Right? Let's tidy all this stuff away and take a look inside the Smart active balancer. Um, so this comes with this uh Bluetooth dongle and it's plugged into the uart stroke BT socket and I got to get this plug out otherwise I don't think I can take this apart. Oh I might be able to. but anyway I'll take the plug out anyway.

but um, it's quite tricky and I don't want to pull on these wires. There was a strain relief bit of heat shrink on this, but I think it was doing more than good because it was kind of trapping these wires right at the top there and then any Bend or twist on here was was Amplified up at this point. so I took the heat shink off. But let's try and pull this out with these chip pullers.

Yeah, they work quite well. Okay, so let's get the Box open. uh for very similar in fact I would venture to say the same size screws on this one. Okay, let's take a look ins side and things are very different inside Here to the little capacitor active balancer.

let's get in a bit closer. Okay, this device is ooh, quite complex. I Don't intend to give a full explanation of how this works well because I don't really know how it works, but we can look at some of the major elements. So uh, inductor here.

Big tall Thing Two Right stacked on top of each other couple of capacitors. Uh, very different. This is 47 Microfarads 100 Vol This is 470 Microfarads 16 volts. Now there's some sort of inductor here.

There's a little inductor down here. 47 Micro Henry's Uh, there are these two things. Tr73: what are these are they? Transformers They look like they might be Transformers And there's an absolute mass of Uh components on here, including what are these are these moset fets I Don't know. would you have all these resistors on the arms of these mosfets? We'll have to have a closer look at those.

um. big single chip device Here it says on it uh Giga device and it also says Arm so it's an Arm Cortex CPU or system on a chip would be my guess. a little Um oscillator there. There are a few of these things which look like the package looks like Opto isolators I Mean are they optoisolators I don't actually know.

And then there are a whole series of these switches. Um, on here. they've only populated three of them because this is a 4S That's interesting why three I Would have thought there'd be four cuz that is actually a 5way connector. and on the back, there are more Uh circuits here.

Only two of them. Oh I wonder if they I wonder if that means that there are actually five, three on the top side, two on the bottom side. They do look very similar, but that's a lot of switching, more switching, um, and masses more Electronics Here, There's a lot going on in here. I'll take a look at some of these chips if any of them are identifiable, right? A couple of things.

Um, this is a 24c. I think it was a 512. Um, quite a large serial Es Squ prom for whole in parameter data. Surprised there isn't enough uh, permanent storage in the main s so for that.

But yeah, there's that chip. Um, this says HC 595. So is that an octal latch? possibly for latching in? Uh. output driver data for all of these uh channels of switches.

and there can be a lot of those if you get the 16s version of this. Uh, this is a 4 4052 and I'm just wondering whether it's an old school Seos 4052. Whatever that is. Let's look it up.

Uh yeah. Seos Multiplexer D multiplexer. Um, this is an EG 27324 which is actually a motor driver. It's near the inductor, so I guess it's driving.

Um, the inductor and capacitors using a motor driver. That's really quite interesting. Um, more of these four pin devices over here which look like optoisolators. They may be optoisolators now.

what are these devices here? with all these resistors one on each leg? Well, these are Uh, CA is- 372 X high-speed dual Channel Digital isolators. Um, designed for isolating digital from analog I Think for noise immunity and stuff like that, someone's had an absolute field day designing this thing. Oh, look, of course. Yeah, this HC 595 latch.

You can put more of them on here in order to drive these other channels. So yeah, that is to latch. Digital Data to switch all of these channels I Suppose to decide which pair of Um cells you want to balance with this um balancing circuitry. Okay, T PP 8485 e Um, it has Peak written on it.

This is, uh, a 3vt to 5.5 volt power transceiver that meets Rs485 and Rs422 standards and that's fairly near. uh, the output. which one is which uart and Bluetooth sits on the left there and Rs485 sits over on that side. Just one more chip to identify.

Oh, there's this one over here, of course. Now this one is a BM 8563 Seos realtime clock and calendar. Why on Earth It got a realtime clock and calendar. Interesting.

and yeah, there is a little Crystal there sitting next to it, which I presume provides the Uh 32 khz reference. What's this thing down here? I'm guessing some sort of buck or boost converter. Okay, this is possibly a mosfet down here and there is one more device on the back and that is possibly I Haven't done a thorough check Um, a mosfet gate driver. but I mean there is a mass of exotic I would say circuitry on this device.

