The Best $125/Kwh DIY Powerwall On the Planet

the scooter battery what is the scooter battery well is this battery pack here that is 36 volts and it comes off of a scooter one of these guys uh if you have been paying attention for the past couple years there are several companies that have been dropping hundreds of thousands of these in cities across the u.s and across the world actually but for one reason or another eventually these end up in scrap yards in this case this company here sold the entire division of scooters to another company and as a result of that the new company doesn't want these on the street because they have the wrong logo and so as a result of that then there are just tons of this stuff that's available to anyone that wants to buy it the average person doesn't know what to do with this stuff right this is a 10 pound paperweight but to us well we know batteries and so we can figure out how to use them right that's a good thing because this is probably a two three hundred dollar battery pack that now we can get for about fifty dollars so today i'm going to show you the work that's been going uh in the background to try to figure out how to use these because this is all proprietary uh hardware that has software in there and so as a result of that these batteries are kind of dead they don't have power they have the connector here but if you connect something in there they're just nothing and so it takes a little bit of work to wake them up and to figure out how to use them right so that's what we're gonna do today all right first step we gotta wake these guys up both of these are dormant right i have plugged in a meter here and another one here and it doesn't show any power how do you wake them up that's easy all you have to do is apply power to the charging port or to the discharging port but they kind of react different let me show you here i'm just going to use a 2 amp 42 volt 2 amp charger these are 42 volts batteries and it does it at two amps and it's got a little light here right so let's try this one first so when this light turns red it takes a little while then hopefully this will okay here we go just turn red which means now it's charging and now this battery is awake it's a 33 volts 33.6 volts which is pretty low so now you should be able to disconnect that ah it doesn't stay on sometimes it stays on let's try it again i think what happens is that it's too low once you can get the voltage up higher then this will stay on but this is the quickest way to wake them up let's try another way now the other way is to go through the discharging port right let's try that so here we go it's charging 34.81 but it's the same thing these batteries are too dead once the voltage goes higher then it will stay on now what are the differences here well i haven't seen too many differences but through this port through the charging port you could only charge it at max speed of 5 amps if you put 6 amps in here then the bms will turn itself off and it'll stop charging through this port you can do up to 25 amps all right here now is a battery that i fully charged or at least 90 percent when you connect the meter on this one it comes on which means is awake the problem is here let me show you what happens i'm going to put a load on this one right i'm going to try to charge this one which is at a lower state of charge from this one there you go connected and look at that you see that it's charging see that is charging but here's what happens after five seconds or about six seconds i think it quits here's what will happen in about a minute right exactly a minute after it came off it will turn right back on and then it'll stay on for six seconds and then it'll come back off again and it will do this at least 20 times maybe indefinitely i don't know but at one point it will stop because these were dead when we got them but maybe it it stops once it gets like to the batteries are really low but i stopped counting around 20 cycles there we go turn right back on right and then six seconds boom turns right back off another minute it'll turn right back on that'll turn so that is the problem with these batteries that they need a signal on this pin right here the blue pin they need a signal to stay on and so now to be able to provide the signal that it needs let's go to the desk now a few days ago i made a video asking you guys if anyone out there knew how to wake these batteries up right and a lot of you guys commented and sent me messages right but the very first person to actually send me a kind of well a video this was brad cagle brad cagle sent me a video where he showed me his uh his battery working hi jehu um i got this thing to work i just went to bed last night but uh yeah i broke out one of the arduinos um this is a five volt one my arduino is on and it should be sending pulses uh that that uh bike string to the battery pack every five seconds okay so he basically got his working uh with this e-bike right and what he did is also he told me exactly what he did he got an arduino uh nano and then he you know he programmed it with the bite that everyone was sharing saying that that's what it was here i sent them this picture showing that the blue wire was the receiver pin so then that's the one that needed to hook up to the arduino right and then something very important he's the only person or one of two people that sent me an actual code here right the the little sketch that uh which is a little part of code that you are supposed to load up into the arduino so there we go i got myself an arduino let me show you how to load up that little sketch into it it's pretty simple but nonetheless there's a lot of people like me that don't know much about this stuff and i'm gonna show you exactly how i did it first things first you have to copy this code that he sent me here and by the way i posted this code up on js diy power walls group and facebook right so if you need to get it i post it in there there's a post and you can go get it so here we go after that what you do is you load up the arduino app you have to go and download it and there's other stuff right i tried this code in two different arduinos this is the one that he used first i didn't have this at first i only had an uno and for some reason i couldn't get this code to work on the uno i don't know if it's just this particular one or that code needs to be uh just modified slightly to work with the uno but i couldn't get it to work but i did get it to work with the nano so here's what you do you connect the nano with the little usb cable and then you connect that into your computer here here we go and now it's got power so here's what you do here's something that you will do this thing already has a very simple piece of sketch or a piece of code in here that tells this pin that port to blink this is the the very basic blinking led right and so that's lo