Good morning all i have received the uh eight s flying capacitors active balancer, which i bought on ebay. I think this was 22 pounds uh. Fortunately, this is marked well mcn. They don't really care much about the order of these letters.

Do they manganese cobalt, nickel or lfp and, of course, i'm using lfp now on the ebay listing they had? This marked well in the photograph they had this marked as lto, which is why i hesitated to buy it in the first place and in fact it's why? I bought the four cell active balancer, so here it is on ebay, it's the 5 amp balancer 8s live pro 4 lithium ion version battery active equalizer, and you can see here in the photographs. They've actually put a sharpie mark on the lto, but in the description well, in fact, in the title it says it's the lithium ion version. So in the end i thought okay, i'll, believe the title and not the photo, and it is indeed the lithium-ion version. So 22 pounds 72 each.

This came from julian 32 uh and was it free shipping, yeah, free economy, speed pack, shipping and i'll put a link to this item in the description below okay? Let's take a little look at this and also do some comparisons. Oh with uh this one - well first thing i see is this: this says um version 1.2, so it looks like it's a slightly older version than this one, because that's v 1.4 on the back. It looks much the same, but there is an addition. I'll have to snap that bit of board off there, and that is this - there's a little inductor here and that's presumably a buck converter chip and, i suppose the thinking there, because this one appeared to have.

I think it's that chip, though i don't think i mentioned this in the previous video, but that one looks like a 3.3 volt regulator. Linear and i suppose the reason for going for a buck converter here is that the voltage across here is eight cells worth of well potentially um mcn battery, which is well on my lfp. It's 30 volts across there because across here it's more like 15. So, yes, you can understand why this is a buck.

Regulator switch mode, and this is a linear regulator, but i think, apart from that, it's pretty much the same. You've got the controller chip there with the run led eight lots of mosfet drivers. I believe they are the same three transistor circuit is on this one um, as on this one. The layout is slightly different.

Three transistors are just positioned slightly differently but they're there. So are they the low voltage monitoring? I don't really know um, but that's it. Essentially. It's the same.

You've got all these poly fuses. You've got the diode linking um positive of cell 7 to positive of cell 8. If you want to put this on a 7s pack, which is more common, if you're using mcn, eight cells is more common. If you're using lfp because of the voltages involved, so i think what i'll do is i'll go and get the battery from the shed and i'll disconnect the bms disconnect the high current stuff i'll bring it in here and attach this and i'm just thinking what sequence Shall i do it and i think what i'll do is i'll, just simply put the most negative on.

Is that the most negative? No, it's that one, the most negative on first, the black wire. Oh, i didn't show you this did i you get a full set of um nine wires, eight red and one black and they're these nice bendy silic, silicone ones, so yeah put the black wire on and then just simply add the wires as i go, and only When i get to the b7 wire, will this actually power up and then i'll attach the b8 wire that should work shouldn't it right? As i say, i'm just going to snap this bit of board off, which hopefully is not needed right. Here's the bicycle battery. It was in my bicycle and it's going back there at some point: it's reasonably well balanced.

Actually, i can attach the balancer. This is a balancer and monitor um. I had it balancing in the shed. It's been balancing for several days.

I mean the balancing is easy to start on this thing. You just press it until it goes green and it's balancing again does it without any external power, which is quite handy, so i should be okay to start attaching this thing, i think i'm going to sit this perhaps there just with some blue tack initially, but it Is going to mean a third set of balance leads because i've got the balance, leads for the monitor or balancer. Sometimes i use this, and sometimes i use this one, a little battery, checker um. It's also got the balance, leads for the bms, and now it's gon na have a third set of balancing leads actually for the balancer.

So i need the new balancer, the cables that came with it, and i also need these little solder, lug terminals, so i'll solder. Nine of these onto the ends of the nine wires all nicely done with heat shrink and then i'll start attaching them to the little bolt studs on my battery, not sure if you can see those, no, you can't see them very well, but the little bolts that The balance leads are attached to and yeah see if it works right. I've put the nine wires onto the balancing board. Now i just need to solder nine of those little solder tags on these ends.

So i'll do that right? I think i put it on this side, so i've got two pieces of blue tack. They'll do to hold it in place for the time being and here's my active balancer with all the little ring terminals attached. So let's get bolting them up, starting with the most negative yeah. It's a shame.

