Good morning, all this is an 8 s. Bms um, it's specifically a life pro 4 8 sbms. I bought it on ebay from a chap in the uk um for 99 pounds quite expensive, but then it is 100 amps. Look at those ring terminals.

So, what's this thing got um well, two monster great uh power cables or high current cables. There are two temperature sensors here which run into two pin jsts on the side. It's supplied with this, which is a bluetooth dongle, i suppose, which plugs into that socket there, and it all also comes with a nine-way cable, which is actually curiously soldered into a 11-way header. So i suppose they're using a common pcb for a 10s bms and an 8s bms and they've just left a couple of gaps in here.

In fact, if you look on the underside of this board, there's a couple of solder bridges where they've bridged those gaps, but anyway this is the 8sbms. Let's power it up and see what it does. The thing is, i don't really want to disturb the 8 cell. Lifepro 4 battery pack that i've got in the shed and bring it all in here and disconnect everything.

So i was thinking. Is there a simpler way? I could test this, so i was thinking about these sorts of things. These lipo testers, and particularly these led ones. Now, as i remember it, these are powered from the first two cells and of course that makes sense, because although this can check eight voltages on nine pins um, it works just as well on a 2s or 3s battery.

In fact here's a 3s battery pack. So, let's just check this out: that's negative there! Oh that's very loud! So that's saying a three c s whatever that means, and it shows you the number one number two and number three voltages and then all and then back to number one. So this needs to be powered from the low end, pins uh in case you are not using an 8s pack, so i was just wondering whether that might possibly apply to this. Then i thought no.

This is sort of nice and professional and also it's only intended to work with eight cells. So i'm, supposing that this is probably going to take its power. You know for the microcontroller and all the circuitry from the red and black on here, which are the outer extremes of this connector. So on that assumption, i need to find something with eight cells.

That's gon na make this fire up and we can look at the um, the app on a device and do it through bluetooth and all that stuff. And then i thought what about this? Nine cells, yeah they're super capacitors and yeah. They only go up to 2.7 volts, but if i charge this thing fully solder these wires onto well eight of these capacitors across eight, that's nine wires charge this up to the top. This will see it, and this should power up.

Uh it'll be about 21 volts or something like that. It's going to show that all the cells are very low, but that doesn't matter it just gets the thing running. I just want to see if this works check out the app and see what sort of features it has. So, let's do this? I've got my buck boost there.

I can put my 12 volts in there yeah. My 12 volt battery still seems to be working. Oh, in fact it's 12.5 um. I can take uh a thing off there.

Now i found this in my box of lithium stuff, so that can go into those and then, if i put an xc60 on there, i don't think i now bother with anti-back feed diodes to protect the power supply, because i've never had an issue with that. So i think we can hook this thing up directly to the output of this power supply charge. This thing up probably take those bulbs off sold all the wires of this onto the pos of each of these caps, oh and the most negative around here and see. If that bms works, let's get going so xt, 60s and 90s, i can see these are going to get used up quite quickly, um but, like i said, i ordered 10 sets of these, and the chat gave me 15 for some bizarre reason, not complaining uh, so That will plug into there.

So i just need to put a couple of um spade terminals in there and have it hang off the back end of there. Let's do it. I've put a couple of spade terminals in there and now pauses the flat side. Isn't it on here? So if i just shove that on there and solder it that's it simples right, that's soldered uh onto there, so i can now well just check this.

I've set it to 26 volts one amp, so that will charge that up. But what i really want to do now, solder these nine wires onto the supercat block, ignoring the last capacitor. I don't know if you remember, but this one had a lazy cap which is always slow to come up, so i've got extra connections on there to sort of experiment with it, but that well, that could be quite interesting. Actually, if it's a bit slow to come up, bms should show that on its graphical user interface, well, i've started to solder the wires on.

But now i'm just thinking, what's the sequence of these, i think it is these three, but then it seems to go over there and then it seems to go over there. So does it go in a funny wiggle, i don't know perhaps i'll charge it to. I don't know half a volt and measure some points on here. Well, that is 72 millivolts.