preloaded in here so what you can do is once you have it connected in here in order to make sure that you are connected to this and you are communicating with it i am going to modify that blink code and i'm gonna visually see that light uh change right and so that's just to make sure that i am actually communicating so you go to this open this sketch thing here you go to basics and then there's a blink and here's the code it's very simple right and then what you can go and do here at the very bottom says delayed 1000 and then delay 1000 so that's uh how long is this little light supposed to be on it's uh you know one second and then one second off so if you change that you just delete one zero right oh here you go so if you delete one zero now it's going to state now it's going to change the way that this light lights up right now it's one second on one second off one second on once it so then what you do is now you upload that right and then all these little lights flash in here and there we go see now it stays off for a whole second but then it stays on for only one one tenth or one hundredth of a second whatever it's like yeah 100 milliseconds to 1000 milliseconds right so so there you go now we know that we are communicating with it and so now what you can do is now you can delete all this stuff right boom so here i just pasted that code that i was sent right all the way from the very word that says void setup right and now what i'm going to do is i'm going to load this one into the arduino here we go ah come on whatever don't say that just upload it okay so did it right so here we go now that little light is not blinking but what it is blinking every five seconds the tx which is the transmitter pin now that's blinking every five seconds it means it's sending a signal and the signal that it's sending is this right here right uh if you're watching this and if you know how to do this you know just bear with us this is for us beginners that don't know much about coding and people that haven't done it but once you do that all you have to do is now connect the tx pin to that blue uh pin on the battery and then uh get the ground to the ground or the battery right the ground pin to do and then you just gotta provide power via the usb so let's go check the batteries now see if we can wake them up all right so here we go now i have made this little wire and um i have put these little pins on the uh arduino there the ground pin goes to the ground on the battery here and then the blue one goes to the uh transmitter tx right these are a couple of capacitors uh these are a couple of resistors to lower down the five volts to 3.3 volts that it requires here now i did this because brad did that and he specified that on his little video uh i also tried it without these um resistors and it also works now i don't know long term maybe a thing it's only a volt and a half but i don't know this at this level maybe this uh electronics are super sensitive and it'll eventually burn it out there's also uh another arduino board the mini pro which is also 3.3 volts instead of 5 volts like this one and so maybe that is a thing that we'll do in the future but for right now we're using this one because that code works on that one and we'll figure it out so another thing to figure out of course is how to power it this right here the positive uh we need to figure out how to get it from 42 volts when it's fully charged down to 3.3 volts or 5 volts right just to power this arduino here uh i've ordered some uh this small dc to dc little board uh it's gonna take some time to get here so for now what we're gonna do is luckily this little meter here has a function that says usb charge and it'll take the voltage from the battery and it'll spit it out through this usb port right and that's a usb charge function so all i'm going to do is going to connect my usb cable right here and then connect it to the arduino and then just click on the start usb charge and just like that that made it power up and so now this arduino now is pitting out those commands right that's it's that little those little things that it's doing so now let's test this now this battery should stay on because it's getting the signal that it wants every five seconds right and so now we should be able to now charge our secondary battery there we go is charging it right and here we go for more than five seconds and it hasn't turned off right and now that should stay on indefinitely because now it's getting the signal that it wants so just like that it's that easy as long as that thing is powered as long as that's spitting out that code uh those signals and then this battery is receiving it it'll stay on and now you can charge through this port or you can charge through this port right at this point i don't know why we would want to charge slow charge on this port i would say just charge through the same one right because you can go in and out faster because it's got all the mosfets there so we could essentially just cut this wire and just you know pretend that it wasn't there um or you can use it it's up to you guys but you don't have to you could literally go in and out through that same uh port now now that we have this running it's putting uh nine amps right and of course i did these tests and right as soon as you go above 25 amps through this then it shuts down the bms protects itself as soon as you try to charge faster than 5 amps here this bms also turns itself off if the battery gets too hot this will turn itself off if the battery is hot it won't charge but you can leave the charger connected there and after the battery uh cools off then it'll start charging automatically and so this this bms that's built in here it's pretty good um it's pretty safe especially if you leave them like that now what can you do can you run multiple of these units with a single uh arduino well i think so but of course the only way to find out is to try it so let's go try that right now all right so here we go now we have a similar setup that we have last time but slightly different right we just have more so here we go same arduino right now this time without the uh the resistors they're just going straight so it's spitting out five volts into the 3 volt systems here and i'm thinking that maybe because it's got to go and split right so here's the signal it goes to this one to that one and then it goes over here and to that one it's just running parallel right daisy chaining so i'm thinking that maybe because it has to feed all of these 10 battery packs the 5 volts is going to be fine i don't know that's the case but we will i guess time will will tell right so here we go now we're going to plug in this bank of inverters this is uh 4 000 watts and here's our little meter that tells us the uh the voltage of each of the whole pack it's at 40 volts right now uh i didn't charge it all 100 all the way