Beginner Question Thread! 2023 Edition

Incorrect. The healthiest is to only charge to ~90% SOC and only discharge to ~15% SOC

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What about battery memory? And a complete balance at full charge?

I dont ever discharge fully, but i feel using the top end of the battery 30- 100% is better than using the range of 20 -90 % since there is voltage drop and at 15% your likely damaging the batteries. Im a firm believer in a fully charged balanced battery. The life might be slightly shorter but if you only use the battery at 90% your range wont be great anyway and are likely to charge it moee often.

Battery memory was only a thing with nickel based rechargeables like NiCd or NiMH, it doesn’t exist in lithium batteries. Besides, energy output is not linear with voltage percentage and you don’t actually lose that much capacity not charging to full, but the voltage differential is significant.

image
Representative chart I found, oversimplified and not super accurate but gets the point across.

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The point being gotten is accurate, but that chart seems dangerous, implying capacity above 4.2V and below 2.5V.

Here is a chart from @Battery_Mooch, as you can see, for this cell at 10A the capacity from 4.0V to 4.2V is basically zero, and while there is more capacity on the bottom-end, you run a high risk of battery damage if your cells are slightly imbalanced, if you discharge down real low.

P42A_mooch

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Dont iphones have battery memory? Those lithium i thought…

Edit: cool! Google prevails, you are indeed right, no battery memory.

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There is no damage to a standard li-ion cell at 15% or even 0%. Especially since 0% for esk8 is typically above 3.0V.

There’s not even any extra damage at 2.5V. That is the low voltage cutoff point for every single cycle to reach the rated cycle life of the cell. You’re not damaging the cell, beyond what happens normally for any cycle, by going down to 2.5V every time.

Stopping at anything above that just helps to extend the life of the cell, same as not charging to 4.2V.

Though, as you mentioned, balancing needs to be taken into account. If your BMS will only balance at higher cell voltages then you will need to fully charge once in a while. Otherwise you can charge to a lower voltage (4.15V for about a 7% loss of range, 4.0V for about a 12% loss of range, Molicel P42A) to also help extend cell life.

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What if you have 15% and max throttle up a hill? I have voltage sag because im heavy… wont the battery sag so much beyond the “0%”

If you don’t have ESC or BMS settings to prevent that then, yes, you can overdischarge your pack. Depends on the pack and the current draw.

But that can happen no matter what charging regimen you use, and whether cruising on flat ground or going uphill.

Configure your pack and settings for the way you ride. :slightly_smiling_face:

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:grinning: thanks!

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So you’re telling me that VESC based controllers can’t even save the total distance traveled on their own but the cheap Ling-yi controllers can? :thinking: Seems like a pretty big design oversight tbh. I’m still going to switch to my VESC and replace my ESC but it is just weird that they left a simple feature out.

“Can” and “do” are different things.

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Has anyone run across this brand of esc before? looks to be in a somewhat similar category to the stuff SRB uses.

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Lol did you look at the prices?

:exploding_head::exploding_head::exploding_head:

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yup. My reaction was something like:

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I have been looking throughout the forum for some information about what to set the battery current max too (and regen) and have found different information. Some say that I should take whatever amperage a cell is rated for x packs in parallel. Some other say to cut the C rating in half x battery capacity.

(my battery has a continous discharge of 20)
The first one would yield 120A, the other one 60A. But then I compare my number to other people’s and they usually set theirs to around 45A. Which makes me wonder if I have calculated this wrong.

Also a link to my battery


Do these values look fine? I went conservative with the numbers.
This is a for 10S2P setup Lipo battery at 20C continuous discharge LINK i.e. 4 packs, two in series, two in parallel
And this motor

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Is this a dual motor or single motor setup?

I’d bump the motor currents up to 80/-80, but leave the battery at 60A if you have 4 of those lipos. If it’s a two motor then halve the battery max and battery regen max.

Low speed braking will be good with those settings, but if you find high speed braking really weak, you could double the battery regen amount to -24. It’s over the battery specs, but it’s better to shorten the life of a battery than not be able to brake fast enough. If you have a BMS with a battery temp monitor that would be ideal as well.

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just a single motor setup

All of the Ling-yi controllers I have used that are relatively recent all keep track of your total distance traveled and you can view it on the remote. So they do actively track distance covered with the controller.

Only one that didn’t was a really old version that used a remote that only had LEDs to indicate battery and remote voltage. Even then with that one I never tried paring it to a display based remote so it might have been tracking distance too. Can’t check anymore since multiple mosfets died and I ended up taking it apart for parts/ soldering practice.

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Vesc is a OS project that’s always in beta, lingyi / hobbywing are purpose built esc. Configuration and features are gonna be different. It’s not fair to compare them against each other only for one or two specific feature.

Lingyi / hobbywing has ODO, sure, but they also lacking in other features like ability to use many different kind of remotes, or let u play around with different parameters

Both have their pros and cons.

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