Good morning, all this is the battery out of my electric bicycle, which i hardly ride these days. Um, as i remember it, the balance charge lead wiring in here is absolutely horrible. So what i want to do is have another look at that, but actually i think for winter, i'm going to take the cells out of here completely and turn it into a sort of bench top. This is lithium ion phosphate, 8 cells.

That's 24 volts a bench top battery bank and put bms and charge controller and all that stuff on it. Now, don't you know whether you remember this connector? It looks like an iec three pin sort of kettle connector, but it's not it's a funny one. Let's see if i get the light on this yeah, so you've got uh, let's see if i can get a pointer, live and neutral in pretty much the same place as a regular, socket but earth on this one is horizontal rather than vertical, so it means. I can't use a regular three pin iec connector on there, and i've only got two of these connectors, this one, which was attached to the charger which is now attached to an xt60 and the one on the bike itself, um, which is a higher current cable, actually, Which goes down to the speed controller and the motor? So, let's start taking this apart, i think you have to take this handle off and then there are screws all around so i'll get all of those out actually just before i crack this open, i'm just going to connect it to this bc8s battery checker, which should Give me all the voltages and there they are, but it does this funny thing where one of the connections i think is bad, and so it shows cell 3 as not being there at all, and all the other cells as strange voltages now is that the wiring Inside this that's bad, or is it this connector? I keep pressing those buttons.

Let's try and get this connector on all right. Okay, that's! Balancing back up these bar graphs, show you minimum minima and maxima yeah. I just don't know. What's going on here, cell 3 keeps coming up as nothing and cell 4 as 4.96.

This probably only measures up to 5 volts yeah, i'm not sure what's going on, is it the rather bad wiring inside here, or is it something to do with this right? So cracking this open here are the lithium-ion, phosphate headway cells. There's a fuse down here linking the two four cell blocks - here's some wiring um to this - and that's where i could get this top off. I wonder if i can get that um there's a switch here. It's a key switch which is kind of the ignition lock for the bike.

The ignition switch um is got, has got two connectors on it, a spade and a bullet, so that comes off and that switch just powers up this relay. Presumably, on these two end connectors and then the two big red connectors energize and that feeds power, yes to the output connector of the three pin, iec style connector. That goes off to the motor and daisy chains onto the charge, input which ultimately goes back to the positive of the battery, so that has given me access to it. Let's see how much further i can get into this! Well, it's not as bad as i remember it, but it's not very good either um.

I can separate the positive there because it's on a fuse. The negative, though, is bolted into this cell. So i need to split these to get to that bolt and then that's soldered onto the connector on the battery box here. But these balance leads have these plugs and sockets um, which are not ideal.

Are they really because that's going to add extra resistance from the point of view of balancing and also measuring, i suppose i suppose i can see the logic of this. The idea was to have two four-way connectors that one and that one, and so that i can then split these two packs. So i think i might do that again. I bought some more of these jst leads, but rather than use these connectors, i might take the nine way this uh there's a four and a five actually yeah.

So i might take this down to pcb mounting jst sockets, four and five-way and then have four and five-way plugs running into all the connectors for the battery. But i don't need that for the moment. So the best way to dismantle this is to split these two halves, get a screwdriver down into these two and get the positive and negative leads off the battery, and i think that'll be best achieved using this right angle. Ratchet driver uh, so that'll need to be plugged in the other way.

Won't it like that and uh. It's actually still got the hex piece in it that fits into these bolts. So obviously the last time i used this was to do these up. That was years ago, so undoing this being careful not to touch the corresponding negative, which is 24 volts away.

That wouldn't do much good. Would it so, let's undo that and get the positive off this thing right. So that's undone, the main positive and also this fuse, which is a link wire to the other block. And now this block is completely out i'll, get all this stuff off the bench.

When i've got these out - and i will have a much better look at these uh - it's difficult at the moment, because the box is all attached to it and i can't get a good camera angle right. The batteries are out so now we can take a look at this um, so this is simply a nine-way jst. It's the same as this one with the colors slightly rearranged. I think, because i was playing with that.