up but it doesn't matter so let's see how well it handles in rush these inverters all have a bank of capacitors and so when you connect them to the battery for the first time it has to charge them and you will see a sizeable spark it's not great because it doesn't it just eats up your your you know your connectors but uh there's ways to pre-charge these uh with like a resistor um yeah there's different ways right but we don't have any right now let's see how well it handles i'm thinking that each one of these can do 25 amps of inrush and so there's 10 of them so you should be able to to you know do a 250 amps of inrush which is kind of scary to be able to do that on a connector like this but i've done it before here's the spark to prove it hopefully you know it's not too bad uh because then it just destroys the connectors and it could get a bit dangerous because of the flash right arcing and stuff but let's see i feel brave tonight let's do this thing there we go okay so yes there we go there we go what's going on oh 23 volts oh it's not they're turning on and off they're all turning on and off it didn't do it it uh wow look at that it didn't handle the inrush very well damn okay that sucks so now we gotta wait and see if these batteries will start coming back on right a minute it'll take usually about a minute for the first one that turn itself off to turn back on and then hopefully that's gonna turn on this guy that's gonna turn this guy on and then it's it's gonna daisy chain the whole thing right let's see if it happens if not then we're gonna have to wake these batteries up individually by putting a charge on the charging ports here so now it's been more than a minute and these have not turned themselves on too i guess we're gonna have to go manually turn them on that kind of sucks okay and we're gonna do that again with our little charger right so we'll just plug it in here all right there we go come on once this turns there we go so it's charging but you know what this did not oh there we go there it is now that turned on this turn on right did all of them turn on i don't know huh you know what i'm only gonna turn one on let's try something else all right so i have set this power supply here to 42 volts uh i am going to plug it in and let it slowly charge those capacitors and then once these are charged then i'll connect the batteries right and then hopefully that's gonna work so here we go there we go there we go well that's that says 42 volts that should be charged now 42.2 okay so now we should have those capacitors charged there shouldn't be any spark here now let's plug it in let's see if we can turn all of these other batteries as far as i know only one of them is on right okay so now what i'm going to do is connect one of these and see if we see a load and uh this single battery should be able to support that load so it's showing one amp right now and then we'll go and see which ones are these are on so there we go six seven twenty two twenty three this is doing 24 amps so the way we're going to find out where that power is coming from is by measuring each individual battery here so there we go there's 3.6 amps coming from that one battery pack let's pick the other one here 3.7 or 3.5 amps from the other one so it seems like more batteries are woken at this point now there we go 3.8 is coming from that battery here we go where's that one in there 3.9 from that battery uh what 1.6 from this battery huh i wonder why this one is uh 1.7 from this one right here yeah 1.7 i don't know why that is and we go there's five amps coming from this side of the board which means that these are also 1.3 1.2 1.3 on this last one and 1.1 all right so it seems like the farther we are than uh the least amount that uh there so this might not be the greatest setup that i have here but now let's connect a bigger load here okay i just connected us the second uh inverter here and is coming up now oh look at that 50 amps i've brought it up to 50 amps let's connect the third one in here uh yeah these are 10 should be able to support up to 200 amps the batteries the wiring and stuff here maybe not so much here we go i connected the third one there we go 83 amps coming off of that let's see what these guys are doing yeah so that's just what's happening let's connect the last one in here we go 115 amps there we go we're we're doing 4 300 watts off of these 10 packs right here all right so after uh 20 minutes you know they're running fine the extension cords are warm the uh the dc low voltage wires those are hot look at that like 50 degrees right there but those batteries are staying pretty pretty even pretty even the inverters too i mean they're they're it's not that much we're running them at four forty two hundred watts right that's that's not much that's less than one c on the that's about forty five hundred uh or four point five kilowatt hours worth of battery so this yes 1c it'll last about an hour like this so we've removed one fifth of the power the energy right now uh yeah these batteries are awesome so there you go these are probably now going to be the easiest way and one of the most affordable ways to put a large battery system together right you literally grab these and throw them up in the wall just screw them they have screw holes right here already right but kind of but the possibilities are kind of endless i mean you can use these as e-bike batteries because that's what they are uh using a scooter batteries because that's what they are uh power walls right but here's what i'm thinking i want say six of these in our little box here that we have man that's that's three kilowatt hours right there 36 volts yes you know that's gonna be pretty cool we're gonna probably offer those start putting them in there and uh offer just another variant of that yes and the cool thing is that there's plenty of these if you have in mind a big project we have plenty of them and we have another two truckloads of those coming so yes it's pretty exciting times for building diy power walls or diy battery systems i hope this video helped you out i hope uh you can get what we did here if not i think if you're not into you know coding this thing if you feel that this is not for you or whatever i think we're going to offer these already pre-loaded with the little wire with the with the software with the code on there and then you can just you know connect them to your batteries and then use them the way it is just to make it easier for everyone to use these batteries all right thank you for joining me uh if you're building a diy system make sure you share it with the world share with us it helps us to stay motivated and helps us to stay uh inspired by all of your projects right and so go to the facebook group juice diy power walls on facebook and then share it there all right thank you for joining me we'll see you in the next video bye

