LiFePo4 BMS - Unknown Manufacturer and Questions

ninetyeighter

100 µW
Joined
Jul 12, 2021
Messages
8
Hi all,

First post, so to start off, I have been reading/searching here and everywhere for possible answers to my question(s). I am completely new to BMS's, don't have an EE background, but tinker enough that I can hack my way through stuff. Anyway, I'll try to make a long story short.

My friend won an auction recently for these 3-wheeled scooters called the EcoSpin Raptor. They were also licensed as the Vectrix ES3 in the US. EcoSpin was based in the UK and received street legal status for them. For that to occur, from what I understand, they had to pass some fairly strict automotive standards. The scooter has a Sevcon Gen4 master and slave, a Curtis Engage VII, and two independent 2kw motors for each rear wheel. Unfortunately, the company went out of business in 2015 or 2016, I think and as a result, there are no parts and very little information on them available. And there are certainly no way to get batteries for them.

The auction came with 8 or 9 battery packs for the 4 scooters. These packs are LiFePo4 1kw (48v 20ah). The Raptor has three "slots" for these batteries and can be charged offline and swapped in and out for no downtime. It can run on one battery pack with speed/distance limitations and can run longer, obviously, and faster with 2 or 3 packs. Of these 8 battery backs, by some miracle, 4 of them work perfectly. The others, I disassembled to attempt to create a new pack with the good cells. If you saw some of the corrosion, dampness, and smell of these packs, you'd be shocked there was even one good cell.

That said, I managed to get the 112 cells I need and have created a pack. Now, the BMS. I have 4 BMS's from the disassembled packs. They are all the same, except for one, which is a previous revision. All of them have a "B16L Vxx" marking, where xx is the version. All of them are "11" except for one that is "02". They also have the date. All of them are "20140110" except the previous revision, which is 20131121. I am unable to find ANYTHING that looks like it online. My best guess is that it is an OEM made by Bestech, but that is based on nothing other than "it looks like some of the other pictures" ... but I could say that about SuPower and others.

Well, so much for the long story short. I am trying to find information on these things. I have hooked them up to the new battery pack but the Raptor isn't recognizing them. As a test, I removed the BMS and hooked it up to the scooter. It showed full charge but I received a "BMS not connected" error on the Curtis screen. My lack of BMS experience is preventing me from knowing the best way to test these things other than making sure all of the voltages at each balance port is fine (which it is). There is a UART connection and an I2C (I think ... SDA, SCL?). I tried hooking up a BusPirate to it but I didn't get anything as I am not even sure how to power it up or determine if the UART is even working.

Here are some pictures. If you make it this far, thanks for reading!


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Hi! I have two ecospin ratpor batteries. Can you rebuild them if they are not working? Thanks!
 
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