Active balancers can indeed save (shuttle) most of the energy that is needed to be taken out of cells for balancing. But there’s not much energy involved overall and the additional complexity, size, and cost of an active balancer has to be taken into account. It’s far harder to design one that is effective and reliable versus a passive balancing setup.
The high balancing current of many active balancers also causes a great deal of voltage bouncing on the cells. This makes is harder to provide accurate balancing compared to the 25mA-50mA average balancing current typically seen on passive balancers.
Both types can certainly do a great job or a poor job at balancing but it’s just harder to do as the balancing current rises. Each of us can choose the method we want to use though so it’s great that we have so many choices.
Fully understood on that; for the past few years I’ve ran a (supposedly max 8A) active equalizer only during charge cycles on my packs, with zero other protections. Since I’m redoing my entire pack setup anyway, I’ll probably at the least incorporate the Daly equalizer in permanently, and monitor to see how well it performs.
I had insects get into an LLT a couple years ago, they shorted the balance circuits just past the connector and zeroed every other group. It looked burned up like that too.
I thought the same. My only theories are that the bugs were eating the coating, managed to short the pins as they go up into the back of the connector, or were a complete coincidence and the part just failed while there happened to be bugs in it. But they were all dead and dried out like they had been fried. Customer left his board on the porch or whatever after a ride, came out the next morning and it was dead.
bugs can be an issue, you just don’t really hear about it often. I had a legit crazy ant infestation at one point, they ate a remote I was beta testing. and by ate, I mean they infested it with a nest and rendered it inoperable, even after a good cleaning. they were also in my circuit breakers, had to cut power, replace all the breakers, and clean them out of the rails.
Speaking for the Android App:
I’m using a lot of Ebikes and Esk8s with Xiaoxiang Smart Bms however the App on Android store is sh…, the best way is to find 3.2. 026 /27 apk and install it with a right installer. (Can make issues if you’re using a bad installing Programm)
Designed my own “smart” 10s charge only BMS using an ESP32-C3 and BQ76930 IC. I forgot to order a few components so it has some THT resistors for testing. Currently working on porting an Arduino driver to ESP-IDF. Planning on making an app to configure and monitor the battery via Bluetooth LE. Also first time working in Altium Designer.
Has a max balancing current of 127mA per cell.
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