Hi,

I'm building an electric motorcycle with 12kW motor and about max 95V battery voltage, and looking for suitable batteries..

As you know I have a few Think Enerdel packs. I could build a 22S pack with these cells to get correct voltage. But I need about 150A current.

"Think City Enerdel Battery Service Manual.pdf" says maximum current for the pack is 140A. But this is for the entire pack, where there's two "chains" of modules in parallel! So for single module the current would be only 70A.

But then again the 140A limit might simple be because there's 170A fuse and the contactors have 200A limit if I remember correctly.. So 140A might not be the module limit but pack limit?

So, anyone know for sure, or do I just try it and after the explosion decide to get some other batteries? 

Hi!

I'd like to introduce my cars.

I bought the red one in 2020. It had only 25000km in the odo. Here it is, the day it arrived:



First thing that struck me was how incredibly high the suspension is.



I was the official Finnish importer of K-Sport suspensions at the time. So I figured I would lower the car. I bought 106 coilover set and installed it. Rear needed some work because it's really from 206 and not 106, but the struts fitted with some work. Rear lowering is done by adjusting the tension bars, but you need shorter dampers.

Front uses the lower part of the original strut, but the top half is changed to a coilover.

Anyway, car looked cool now. I also bought 15" wheels!



In August we bought a Tesla Model S too. And my kid already had a Twizy 45. Missing in this family photo is my EV-converted Datsun 100A, we ran out of drivers.



Everything went well for over a year. My wife used the car to drive to work every day, even in winter time. Ground clearance was a bit of a issue in the winter, though.

However. We have a big stone in the road that goes behind our shed. Everyone knows it's there and knows you must not drive into it. Except for my kid that started car license learning and I forgot to warn him, and he drove straight to the stone. Doh! There was a big dent in the battery box, which I fixed with Sikaflex:



Car drove fine even with the dent, so I thought nothing of it. Car had no issues for entire summer of 2021. But then in August 2021 we had a baby (fourth child) and wife has been at home after that, and Think was not used for the winter. At spring 2022 I thought I'd drive the car, but it had died during the winter. Battery problem..

I'm not sure if the dent had anything to do with it, but surely it didn't help.

(story continues)

Hi,

just thought I'd share this with you. I needed a CAN adapter for Think diagnostics and to be able to program RLEC ID with ProgTool.

I thought I'd try first with cheapest possible chinese adapter before buying a real PCAN.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005721849902.html

Well, it wasn't THAT cheap when I bought it, seems to be 50% discount at the moment! Only 11.93€ including shipping!

Anyway it claims to be PCAN compatible and is very small etc.

I had a spare OBD connector casing, I figured it would be very compact device when built inside there. Here's some pictures of the process.

Du kan ikke vise dette vedlegget.

The board fits very nicely to the OBD casing when I used a saw to cut small lines near the wire exit hole. They hold the board nicely. I added small foam padding to make the board sit more tightly.

Du kan ikke vise dette vedlegget.

Wiring is simple, just CANH, CANL and GND.

Du kan ikke vise dette vedlegget.

Anyway. I installed PCAN software and drivers and the drivers recognize this device as PCAN USB Pro... At least PCAN-View works nicely, and also I managed to now change RLEC ID with ProgTool which was the main purpose I bought this. So everything fine!


Oh I also have this kind of adapter to fit RLEC ribbon cable to OBD reader.

Du kan ikke vise dette vedlegget.

Hi,

I'm running a company Z-Power in Finland. I specialize in all kind of car electronics and chip tuning, but I also have 30 years of experience in all kinds of electronics design.

I have two broken Think Citys with Enerdel battery. Both batteries are broken but it seems I am able to combine them into one working, but I will be using all of my RLEC boards.

RLEC boards seem to be very badly designed because they break almost instantly if there is any leakage between channels (water damage).. Then they start draining the battery cells and eventually destroy the cell. Even if you can find new RLEC boards it's very likely to break again.

I know how the CAN messaging works between MLEC and RLECs. It would be reasonably easy to redesign the RLEC with modern technology, which is much simpler (=cheaper) and more reliable.

I was thinking of L9963E chip from ST:
https://www.digikey.co.uk/en/products/detail/stmicroelectronics/L9963E-TR/13986399

It's interesting because it has practically everything RLEC need in a single chip, and several L9963E's can be daisy chained with isolated SPI bus. So only single CAN->SPI bridge processor is needed to communicate between MLEC and the "master" RLEC. This also cuts down costs as the isolated CANbus drivers in original RLECs are expensive.

These new RLECs would be reasonably priced, perhaps about 30-50€ piece depending on quantity. So you need 16 of them and then the CAN converter box (which probably would be integrated to one RLEC).

However, this will take some design effort and I'm pondering if it's worth it. Do you think there is still enough of these cars?