Channel: jehugarcia

Views: 82,677

Rating: 4.8534884 out of 5

Keywords: lumix, e-bike, ebike, electric skateboard, boosted, board, elon musk, gigafactory, tesla model 3, model, 2170, car, mods, diy car, diy, renewable energy, renewable, li-ion, lithium, ion, battery, tesla, swap, tesla battery, powerwall, volkswagen, carros, samba, van, solar, 18650, dead battery, TESLA, motors, ev, electric

Id: UmXgEoOm5y8

Length: 29min 19sec (1759 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/radfordra1]

I would not do the things in this video.

One. there are easier options to get used scooter batteries. The M365 battery pack is about $60 on eBay right now (usually are) they don't require a 5v wake signal to use. Literally plug and play once you solder the discharge and charge ports on.

Second. Using one charge port to charge multiple batteries is a great way to kill the BMS.

Third. Even with good cells this seems demonstrably unsafe.

[u/lightsuitman]

I almost got some of these to build a spare pack, then calculated that the cost outlay of other DIY battery pack options, including the 52V 27100 pack I'd just built, can still be as good or better. Depending on how you many cells you need vs. the 40 cell pack you rebuild in this deal (plus a new BMS). Great for 36V, though.

So, potentially a great value for ebikes if you won't end up with 20 or 30 extra cells after building the pack you need. Otherwise buying by the cell may be a better deal even if per unit price is higher.