack i have wired up in parallel to power my little ZENN car, 195A peaks.

4 BMS total actually. 2 on the lipo pack, master/slave, and two on the lifepo4 pack with one of them used for the charging to protect it from overcharging when i charge the lipo to full voltage.

4 of the bestechpower D131. 24S for lipo and lifepo4. but i only use 21 channels on the lipo pack.

you wanna have a fuse on the output of the converter in case it shorts on the output. that would damage the converter i expect.

 

[mistercrash]

I have a fuse on the input of the DC/DC and a fuse on the output also. It did help me once when I was doing something, can't really remember what but I kept blowing that fuse on the output. Once I figured out what I was doing wrong, I replaced the fuse one last time and all was fine so that fuse saved me some damage to something else.

Your signals it might be just the relay that needs changing, the stereo and USB thingy, there might be fuses hidden somewhere for each of those or one fuse for both. I'm not sure, I have an older model Motorino scooter which doesn't play music or video games :lol:

 

[inedible]

At least yours has a cup holder. I have to precariously hold onto paper cups with my toes!

Are you still using your stock DC-DC? Or did you upgrade that when you went to a higher voltage?

 

[mistercrash]

I had to upgrade since I went to 74V. But now I'm bringing it all down to 64V and limiting the speed to a safe one that will keep me moving without burning things up like the motor or controller, and keep me moving slow enough to keep the cops off my back.

I found that riding a dependable slow scooter that works all year long with zero problems is way more enjoyable than a fast scooter that needs repair on a weekly basis.

 

[inedible]

Okay, so I figured out what the problem was with my turn signals. I had plugged my dc-dc converter in wrong. I wired it up so negative was the white wire, green was positive, but that's actually backwards. I thought I double checked.

Anyway, it's sorta remarkable everything was working this way, except my turn signals, which are LED-based.

So, I swapped the wires, turned it on, and BANG! blew the fuse. Double checked the wires, tried again, blew another fuse. Turns out my DC-DC converter is now shorted from + to -. No idea why. So I plugged my old, stock dc-dc back in, the exact same way, and it seems to be working fine.

Not sure how long it'll last being overvolted so much. I'm going to want to replace it anyway, since I want to be able to run a 200w inverter off my lighter plug, so I can charge my laptop, or, say, bring a projector camping, etc.

 

[Laserman]

Well a buddy of mine had some caps, and I got them the only thing is they are 200v instead of 100v would you think there might be any issues?

 

[inedible]

Yep, that'll be fine. Too high of voltage is not a problem.

 

[Laserman]

Inedible since you have the xpd could you measure the shock length for the rears as on the n model have to take off the body panels I am thinking of getting some upgraded shocks for the rear if you could measure the overall length and from centre to centre of the mount would,be great

Thanks

 

[inedible]

Okay, so I finally got around to moving my battery box. There's *almost* enough room to leave it the way it is, but the front end of the battery cans gets in the way of putting the floor boards back on. There's like 1-2cm of extra clearance needed. At first I considered cutting the plastic, but in the end it was a much better idea to move the battery box back a couple inches.

I used an angle grinder and a reciprocating saw to cut the three welds holding the battery box in place. In doing this I found out motorino cheaped out on painting, leaving the space between the battery box and frame to rust. It's really surprising they didn't paint the frame first before assembling it. Seriously not impressed. After a couple more Calgary winters, this would be rusted through.

I sandend away all the rust, primed it, welded it back in place an inch back, everything looks great. Also got a chance to make a mount for my cellphone dock, which will be great for GPS navigation.

Here's an album of the process: http://imgur.com/a/xj5Mg

Inedible since you have the xpd could you measure the shock length for the rears as on the n model have to take off the body panels I am thinking of getting some upgraded shocks for the rear if you could measure the overall length and from centre to centre of the mount would,be great

Dunno, I don't have a measuring tape handy. It looks like 14 inches or so. Just over a foot. I think the ride-height adjustment is set to the lowest setting though, so I think it adjusts out to 16 or so inches.

Seeing as it's attached to a swing-arm, I don't think it matters if you get it exactly right. Anywhere from 12-18 inches should be fine I think. It'll just make your seat higher or lower.

 

[mistercrash]

I found out motorino cheaped out on painting, leaving the space between the battery box and frame to rust. It's really surprising they didn't paint the frame first before assembling it. Seriously not impressed. After a couple more Calgary winters, this would be rusted through.

I don't find it surprising at all. I did find a couple bare spots I had to deal with too. Fighting rust on these scooters is an on going battle, especially if you ride in wet weather. I must have resprayed the whole chassis three or four times in the last three years :lol:

 

[inedible]

6 month update:

Been using this nissan leaf pack for a while now without any kind of BMS or balance charger. For the first 4mo I was bulk charging to 65v, but I adjusted the voltage on my bulk charger up to 67v. At first I was trying to play it safe and keep each cell's voltage at 4.1v max in an attempt to extend the life of these batteries as much as possible.

That is until I saw this video:
[youtube]jzb51NSB0bM[/youtube] (starts at 1hr, 25min)

He explains how the top of the voltage curve doesn't rise sharply at 4.2v and that these cells' chemistry is suited to go up to 4.3 or 4.4v so he wouldn't recommend limiting yourself to 4.1.

I ought to have bought a BMS earlier. It was pretty irresponsible to bulk charge for so long without even monitoring cell voltages. So, a month and a half ago I borrowed a friend's RC balance charger, finally got around to putting terminal blocks on, and slowly balanced the pack 4S at a time.

Surprisingly, there was only 70mV difference between the lowest and highest cells. Most were still very evenly balanced. These LiMn batteries really do seem to self-balance well.