It's quite, um, quite surprising. Oh, and just one more thing. there are a couple of LEDs on here. uh one there which is right underneath this little cutout.

here. this plastic window um which flashes quite brightly to show when this is balancing. There's another one where was it here which I think is just an on LED and it doesn't really show through anywhere. You can see it through this port, but you have to look at an angle and it's quite dim.

but it does appear to be on all the time now. I'm just wondering whether the circuitry in here is circuitry that would be part of a BMS because when you run up the app for this, it has all sorts of BMS settings which are Irrelevant for this things like charge and discharge mosfets. Well, there are no charge and discharge mosfets in here because there are no high current paths into and out of a battery. But um, this is just the smart active balance part of that.

So I wonder whether this circuitry has been copied over from uh, a very complex BMS which has builtin active balancing, right? Let's plug in the UR cable. Got to be a bit careful with this because I know it goes in quite easily, but these wires are terribly thin which is why I didn't want to pull it out by the wires. Okay, let's power it up. I'll connect it to my sodium ion battery and we can see the app now.

I Originally put the app on my tablet here with all my other sort of Bluetooth and device apps. um I also loaded in Smart BMS So the app is called Balance BMS it's on the Play Store There's also Smart BMS which is the darly or daily um version of the app. It's very, very similar, but it's all red. I Don't know why the icon is green.

that's rather strange. um, but 100 Balance have obviously gone for this blue uh, corporate coloring and although it runs on my tablet for some reason and this kept me guessing for many hours, um, it just doesn't see the Bluetooth anymore and I don't quite know why and it appears that Bluetooth on this tablet might have just died halfway through testing these apps. I'll have a quick look at the other app actually, let let's run that one up. and yeah, you see it's all red, which is the colors of daily or darly local monitoring and although it looks very different, it is essentially the same, but again, it just can't see the Bluetooth.

So I had to load the app on my phone and I'll look at it from my phone. So I renamed my Bluetooth dongle Julian 100 Uh, cuz I just felt like it and what it does is it shows you the voltage of the maximum voltage cell, the highest voltage cell, the voltage of the lowest voltage cell, the voltage difference, and of course they're very, very close. Um, but also down here shows you the four cell voltages to three decimal places and although I haven't tested the precise accuracy, it does look pretty good. Um, and I presume courtesy of the A2d conversions in that arm chip.

But yeah, you get to see the highest cell which is in red, the lowest cell which is in blue and the other two cells. and I have seen videos of people using this software with 16ms and it just lists all of the cells in this little panel here, right? Well, the first thing I need to do is unbalance this pack. So I've connected um, my red wire onto a magnet just on cell one. So I'm charging cell one.

Um, I'm using 2 amps and 4 volts so that I don't overcharge that cell. Okay, let's switch that on. You can see one of the uh, passive or yeah, passive balancing LEDs is coming on. Oh I don't know whether I'm interrupting the charging of that uh on the life po 4 BMS but that probably is for another video.

Uh, so I will leave that for a bit to unbalance. Uh oh, that's actually fired up now because it's flashing its green light so it means it's seen the imbalance in the four cells cell one having gone high and it started balancing. Okay, so the difference uh between the highest and lowest cells is now uh, 44 molts and that should increase. It is cell one which I'm charging so that one will start pushing up and we should see this difference parameter increase.

see if the next update shows It as having increased. Yeah, 46 M volts now I can see here state of charge. So this has got Kum counting. Uh, it's also got current and you've got things like charge mosfet is off, the discharge mosfet is off.

but I mean all of this doesn't relate to active balancing. Yes, you've got the balancing is on and you got the balance current as6 amps now I Got a feeling I set this to a lower balance current. you're going to parameters setting and oh, there's a lot of stuff in here but I think it's in control center. Uh, balancing is on.

But yes, I've set the balance current to8 amps Now you can have a maximum of 1 amp so let's set that. Then we got to enter a password 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and it will update and hopefully it will set the balancing current to 1 amp. Uh well, it doesn't appear to have taken that, but if we go back to the status display uh, balance current is 7 amps. No, it didn't take that I Have to say the software on this is.

well, it's largely good, but ever now and again it does strange things and misbehaves. Let's try setting that 1 amp again, right? It's got it this time. so for some reason it didn't take it. Uh, this voltage is the voltage.

Um now I think all cells have to reach this voltage before it Tri triggers balancing which is really strange. You'd think that if one cell were above your threshold voltage, it would start balancing. but no, they all have to be above it. so you probably have to set that a bit lower than you might expect.