That's 300 millivolts! Oh, that's, not very easy! Is it right? That's the wires on decided to use the power supply to charge it to nine volts. That's one volt per capacitor and that'll make it um a bit easier to just run along here and see that they're all in sequence right. That's nearly at 9 volts 8.6: let's go across these 0.9. 1.8.

2.8. 3.8. 4.89. 5.8.

6.8. 7.8. Eight! Yes, of course, it's nine volts over nine capacitors, so the top one will be eight volts. Okay, it looks like i've got them in the right sequence, let's plug it in to the bms.

Okay, live on camera. Now there is only nine volts across there or eight volts across here, so it's very low, but it might fire up the microcontroller. Of course it might all explode, that's the other possibility, it doesn't actually say it says: bc naught there next to and zero yeah. So that's definitely negative.

Let's plug it in and see what happens. Oh, it's quite tight there! Well that's plugged in interesting! Well, i suppose i should plug in the uh bluetooth dongle, which i think has a little led on it. Let's see if that lights up. That goes in there.

No, it doesn't light up. So let's take the voltage across this uh further up at 12. Volts that still hasn't illuminated, there's plus on that v bus is the red wire that looks about right. So i don't know whether it needs close to the 24 volts to burst into life, but it ain't doing anything just yet i'll leave it for a bit well now to 20.

Nearly 22 volts still no light on this, but maybe that's an activity light rather than a power led no leds on the bms. So nothing really to see. So i suppose i should go and get the app which i've installed on my tablet and see if it can see it right, can it see anything? Oh i've switched off the power supply. Let's turn that back on signal very weak, oh strong.

Let's pick that one use gps to test speed: gps, no uh, oh well, that doesn't tell me a lot. Does it what's in here, dashboard? Okay, that was that battery state whoa average voltage 0.19. That's weird parameter view haram's loading. Well, i don't really know my way around this.

Yet so perhaps oh, that's not very visual. Is it uh param setting so there's a lot of things you can um set anyway? It seems to be talking to it. I'll have a bit of a play and come back well, this seems to be a problem. We've got battery voltage here and they're all measuring 0.1 volts.

Well, that's not quite right. The lazy cap hasn't actually come up, yet i don't know whether that's going to be visible, but it has all the little leds are on all the other, eight caps, but the the bad one the led hasn't come on. Yet so perhaps i'll wait for that to come on, but i don't know whether there's some sort of refresh maybe just pulling the plug out and rebooting. It might be.

The answer we'll see: yeah, i'm still struggling a bit. Don't quite understand this, but i have found this graph, which is a current graph. Actually, it shows current at zero and on the voltage line. Um voltage is blue there.

It shows it went up to 13.6 very briefly and then came back to zero or very near zero. Actually, it's a negative. No, it's not negative. It's um! 1.5 still, don't quite know.

What's going on one possibility when i'm measuring continuity between b minus on the blue wire and the zero point on the uh, 10-way or nine-way connector, there's no continuity there. So do i have to connect this to the most negative point on the battery they're not linked. Like they were on that daily bms, so i'm going to link them, i'm going to link there, which is the most negative point on the battery, wait for the spark no spark to there and plug this in again and see if that changes. Anything let's find out.

Ah, that's done it and there is my lazy capacitor and i can see the voltage of it now. So that's interesting uh, unlike the daily bms, it doesn't seem to be any intrinsic within the unit connection between b minus and the balance leads they're kind of floating. With respect to most negative point ground on here now, i've got some voltages that looks a bit more like it, not sure why that one's flicking on and off but uh there we are. Oh, i think that's telling me the lowest and the highest, so the highest is 2.686 and the lowest is 2.406.

I think i should probably wait for the lowest one to come up. I'm sure it will but yeah. That's that we're getting there now there's an absolute massive parameters here: overvoltage 3.65 over voltage release 3.5 over voltage release delay two seconds under voltage 2.5 under voltage release three, so it needs to drift back up to three under voltage. Release delay two seconds back over voltage.