After hooking up the balance tap wires and terminal blocks, I decided I no longer needed access to the terminals of the battery, so to protect them and prevent water damage and corrosion, I would seal up that end of the battery.

I'd soon come to regret this decision, since I just bought a BMS that comes with 4 thermal probes, and now I have no way of inserting them inside the battery pack.

 

[inedible]

So I pulled the trigger on this BMS:

http://www.foundingpower.com/en/Products/Smart_BMS/2012042353.html

Had a bit of difficulty hooking it up. For whatever reason it complained my bike had a short, so it kicked into protection mode. Got ahold of the seller and he told me to remove resistor R150 and transistor Q33 off of the board. I did so, and now the BMS works suspiciously fine. I hope I didn't just disable short circuit protection.

The BMS is great. It actively balances all the cells, has warnings about individal cells over voltage, under voltage. The entire pack under voltage or over voltage. Too high of current draw. Too high of temperature, Too low of temperature. Too high of charge current or voltage. Short circuit protection. Individual cell wire monitoring in case one comes loose or breaks, etc. The amount of features is really incredible. It's got a nice pretty bar graph showing how much battery I have left, and it's not just guessing based on the voltage. It performs kalman filtering and slowly "learns" the characteristics of my battery over time to produce an accurate SOC figure.

Now I no longer have to worry about spontaneously combusting! Though, apparently these cells are very stable and that's not much of a concern anyway.

[youtube]Jz37WycW-7E[/youtube]

I still have a lot of upgrades planned though. I've got a bit of down-time since a ton of snow has dumped on my city, and temperatures have been around -20c this past week.

Just bought some new LED headlights:

According to the specs these should only be 10W each, which will save a lot of power. My current incandesent bulbs are 95 watts! That'll save a bunch of power for...

A custom designed battery heating pad! We've worked out a design that will cover 3 sides of the battery, and consume 80W. Hopefully if I insulate my battery box a bit, that'll be enough to keep my battery nice and toasty during these winter months. I've noticed at -20 my battery suddenly becomes gutless and has a ton of sag. It's probably not very good for it either. Hopefully this will work well, without completely draining my battery in a short period of time.

If I'm going to be riding in the snow though, this stock kenda summer tire will have to go. It has no traction at all, so much that it's almost impossible to get started from a standstill on an icy road. The tires just spin and spin.

So I'm getting one of these:

A Heidenau K62 Snowtex M+S. It's rated for snow, and it's quite a bit larger than my stock tire. Hopefully it'll make a huge difference.

I also bought 40 feet of 12ga silicone sheathed wire, which I'm going to use to redo the phase wires and some other internal wiring in the bike. Looks like I've got my work cut out for me.

 

[mistercrash]

Heating your battery in the cold months is a great idea, boiling your battery will kill it. If this heating pad is powerful, I suggest using a thermostat to regulate the temperature of your battery. I'm pretty sure I saw digital aquarium thermostats that run on 12V.

P.S.: You're going to love those tires.

 

[inedible]

Good point. The company has agreed to include a thermostat, but I'm not sure what temperature to have it set to. I just need it to come up to like -10 to 0 degrees.

They're suggesting 50 degrees, but I'm sure that'll cook the one cell that's flat against the bottom pad. I think I'll ask them for 30c or so, but I guess it'll take a while to heat up.

 

[mistercrash]

It looks like most Leaf owners that have reported premature capacity loss from their battery live in very hot climates. Personally, I wouldn't go over 25 or 26 degrees Celsius. I would put the temp sensor in contact with an outside module and the heating mat. With maybe just a thin piece of cardboard between the sensor and heating mat. With the whole battery well insulated with some kind of box made of half inch rigid insulation. I find it's better to have the thermostat go on and off often to keep the outside cells from over heating. If the sensor is installed in the middle of the battery, the outside cells might get up to 50 or 60 degrees before the heat radiates to the center cells to finally trigger the sensor. Temp sensor on the outside of the battery with an ordinary digital display thermometer with its sensor in the middle of the battery. That way you can monitor how hot the outside cells get and how well the heat radiates to the center of the battery.

 

[inedible]

The heating pad will have its sensor within the pad itself. That will regulate the thermostat. I'll also have four temperature sensors on my BMS, which has an LCD readout on my dash.

I'm thinking I'll have one sensor on the pad, one in the middle of the battery pack, one at the top cell furthest from the pad, and maybe I'll put the last one inside my motor. I think I'll have it set to sound an alarm if anything goes above 40c and cut all power if anything reaches 50c.

How hot would you say your heating pad gets? Can you adjust the thermostat? It's just a standard Canadian Tire cheapo one right?

 

[mistercrash]

I can see it is pretty obvious that there is a sensor right on the surface of your heating pad. I can't believe I missed that.
Yes the heating pad I use is a cheap battery warmer from Canadian Tire. Some call them battery boilers because there is no thermostat and like I found out last year, with its 80 watts it is capable of boiling a battery up to 75 degrees Celsius. I had to make myself a new battery after this experiment gone wrong. I am using the same battery warmer but it is now regulated by a fish tank thermostat which is adjustable. Mine is adjusted to 25 degrees, the outside cells never go above 27 degrees and the heat radiates to the center cells quite well. My system is 110V though and I use it to warm the battery during the night, the whole battery is at a balmy 25 degrees in the morning when I go to work. At the end of the day, after sitting outside at work with outside temps of minus 2 degrees Celsius, the battery is down to 15 degrees thanks to the insulation. I get back home and plug in the heater until the center of the battery reaches 20 degrees before I start recharging.

Your system looks like to be of much better quality than what I'm using with all those temp sensors and that nice heating mat. And the battery heating itself should be pretty awesome.