They couldn't put the little run light the little led there on the top, because it's nice to see these capacitors. But since i probably want to see the run light, i think i can actually mount this upside down like that, so i can see the led yeah. I think this is going to be quite fiddly um. I need to get the black one in there.

I've got to use this spanner, but i've got to be careful. I don't short anything so i'm going to go slowly. Take my time not sure how much of this i'm going to be able to film, but i'll do what i can right. This is the first of the positives, so if i attach that nothing should happen, and it doesn't now, i'm just wondering will it matter if these all short to each other, because they're dangling down off the desk shouldn't do because until i get to b7, this board Shouldn't actually power up so i'll just continue like this yeah.

I just can't get to the little nuts inside here, particularly the ones at the bottom. So i think what i'm going to do is undo the big bolts and take that link piece out and also this uh poison they're going to the xt90 plug at this end. Split these apart a little bit and that'll, make it easier and then put it back together again right. That's interesting! I've just put b6 positive.

I guess it is on to its position and this light lit up now. The two packs are not even connected, so it must be getting power between b5, positive and b6 positive. Don't quite know how that's happening, but i think i want to rejoin this pack at this point uh, so that all the voltages are at least referenced to each other uh yeah. That should be okay, joining this center uh connector there.

So let's do that yeah! I don't quite understand why that lights on when i haven't even connected b6 positive, yet let alone b7 positive, which should then go through that diode into the controller chip. But it's on what i thought i'd do actually is just connect up my battery checker. Now that i've got this uh middle link back on all the voltages should be referenced to each other, so it shouldn't destroy this thing and um yeah that all looks fairly closely matched but i'll leave that on, while i plow on with this process. So this one has to go on the little nut right down in the bottom.

There tricky and finally, b8 positive goes on. There try and get the little nut back on it's very difficult, because i can't really see what i'm doing. Okay, that nut is on so i'll just splay these out, and i'm just wondering if i should poke that through there yeah. Maybe i will right tighten that one.

So it's all connected now, uh. The only thing that i've got to put back is the main positive wire onto the positive stud, but i just wanted to tighten that so that this doesn't move around. While i tighten this little one right, that's on so red lights, on how my cell voltages! Can you see that not quite so, let's bring this back in a bit and they all look pretty good um we've got 3.32 on the positive one, not quite sure why that hasn't settled down to the same as the others. Maybe they are out of balance and there's a lot of quite a lot of work that has to be done by this, because i can't feel the capacitor temperatures with them underneath i'll just finish, wiring this up right now.

The problem is, i can't get this um allen key into that screw, because there isn't enough room between the main positive and the main negative, and i don't want to short them. So i think i'm going to saw this down. I'm going to go and put my junior hacksaw on it and make a special shortened version all right. There's my cut down allen key! It's a bit of a mess because the saw had a whole load of broken teeth, but whatever, let's tighten that up without shorting it to its opposite number and that should be complete.

So i'm watching these uh voltages to see if they're sort of coming together. I think what will really prove this is to start charging this up. So i think i'll take it out to the shed put it on the solar panel and we can watch it charge up and see if the balancer is doing its job and out in the shed here it is in situ the balancing board is there and things Just look a lot different now, all the cell voltages are really well balanced within 20 millivolts, so 3.6 is the minimum. 3.8 is the maximum.

Let's switch that to that, so you can see that it's 26.9 now my little volt meter here is saying 27.0. Now this is set to trigger at 27.5, and i think now that's a bit low, because i've just calculated that um eight lots of 3.5 would be 28 volts and 8 lots of 3.6 would be 28.8 volts and those sound much more reasonable. Now that these cell voltages are all effectively locked together, that's um 3.6 volts, of course, is way before this thing will trigger, because the bms cuts out at 3.75. So, yes, i'm having to kind of rethink the way this works now, but it just feels so much better with all the cell voltages being just locked together with superglue right.

Well, i've just been on the phone for an hour or so, and this really isn't doing much. Uh i've lowered the trigger voltage on this to 27.2, but i don't think i'm going gon na hit it today. Oh i'm, on the end of my wire, but up on that meter up there we're only getting 200 milliamps in from the solar panel. It's a very dull day today.

So i don't think this is going to do anything today. I'll have to wait until tomorrow and then hopefully this will get up to this trigger voltage 27.2 and we can do the first mine of the energy in that battery. But those are the voltages they're, looking absolutely fantastic. So yes, i'm really pleased with that flying capacitor.

Balancer and so for this video, that's it cheerio!.