29 hack over voltage release 28 hack over voltage, release delay two seconds. I mean it's just masses of it and i can scroll up and there's masses more there's so much stuff in here. It's crazy and in the basic pack, information. 21.13, that's very low.

For eight s, lithium ion phosphate, there's no current. Of course. It's an 8s pack, average voltage is 2.64, but one of the cells is still very low as a result of that the charging switch is on and the discharge switch is off. So you can't discharge this pack um, but i can charge it.

I mean i'm charging it anyway separately through these banana plugs temperature number. There are two of them: ah they're, both reading correctly now 22.3 and 22.5 date no cycles nominal capacity. I suppose we can set that remaining capacity, nothing percentage capacity, not percent and cell over voltage. No interesting now i did see that there's a newer version of this app and from watching off-grid garage.

It looks prettier and everything's on one page, so i'm going to attempt to install that. I can't even remember how i installed this it. You don't download it from the play store. You have to install it from an apk file.

I believe it is i'll give that a go and that'll give cell 2, which is my lazy capacitor time to come up i'll. Do that now, um yeah, this version of the app is a bit prettier um. That's an ammeter voltage, total voltage temperature, probably the average of the two sensors, and it says that the charging fet is on the discharge. 30 is off and it shows the cells as much more empty this time, but the voltages are all there so i'll head into some parameters.

I think - and this is quite nice i can turn off the charging fet or fetch. There are a lot of them and that stays i can turn it back on for charging not hitting it properly. If i tried to turn on the discharge, it turns itself back off because it doesn't like cell 2, and neither do i there are some voltages here for different percentages. 80.

3.329. Sixty percent three point: three, two: two: forty percent. Three, two three point: two: nine one and twenty percent three point: two: six: six! Well, i'm down at two point: six volts, so it's obviously showing it as zero percent. Well, there's clearly a huge amount of stuff.

You can do with this. If i go into uh parameter settings there are 52 parameters. I can change, i mean that's a huge number, all sorts of stuff. I suppose i ought to first write down all the parameters that are preset into this.

Actually, there probably is a reset parameters button somewhere so that you can reset all the defaults. I think i'll look for that. Well, there are some uh preset parameter sets. So if i do polymer light, we've got 4.2 polymer, normal 4.25 life, pro 4, normal 3.65 and life pro 4 lite 3.6.

Now i could lower the under voltage. So let's do life pro 4 light. That's 2.75 um! Let's go for something like 2.5 and then i think i press the tick to set it um, but i also want to change the low setting for the percentages uh. Where are they think they're under there? Where are the percentages yeah here? So i want to set this uh 20 voltage really low so that it shows uh something on the bar graphs.

So let's go for something like 2.5 nope missed 2.5, and what did i set my low voltage to uh it's in there somewhere? I have 2.5. So let's say that's okay, it appears to be writing the parameters into the unit. I can always go back to the previous settings. I think i don't know actually and let's have a look at the home screen.

Oh, it doesn't seem to have changed the percentage indicators here. Oh well, so now i've turned off the um power supply to charge the capacitors, so they're discharging and we're down to 13.3 on the pack and i'm kind of waiting. Until i don't know, the microcontroller just stops measuring properly that dodgy capacitor capacitors really bad everything else at 1.8 and that's gone down to 0.47. I was thinking i might shift it actually from that position up to the top position um just for this, but i can see how this works from this experiment.

I mean, obviously, i'm not seeing the percentages very accurately, but uh. Yes, i just think this is a bit over the top for my current um life, pro 4 setup with the ant miner and the solar connection it just it does far more than i need it to do. I mean it's massively configurable, but i just don't think it's appropriate for the simple setup. I've got in the shed so i'll sit on this for a bit and maybe if i build a more complex and bigger setup, i might come back to this bms, but it just seems a bit over the top for what i'm doing at the moment, but uh Anyway, that was my first look at this 99 pound bms.

So for the moment, cheerio.