Remote Power Mania
Init for the CAD larp-
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2020
- Messages
- 29
Hi fellow battery power enthusiasts. New here, but I arrived with goodies.
I thought people might find the inside of a Powerlab8 to be interesting. My electronics experience is pretty weak so I could not identify much of what is going on in the little beast [1000w 8s active balanced charging, fully programable, parallelable, etc]. I know these will not be found in the Solar community but in the rc realm this thing is definitely a legendary piece of kit.
The big surprise, for me at least, is that it appears to be purely microcontroller based--as in no dedicated bms/charger custom ic. There are two Ti mcu's from the same family with different IO counts. One has a massive 40+ IO pins and the other has 10. Aside from that there are three analogue multiplexers which I suppose is to be expected. I was not able to identify what any of the mosfets are unfortunately. But anyway, I just thought it was pretty cool how everything is bespoke logic on general purpose mcu's.
I have never actually run the thing but I'm planning on using it to manage either an 18650 or a 21700 custom pack. I'm still hashing out the concept but the Powerlab's 8s balancing makes an 8s based strategy the obvious first choice for cell config. I stripped it because the form-factor is just not very appealing for an onboard pack scenario. The general idea is to build an aluminum pack and use that as the heat sink for the charger. It's been about a year since taken apart, so if I don't get it into something soon it will probably be a lost cause!
Okay, thanks for checking out my toy that I hopefully did not break. Would love to hear any and all details on how this puppy ticks. Recently I am learning basic circuitboard design and will be taking some electronics classes over the next four months, so this is all very fascinating to learn about. Please be on the lookout for my future pack design posts as I plan on doing some pretty extreme builds based on several years of NASA r&d into thermal control and "ejecta" mitigation.
Remote Power Mania
I thought people might find the inside of a Powerlab8 to be interesting. My electronics experience is pretty weak so I could not identify much of what is going on in the little beast [1000w 8s active balanced charging, fully programable, parallelable, etc]. I know these will not be found in the Solar community but in the rc realm this thing is definitely a legendary piece of kit.
The big surprise, for me at least, is that it appears to be purely microcontroller based--as in no dedicated bms/charger custom ic. There are two Ti mcu's from the same family with different IO counts. One has a massive 40+ IO pins and the other has 10. Aside from that there are three analogue multiplexers which I suppose is to be expected. I was not able to identify what any of the mosfets are unfortunately. But anyway, I just thought it was pretty cool how everything is bespoke logic on general purpose mcu's.
I have never actually run the thing but I'm planning on using it to manage either an 18650 or a 21700 custom pack. I'm still hashing out the concept but the Powerlab's 8s balancing makes an 8s based strategy the obvious first choice for cell config. I stripped it because the form-factor is just not very appealing for an onboard pack scenario. The general idea is to build an aluminum pack and use that as the heat sink for the charger. It's been about a year since taken apart, so if I don't get it into something soon it will probably be a lost cause!
Okay, thanks for checking out my toy that I hopefully did not break. Would love to hear any and all details on how this puppy ticks. Recently I am learning basic circuitboard design and will be taking some electronics classes over the next four months, so this is all very fascinating to learn about. Please be on the lookout for my future pack design posts as I plan on doing some pretty extreme builds based on several years of NASA r&d into thermal control and "ejecta" mitigation.
Remote Power Mania
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