Hi, I’m sorting out a group buy at the moment, most likely they will be stocked in the forum shop and sent out to Patreon supporters.
As you only need 1 controller, they are not ideally suited to JLCPCB as you end up with 2 or 5 of them as a minimum order, and the additional parts (screw terminals etc.) can only be ordered in quantities of 50!
Please note that the controller has all the necessary hardware to support lots of features, like the TFT screen, CAN bus etc. but the software still hasn’t been written to enable these functions!
We will need to make the implementation plugable for the CAN bus as each device may use a slightly different message format over the CAN bus. I’d expect something similar in the RS485 implementation as well.
Stuart, Thanks again for your great work! It’s very exciting! Can you be a bit more specific about what is and is not currently implemented on this new board? Most specifically, is the TFT display functional? Is there any real reason to install it now? Thanks . . .
I’m not sure how you’re slotting orders, but I’d be interested in getting on the list. I have a new 64 cell 16S4P battery I’m building and the way this project is moving seems to really fit my needs better than anything else I can Frankenstein together. I need to do a bit more studying, but is there also a group buy happening on cell modules or will 64 be enough to get the “Good Guy” price?
I’m not aware of any group buy on the cell modules. But with the current module files you would need to submit multiple orders to JLCPCB as they limit to a maximum of 30 PCBs for assembly. @stuart didn’t you create a set of gerber files that were panelized?
I don’t have a list of people yet but I believe there are at most ten people who have expressed interest in the controllers within the USA / Canada area. Once I have the boards in hand and do some basic sanity testing on a couple of them I’ll post them up for others.
The display will switch on and show the diyBMS logo at the moment, but nothing more. I wouldn’t add it at this time.
As you can imagine, the controller had to be designed and built to support lots of external interfaces. I’ve hand tested each of these using sample code, so they work, but now the fun starts with coding these into the main controller code.
At present, the new controller features which are enabled are:
Relay outputs (similar to the old controller)
Emergency Stop input
Module TX/RX connections
SD Card logging
AVR programming interface (so you can program the modules directly from the web page)
Existing core features like Wifi/MQTT logging etc. all working
So the TFT, CAN BUS and RS485 and extra inputs are not yet enabled.
These two have slightly different footprints and due to that I don’t think they will work. You might be able to order the MicroSD part from Mouser or DigiKey. Note that both of these are around 3x the cost as LCSC.