The other night, as i say, a five-way and a four-way because for eight cells, you need nine wires. So that's just passed through that hole into this little external box. Um the main power comes off. The battery pack goes through this fuse.

There is a second fuse. Actually, between the two batteries and just goes down to this connector, but it doesn't go to the bike's motor and speed controller unless this relay is energized and that's only energized if the key is put into the switch on the other half of the case, so that Power can go out to the motor power coming in, for charging comes on the two outer pins, and so that can go directly to the battery, doesn't need to go through the uh relay. So it's just to stop the bike being ridden away. I suppose so it's a safety security type feature.

So here are the two uh battery packs. Of course there are four cells in each pack um. This is the fuse which links the two blocks together, so that was sitting kind of across there. I think i'll take that off, because i don't want this flailing about um in here, i believe, is a um.

That's 30 amp! Yes, a 30 amp automotive blade fuse. I use this because i just i like the wire. The wire is nice and thick on this. So it was up to the job of transporting that's 250 watt motor, and these are um 10 amp power, but it's going to be pulling um from this is about 25 volts, so yeah it's about 10 amps, so the 30 amp fuse is ample.

So, let's take that fuse off now. You've got these half blades um for the balance charge leads on here, which tend to rotate when you undo them so i'll, try and prevent that from happening, but yeah just better. If this wasn't flailing about and risking a short of some sort, because there's a lot of current in these things, so yeah looking at this again, i actually quite like this um balanced, charlie, lead isolating thing, so you can bring these two blocks apart. So the way they were wired is my 30 amp fuse the red one was across these two and then the final connections are across these two.

So with these two linked, these outer two are the 25 volts well for both charging and discharging these packs. So what am i going to do with these? Well, i want to get this up on the bench in the shed and i want it to be the first version of a solar-powered lithium-ion, phosphate 24-volt battery bank, so i'll put a bms on this i'll also need a charge controller of some sort. I was toying with the idea of just wiring a solar panel directly into these and seeing, if they charge at all and then the other idea is, of course, when these are full to have a relay which is measuring voltage with an upper threshold and a lower Threshold to turn on one of my cryptocurrency miners, i want to set up my first solar powered mining farm now this is not a very big battery. As i say, these are 10 amp hour, lithium ion phosphate cells.

The terminal voltage is about 25 volts, so this is about 250 watt hours and uh for comparison. This is the smallest of the jackery power banks that i've got. This is the 240, so this is 240 watt hours a similar capacity, and i consider this to be pretty small from the point of view of trying to do crypto mining from stored energy, rather than have this captive cable, which has got the nine pin just hit. One end and the four and five-way connectors at the other, which won't go through i'm thinking.

If i cut a rectangular slot here, um. Firstly, it'll be away from the batteries a little bit because when the bat when the cells are in here, what i really want now is to bring the balance charging stuff over to this side, because all the high current stuff's over that side. So i'm going to bring it through this slot, i'm going to go and get my coping saw and try and cut a square hole. That'll be a laugh um so that this actually could be withdrawn through that hole so that it's a bit more easy to work.

On than this business with captive connectors, i don't like them. I've made a rectangular hole here. I hope it's big enough to pass a five-way jst. Now it's going to be a jst pcb mounting socket through there.

I've got a four-way. Let's try that so that has to pass through there, that's a four-way, so i think the five-way will fit through there rather well. Okay, so you'll pass the 4-way and the 5-way jst connectors through there they'll run out to this side. This battery will sit in sort of there and then the justice will come up into this little recessed area and hook into jst plugs.

Well, i say plug it's whatever. That is, it's probably a socket actually um, which will be sitting on top now. There'll be a four-way on one of these packs and a five-way on the other they'll plug into the two separate connectors running down to the common nine way, which will be in this little box on the outside of the battery pack. So that's really all i can do today, um i'm going to order some four and five-way jst cables plugs and sockets with wire uh, so i'll leave it there for today, but i'll be come coming back to look at this thing, um again soon, when i've got The other bits for this project so for the moment cheerio.