And this is, um, it won't balance unless there's more than 20 MTS of uh difference between two cells. So if we go back to here, it is balancing which you can see from the flashing green light because there's 50 molts of difference between uh, the highest and the lowest cells. Now there's all sorts of temperature readings I Seem to remember that the Moss temperature did show and it kind of showed the temperature inside this box, but for some reason that stopped functioning I Don't entirely know why and there are some really weird anomalies. It shows the balance current currently as minus 0.8 amps and this seems to go in uh, tenth of an amp.

So 100 milliamp increments or or decrements. Um, but when it shows- 0.9 amps, it does something really bizarre. I'll try and capture it on camera. Yeah, there it is.

It's minus 0.94 so there's some sort of bizarre calculation uh, rounding error when it shows 0.9 amps 7 on 08. A fine, but 0.9 has this very strange 004 on on the end. um. charge and discharge Cycles Irrelevant because that would only be if we were driving a BMS and a Kolon counter that could detect that you fully charged it and fully discharged it and powering kilowatts? No completely irrelevant to balancing.

Now there are a mass of settings. I'll go through some of them. One interesting thing is that you can turn the balancing off with the balance switch. The charge switch and discharge switch again are related to Bms's so that's irrelevant.

But yes, you can turn the balancing off and therefore, you can use this um, not as a balancer. You can use it just simply to see the voltage of the four cells, which could be quite useful. Okay, parameter protections. So we've got this is: Mo mostly for BMS I Think the upper voltage.

Uh, protect the low voltage protect the charge over current Protect Completely irrelevant for this unit. Discharge over current Protect So none of those are relevant for the active balancer. um. cell type which you can set.

Um, it's currently lithium iron. You can set Lfp and it completely ignores you and stays on lithium ion. You can set the rated capacity of your pack Irrelevant for this application. Uh.

Cell reference voltage irrelevant, waiting time state of charge. Apparently you can set it, but actually you can't because doesn't matter what you enter, it ignores you. Um, don't mess with the board one cell number because if you change it from four on this, uh, 4S balancer, it then doesn't work. Um, you've also got board two number of cells and board three number of cells I Have no idea what? These things are irrelevant to the smart Active Balancer control center.

Um, is the balance current, the threshold and the the Delta uh things. We've seen all of that temperature protections. There's a whole series of Uh 70 minus 40, 70 minus 40 I don't think any of these do anything. Um, this one here temp collect quantity.

You can change that and it does weird things but it's not really relevant and parameter set. Yes, you can change the name of your BMS You can change the protocol type actually and there's a whole series of protocols. nun pylon Growatt So far, Voltronic Power and goodwi you probably recognize some of those names I don't What are they inverters or something like that? Um BMS software upgrade I don't know whether that actually works I don't see how it would I think I think if you do that, it says enter some sort of file and it tells you the firmware version and you can do a factory reset and you can reset that password of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. So masses of stuff in this app a lot of which is completely irrelevant to the function of just uh, active balancing, right? We can now see that the Delta the difference between lowest and highest cells is 70 something Mill volts uh cell one which will be the highest one because that's the one I'm charging is pushing up 3.47 and the other cells are at about 3.4 Yes, they are.

Now here's an interesting thing: Does this balance a balance? As long as you've met the threshold or which is in another page? Isn't it? It was 20 Mill volts. Uh, the threshold where it actually engages balancing. Does it balance with this fixed current of 1 amp? This thing hovers around between 7.8.9 I don't think it's ever shown 1 amp. In other words, can it balance with one amp? even if the difference between the voltages is very small? Now that behavior would be totally different.

Gosh, it's getting dark in here. The sun's well, there's no sun today. Uh, that's the problem. This time of year there's so little light and it lasts for so little time that it's very difficult to film.

Um, this one like I say if the cell voltages quite far apart, it balances at a high current and then that drops off like a exponential decay so that when the cell voltages are very similar. The current that this little unit balances at is is quite tiny. But does this device balance at this? High current. even if the cell voltages are quite close together? Yeah.

I Think it probably might. And looking at that circuitry, it certainly could. Okay, just to finish off, then let's see the actual effect of I Got to remember where is now I Think it's control center. Uh, turning off the balance switch.

So let's turn that off and we should see that flashing light stop flashing and it has. So it's responded to my turning off of balancing. So now this is not doing any balancing, it's really just acting as a cell voltage monitor. Which like I say could make this thing quite useful.

Uh, even if it's not actually active balancing. Okay, probably quite a long video this one, but I did want to just impart everything that I've learned about this smart active balancer and it's corresponding, uh, not so smart. um, just flying capacitor active balancer Uh, and the differences between them and a little bit about what's actually in this and my goodness, is that complicated? Um, and of course youve got the app which uh, controls this and allows you to do all sorts of different things. but I'll leave it there.

Uh, so Cheerio.