I have a smart charger that goes up to 12S and if there is no balance cable connected it just asks after detection if the guess S-count is correct, and if not, you can adjust it.
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After reading all this I feel a whole lot better about just buying a new charger for ever voltage I got.
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It’s gonna suck when you bring friends for a ride and you’re stuck carrying a 10s, 12s and 14s charger on you because autosensing is hard.
Just like a 4 pin charge connector should be capable of this, right? Lp20-4 or gx16-4?
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Not to rain on your idea but that sounds like proprietary bullshit.
Nobody here (AFAIK) likes proprietary bullshit.
Give us Lego or give us death.
Well yeah, something similar to that. In electric cars they use something called a Control Pilot signal, which is basically a pulsing square wave that encodes what the charging station is cable of delivering. Ex 10% duty cycle = 10amps, etc… They also use switching resistors to drop the voltage of the control pins to indicate the vehicle charging status and whatnot.
My spontaneous idea for low voltage PEVs was to use CAN combined with smart BMS to exchange data, but this is all theory talk.
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I think it would be difficult to rain any harder on someone’s idea. 
What open-source charge-control protocols would you recommend they use? 
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DC + and - only with no fancy communication protocols. That kind of thing is exactly why people hate Evolve.
People hate evolve because their overpriced shit breaks.
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repeat after me, its a feature
Just DC power connections on the charger? How is the charger to be controlled (to set different charge voltages)?
Or you you mean using different voltages on two extra pins to tell the chargers what voltage to set itself to?
What about charge current settings? Another pin, also using voltage to indicate charge current level?
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Naah just a normal charge plug. I like your idea of a physical switch on the charger, it’s precludes the need for any extra proprietary-style connections. Nobody wants proprietary.
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If offers some fool-proofing and ease-of-use benefits though. Done well auto-setting of charge voltage and current can be a great feature.
It might be used by just one company at the start but most open-source protocols started that way. 
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If that was the case people here would like evolve, they don’t. Proprietary is evil.
I think proprietary parts is quite low on the list of reasons people dislike Evolve 
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The only difference between something proprietary and a standard is whether you publish the specs so that others can use them though vs patent and protect or trying to keep it a “trade secret”. Just because something isn’t universally used doesn’t mean it’s proprietary. You could make something completely open-source that uses CAN communication between the bms and charger or something along those lines
The simplest version of something like this would probably be sticking a separate micro arduino type thing in there just for charge communication and using usart or spi or something, but that would mean another thing to reprogram when you switch batteries. On the plus side it would mean you could still use proprietary bms’s and even a proprietary ESC if you wanted.
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Proprietary is why evolve is evil.
Don’t be proprietary.
I feel like you are a little misdirected here
There is nothing wrong with proprietary if it is supported well and easy to use
Also, it feels silly to call something that doesn’t exist yet, proprietary. How else is one supposed to create something new haha
To get it back on topic, @WavRX has a cool idea, and not too hard to integrate into an existing board. I think it would take a lot of effort though, at least a couple weeks of work, so it would be up to him on what he wants to do
Point is, it’s complicated, but possible
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This sounds like the same arguments I’ve seen on twitter praising the concept of propaganda. It’s misguided and it’s the kind of thinking that got the world into this mess.
This is totally off topic and extraneous now, on top of not making sense, but okay.
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